Discipline and Joy: 88 Keys, 6 Strings, and a Slide Trombone

We've got a piano in our house. Its a brown upright piano that my wife grew up playing at her parent's house. She and her little sister spent hours sitting on the padded bench practicing Beethoven and Bach. Erin, my wife, still plays. Every so often she'll open the bench, place the sheet music on the piano, she'll sit and place her fingers on the keys, and harmonies will drift through our home. I've often sat on the bench, placed my fingers on the keys and have created what could be considered very avant-garde dissonance.

I've got all sorts of friends who are excellent musicians, a lot of them played in local bands or at churches. Jake, one of my best friends growing up, could pick up his guitar and play almost anything he heard or saw. He also excelled, and still does, at the piano and drums. I always admired his talent and how, just by utilizing six strings, he could completely change the atmosphere of any room.

I should say at this point that for a year and half I was a musician. I remember the day in fourth grade when the band teacher came to our classroom in order for those who were interested to try out the band's instruments. As the instructor played each instrument, those brass and woodwinds seemed so magical as if anyone who was willing could produce beautiful note after note and create songs and melodies.

As I browsed through my choices and knew exactly what I wanted to play, the trumpet. I grew up listening to all sorts of music and the trumpet represent the sound, daring and loud, that I wanted to make. Yet when I got to the instructor, she said my lips were too big and I was sentenced to play the trombone. Nothing personal to trombone players, but I really wanted to play the trumpet, yet had I known ska would have been big in high school, I may have been okay with the trombone. Alas, I stuck with the trombone for about a year and half. And to be honest, I hated practicing. I just wanted to play, not practice for what seemed like an eternity everyday. The monotony of practice felt more like a prison than an object of passion. My band teacher knew it too, it was obvious during each class that I wasn't putting my time in. I wasn't performing my pieces well, and I wasn't keeping up with the other kids who wanted to truly play and practiced in order to do so.

I say all this because I still want to be a musician. I think about being the guy who sits down at the piano at some party and starts playing insanely cool covers of songs that move people to laugh and dance. I want to be the expert, just not the novice. Let's fast-forward through the scales and wrong notes and get to Ray Charles "Shake a Tail Feather", Van Morrison's "Brown Eye Girl", or even a bit of John Legend. But the joy of playing music comes only through the discipline of practicing.

This year I am trying to focus on the Spiritual Disciplines, not in order to abstain from behaviors or merely train myself to be holier, but to be able to practice living a life that will enable me to obtain the joy of truly living. One may ask how do meditation, fasting, solitude and other practices accomplish this, after all such acts seem like they focus denial, sacrifice or exclusion. I think Richard Foster puts it best: " [the Spiritual Disciplines] put us where He can work within us and transform us. By themselves the Spiritual Disciplines can do nothing; they can only get us to the place where something can be done. They are God's means of grace."

So what does it all mean? Why go through it? Because I desire to be a man after God's heart, yet there is so much about me that rebels against it. Yet through practicing the Spiritual Disciplines I put myself in a place where change is possible. What starts as discipline becomes joy. The chords and scales become music and song. What may feel like at times like a prison of practice becomes a passionate way to live life. Who knows, I may even start playing a bit more of the 88 keys, but I think sitting down and playing Coldplay might be a bit far off still.