When The Melody Has Nothing To Hold

May the God of our Lord the Almighty Father
Give you wisdom and peace his comforting spirit
That you may know his hope
And you may know his wisdom
And you may know his mighty strength

Last night at community group this chorus came into my head and has been re-entering my thoughts again and again in the past eighteen hours. I’m not sure what brought it on, as we were discussing salt and light, but these words retain the same calming effect they had when I was young and I would tap out the melodic line on with my right hand as I attempted to hit the high notes with my childish little whine.

All these years and I still don’t know how to put a bass line beneath a melody. I don’t know how to surround the beautiful with the contrast, with the support that it needs to stay afloat, to keep lingering in the air long after the actual notes have died away. I still want to let my right hand dance and not take the trouble to learn how to work the left hand.

The left hand signifies so much in this example, so much that I wasn’t even thinking about before I remembered singing this song and only knowing the right hand piano part. The left hand is the support that I forget that I have from family and friends. I am so busy worrying about how they might perceive me that I don’t let them inside, but yet expect them to understand my feelings. The left hand is studying for an epidemiology test rather than assuming I can wing it like I’ve done for the past 20 years of my life. The left hand is knowing that there are rough patches in relationships and that they’ll be there whether you choose the evil you know or the evil you’ve yet to see. The melody dies away without support, whether that support is a listening ear, an ability to garner information, or the strength of knowing that tension can provide cohesion.

But of course the left hand is God, and although I can say that this is the one left hand that I never forget, that doesn’t mean that I don’t forget what is given to me through my faith. I’m given hope. Wisdom. Strength.

And peace. Peace is so hard to find when I want to do it all myself, when I want to create a beautiful song and have it reach others ears. I become so frustrated when I want so badly to have something turn out right and it crashes down…usually due to my own ability to have patience, to have peace, to simply wait.

I think I’ve reached a point where it’s finally all I can do…rely on the knowledge of peace.

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