Over the last few weeks or months, the sustain pedal on our piano had quit working properly.
For those of you who don't play piano, the sustain pedal is the pedal on the right, which, if you press it down with your foot, will cause the sounds of the notes to sustain by releasing the damper pads from touching the strings inside the piano.
Without this pedal, the notes would all sound choppy and clonky, if you know what I mean, instead of holding their tones for a while and flowing into each other.
Well, I am not the kind of person to just call an expensive technician to fix something that I can fix myself, so I pulled the big board out from under the piano keys and looked at the pedal and the gismos attached to it. I looked up "sustain pedal on piano won't work" online, and found out that sometimes it just needs an easy fix--tightening the nut on the bolt that connects the pedal to the bars that go to the strings.
Well, I tried to tighten the nut, and then I tried to loosen it, and then tighten it again, but nothing worked. I was at a loss. Maybe it was a bigger problem with the pads on the strings needing to be adjusted, I wondered.
So, like it or not, I called the piano tuner to come repair my sustain pedal and tune the piano while he was at it.
He came out and we took that front board off and he sat cross-legged on the floor and started twiddling with the nut. Then he got a pair of pliers out of his toolbox and told me that when you turn that nut, you have to make sure that you hold the bottom part of the bolt with pliers so that the whole thing doesn't turn while you are just trying to tighten the nut.
I watched him in disbelief as, in a matter of a couple minutes, he fixed the problem by simply knowing what tool to use and how to use it.
My eyeballs were seeing big numbers in the sky--one hundred and twenty dollars to tighten a nut on the piano and tune it.
I could not describe my chagrin. My ignorance. My husband's hard-earned money. The piano tuner's skill. It was all rolling together into a ball of "oh no!" in my stomach.
But I didn't know how to fix that problem. I have no mechanical prowess at all and hated to ask my husband about it who works late into the evening every night to keep his business running.
So I had to call somebody who had skills with pianos and sustain pedals.
And I just knew God had a lesson for us.
Sometimes our sustain pedal goes out in our lives.
We aren't able to sustain the troubles and burdens and perplexities we are faced with.
Clonk! goes our activity, and "Bonk!' sounds that note in our conversation. "Twonk! Twonk!" gasps one note after another in our relationships. Things are choppy, broken, and not flowing together well at all.
The sustain pedal's nut has come loose--and in our ignorance and humanity, we don't know how to fix things .
That is when it is nice to have Someone to call, and a way to reach Him through prayer,
like I knew about Roger's Piano Service and had his number on my bulletin board.
Many of our problems are really simple to fix.
God knows exactly how to do it and what we ought to do.
He knows that it is useless to just keep trying to turn that nut around and around, first this way and then that way, without first clamping pliers on the bolt underneath.
But we don't know that.
That is why in our ignorance, we have to call on Him and ask for His help.
Sometimes He will show us what we can do--apologize, ask forgiveness, extend forgiveness, know that you have forgiven even if they are still offended, take responsibility, accept the consequences of our decisions, graciously step down, humbly step up, offer to help, put the other person's desires before ours, pray for someone, learn to say "no," choose our "yes's" more carefully, keep our mouths shut next time, look at things from a different perspective.
Other times, the best fix is to stop twisting and turning a problem around in our minds, and instead grab it with God's pliers and make the thoughts be still in our minds. Go stack wood and weed the garden and make a pie instead of mollygrubbing and trying to figure out why this person said this or why that person did that or what if they were offended by what I did?
Another fix is to stop trying to fix it ourselves and let Him do it.
But any way you look at it, He knows best how to fix our problems, and how to get the sustain pedal working again!
"Cast your burden on the Lord, and He shall sustain you; He shall never permit the righteous to be moved." Psalm 55:22
May He Himself sustain you, tighten the nut on your sustain pedal, and carry your burdens for you.
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