Sometimes emotional stress gets you down.  For some reason the Lord has chosen to surround me with deaths and grieving loved ones the last couple months, with financial complications to sort out, or relationships, or schedules to wade through, or occupational replacements to find, etc.

Two full days of dealing with such things left me in a haze.  No energy to feel, but about to burst with all the anxiety and questions and frustrations and fears inside.  Going on with life and schedule only deterred the problem.

I came to Eau Claire.  After trying phone calls and hugs and nature, I spied my beloved piano...waiting for me.

The radio got switched off as I nervously approached the instrument with forgetful and out-of-shape hands.  Musical score was not enough.  I have nor can play no song as intense and complex as I felt today.  It would have to be something new.  I warmed up with a favorite scale: G flat major.  And beginning with G flat, I played a small slow melody, a tiny emerging thought amid the silence of aloneness, that quietly faded back into the silence.  Another thought emerged, and another, until too many memories and aches were crowding each other out with austere, depressing chords and rhythms of frantic searching.  A breath of calm, stolen away by new thoughts and desires, dashed hopes of the future, and screams of anger.  A spinning blind searching of what to do, with no clear answers.  A good memory or practical thought is spelled out deliberately to combat this despair, but only turn sour and bring back the storm.  Between each thought, each cry, each flood of emotion, silence reigns, tormenting the soul.  Finally, exhausted, regret and anger submit to calm and life.  God  shows up.  In a version of Amazing Grace, he stills the storm and brings to light his promises, his gifts, and what really matters.  A true sigh of relief follows, then stillness, this time not of torment but of peace.

Never again to be played or recorded, my one-time song expressed and unwound my knotted thoughts and emotions.  Still raw and tired, I know now how to resolve.  I heard and perceived the heart of the problem and its answer for today, as I talked it out, in my heart language of wordless music.

Where your ear leads you, speak in that medium.  Perhaps your confusion lies in using a foreign tongue.