A Spring of Joy

“Remember, it requires eleven tons of pressure on a piano’s strings for it to be tuned. And God will tune you to perfect harmony with heaven’s theme if you will withstand the strain.
‘Things that hurt and things that mar
Shape the man for perfect praise…’”
(~from Streams in the Desert by L. B. Cowman

It seems as if everywhere I turn I see the pressure. Tons of it pressing down on the lives of my friends and family, on myself.

I ache.

It hurts.

And I know they hurt, too.

Tomorrow I go for my first injection. The beginning of a week of pain, nausea, fatigue and unknown. Of being sequestered from my children. Of waiting to know if cancer has returned.

Tomorrow my friend, Kim, goes in for surgery for her breast cancer. Cancer that has metastasized to her liver. I well remember those first few frantic messages back and forth 10 months ago when she learned of it.

Tomorrow friends will take small steps of learning what life looks like without their son, their brother, gone this past week.

Tomorrow my friends, Monica & Dan, return to Cincinnatti with Danica for scans and answers with the hope that their little one will be healed enough to move from a brace to a collar.

Tomorrow my friends will be one day closer to the one-year birthday of their beautiful baby girl. A birthday she will never reach.

Tomorrow my grandfather will lie alone in the bed of a nursing home. He has fallen twice in the past couple months, and they have recently had to admit him to a nursing home and away from Nanny. (I have tried to get up to see him, but every scheduled visit someone in our home is sick, and it is killing me to not be able to see him, to comfort him.)

Tomorrow my Bella will be on day six of the flu and the beginning of month 4 of someone in our home being sick.

Tomorrow holds pain and suffering for so many. So many more than I have listed here.

Yesterday I sat between my sweet Beth and another dear friend, Maretta, at the memorial service of the son and brother of friends killed in a car accident. We ached together. We cried together. We laughed together. We worshiped together. There were moments where one or the other of us would reach over and pat a back, rub a leg, hold a hand, pass a tissue, smile at each other, shake and bow our heads together.

And then we stood.

After all the words and the prayers and the confessions and the hymns, we stood, the three of us with hundreds of others, for one final song of worship.

And it was so automatic. I linked my arms through each of theirs and we sang, “Rock of ages, cleft for me…”

We stood there together, worshiping under the pressure of it all. In three-part harmony. And it was glorious.

A taste.

Just a tiny taste of the perfect praise awaiting us in Heaven.

The praise so many of our friends are already singing.

Their harmonies are perfect.

As ours one day will be.

Tomorrow holds much, but mostly it holds hope. Hope in that one day.

Until that day, I will choose to worship Him even when the pressure seems unbearable.

And my harmony will falter and my voice will crack and break, my pitch will be sharp or flat, but one day.

One day.

I will link arms with so many dear ones and we will sing together.

Tuned to perfect harmony.

Perfect harmony in Him.

(Will you pray, my bloggy friends? Will you pray?)