Our piano badly needs tuning. It's an old Broadwood that I thought was over fifty years of age. But recently I came across an identical one on a piano seller's website and it was made around the late eighteen hundreds so I guess I was out by nearly one hundred years.My grandad bought it for something like ten pounds in one of the old auction rooms down in Belfast. HE used to go off for hours into the city and potter about the auctions, rarely buying anything, but occasionally picking up the odd bargain. Anyway, one day he saw this beautiful concert grand piano in a rosewood casing, over eight feet long and in good condition and he wouldn't go home without it, though I don't really think he had thought the whole project through for he and my grandmother had moved to a much smaller house than where they once lived and a grand piano almost nine feet long and several feet wide was going to take up considerable space in any of the rooms they had. But that didn't seem to worry him and when the delivery men brought it home, he promptly instructed them to place it in the sitting room. And there it remained for many years, along the full length of one wall, just behind the door and also poking out almost to the middle of the room. On a family get together, when everyone piled in to the available seating space, the proverbial cat would never have lived in fear of being swung. Every visit, I dabbled at it and though I often played our own upright piano at home, this was a completely different experience, with the lid propped up and a warm, soft sound emanating from the strings within and I would just sit there for ages, playing chords and singing songs of all types. The legacy of that time was that the piano came to dwell in our house, after my grandmother died, just like she had promised it would. But not without a bit of a struggle. I mean, how do you move an eight foot six concert grand piano into your new house when you haven't built it yet and it has to leave its old home. Not easily is the correct answer. So I did it in two parts. With the help of a good rugby friend who ran his own antique business and had a van suitable for the purpose, together we moved the said instrument to mum's sitting room, which was no bigger than the room from whence it had come. That process in itself was an ordeal for it's no easy task to get such a wooden brute with an iron frame out of a small house and up into a van. And there it sat until our house was finished. The only problem now was that we wanted to put it upstairs where our living room would be. I remember the day we moved it the hundred yards from one house to the other, on a fork lift attached to the back of a tractor. It was a long, slow journey and when we reached the house, it had to be 'levered' to the upper floor on two railway sleepers before the actual stairs was installed. So for several weeks after it was in position, nobody could get upstairs to see it or play it!
I remember at the time, an old joke that just about summed up the whole event. It's about a man whose wife asked him to move their piano upstairs while she was at work. When she arrived home, sure enough, the piano was sitting at the top of the stairs. When she enquired how he had managed to do it all on his won, he replied that the cat had helped him. 'How did you get the cat to help you?' she asked. 'Simple,' he answered, 'I used a whip!'
As I was saying, before I went off at a tangent, it badly needs tuned. It's been sitting there for over twenty years and was tuned some time ago, but now that younger son plays it incessantly and also teachers other students on it, some of the notes just don't quite reach where they're meant to any more. For a while it was bearable but lately one particular note, a B flat, I think, just isn't playing ball. Now here's the thing. For years I've tuned guitars and I'm pretty accurate at it, for I know each string just by its pitch and don't need to use any of the tuning methods I learnt years ago. So, with no tuner handy and that note grating every time it was pressed, I thought, 'why not have a go myself.' That was then, this is now, for if the note was slightly annoying before it is driving me up the walls since. You see, piano tuning is not just a job for a pair of pliers or a socket wrench and a good ear. No, each note on this piano is an amalgam of three strings, all at very slight different pitches and if one is moved just a little to the wrong tension, the result is the most awful discord you could ever witness. It's not something I can fix, no matter how I try for it needs the piano tuner, with all his training and experience to put it right.
Our minister was talking about unity on Sunday and how we as believers must work together as the whole body of Christ. Where there is discord or lack of harmony, if we can see it or hear it then God certainly knows about it too. And even when we try to sort it out by our own methods, it only succeeds for a season, if at all and too often we make it worse. What we need is the Master tuner to restore harmony. That's why Paul, in writing to the Galatians, lists 'discord' as one of the acts of the sinful nature and why Peter writes 'Finally, all of you, live in harmony with one another; be sympathetic, love as brothers, be compassionate and humble.' Are you living in harmony with your fellow brother or is God hearing discordant sounds. As Him today to repair the damage and so be in tune with His will for your life.
