The Redeemer

As I pack up Christmas decor and wonder what to do with all the leftovers now that the family has gone home, I have been reflecting on the difficult year this has been. I had multiple conversations with others experiencing the same heartaches we were going through- the death of a loved one, caring for an aging parent, mourning the absence of a wayward child, feeling the loss of once close friends, and the list goes on. It seems that for many, this year has tempted them to despair, feeling God’s silence is an uncertain variable in the circumstances they have pleaded him to step into, to breathe hope into once again. I wrote almost a year ago about the long wait I was in. I am still waiting, wondering, praying for redemption, pleading for an answer.  I keenly feel the prophet’s anguish, “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear?” (Hab. 1:2).

As Christmas came and went, I found myself wondering, quite honestly, why God doesn’t prevent more of the catastrophes we find ourselves in.

I was contemplating this when a memory surfaced of a shattered piano. The story has become somewhat of a legend in my family. My parents purchased the instrument and tasked my older brothers with delivering it, but the piano didn't make it to our home in one piece. A seemingly perfect set of circumstances thrust it out of the back of the pickup and onto the side of the road in a mess of splintered wood and ivory. My brothers tell how they still delivered the piano to my parents’ home, faces full of apology and regret, and unloaded it in pieces at their feet, my mother's pursed lips and silence testifying to the utter hopelessness of the wreckage.

Life has a way of appearing like that piano, with no hope of redemption. 

I often survey my own life and think, there is nothing to be done. The broken pieces, lying silently around me, are screaming loudly of the ruin of it. The effects of sin are a force to be reckoned with, and like the gravitational pull on the old piano, a sudden turn in the road leaves us toppling to a nasty fate, doing damage to our most precious things- ruining relationships, ravaging jobs, unraveling our health. Instead of the beautiful, whole, and useful thing we imagined we would present to the one who purchased us, we end up full of apology and regret, laying splintered pieces at the Savior’s feet.

It is not how I wish to present myself to the Savior- fragmented and weak, and I’m sure if the piano had a voice it would have complained against the circumstances that laid it there, unable to right itself, useless to the one who had purchased it. 

But the story of the piano did not end with it in a useless heap. When my brothers came to visit sometime later and asked about it, they found it whole again, making music like it was intended to. There has always been a mystery in my mind as to how my parents restored the broken piano, so the other day I asked my momma, “How did you fix it?” She stopped mid stride, a far off look in her eye, and answered, “It was daddy, really. He knew how pianos worked. You know, he had always loved things like that.”

All these years, I had assumed my mom had put that piano back together, for I had often seen her work amazing things with a bottle of wood glue and a strip of rubber. She would apply the glue, tie the broken pieces together with the rubber, and wait for the adhesive to do its work. But the truth is, the piano needed much more than glue and rubber in order to make music again, and as I pondered the unexpectedness of it, I saw that the redemption of that piano had been in the works long before it had been fashioned.

The truth of the piano’s redemption astounded me, but it shouldn't have.

For I grew up surrounded by my dad’s love for music, observing the way he had mastered the difficult accordion, hearing the richness of his baritone voice fill our home. I knew he had an uncanny way of figuring out how things worked and putting them back together again. But I was so focused on what I could see, on the more tangible glue and rubber, that I had missed the fact that long before the piano had been broken, there was someone intensely interested in its inner workings, one driven by a love of “things like that.” 

So often, I look for redemption in all the wrong places. 

And as I perused my journals from this past year, I became utterly aware of my attempts at mending the broken with my glue and rubber, working feverishly to patch it up so I can appear to be put together. In my humanness I am so sure that if I slap enough adhesive on the broken and apply enough pressure, the thing will turn out alright. So I expend a lot of energy and lie awake many a night figuring out just what kind of adhesive and how much pressure it is going to take. But the truth is, there is one working behind the scenes- one who “knew” me and “loved” me long before the moment of my greatest need, the time of my most severe brokenness. And as he told the anguishing prophet, “I am doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told” (Hab. 1:5), so he is telling us. 

The truth about life is that God does not prevent the heartache or the brokenness. He steps into it. 

And as we close out one year and prepare for another, I am grateful that the celebration of the incarnation falls where it does, for it is the reminder that God enters our stories, joining himself to the weary human heart. It astounds me, but it shouldn’t. From the beginning, he promised to “crush the serpent’s head,” accepting the humility of the manger, his eyes fixed on the cruelty of the cross. I live surrounded by God’s love for me, so evident in his word. I have seen him masterfully bring music out of my difficult situations, for God has an uncanny way of working good out of even the most sorrowful things.

The redeemer stands waiting for us to bring our broken pieces and lay them at his feet, and in that hopeful act, we find the richness of his mercy poured out amidst the pain.

My brother became a rather amazing pianist practicing on that once shattered piano. When people hear him play, they stop in wonder just to listen to the music that is coaxed from his nimble fingers- music that began with a great and terrible shattering that required a patient labor of determination and love- a love that was present long before the shattering, waiting for the day of the piano’s greatest need.  It is a beautiful mystery that God became man to redeem our brokenness. I cannot quite comprehend it, but it compels me to hope, even in the midst of sorrow. If God would do that for me, I can face another day, another year, another heartache. With my eyes fixed on the true redeemer, I can say with the prophet,

"Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation" (Hab. 3:17-18).