My son, Christopher accepted a position last fall to teach music for preschool through 5th grade. Christopher, who has always had a passion for music, thought of several fun ways to instill that passion in his students. One of his most exciting ideas was to start a ukulele club.
In December, I was given the opportunity to travel to Florida and volunteer in both his classroom and also in his wife Cassie’s 4th grade classroom. One of the ways that I got to assist was by helping Christopher tune all 20 ukuleles before each after school ukulele club meeting.
New ukulele strings need time to stretch so they will settle down and hold their tune. As the instrument is played, the strings stretch. As the strings stretch, they become out of tune. Very frequent tuning is needed until the strings settle down.
The best way to speed up the process is to play the instrument a lot. The more the instrument is played, the more the strings become accustomed to the way they are pressed on and plucked. At first, the strings may become out of tune after being played just a short while. The more the ukulele is played, the more the strings will settle down and the longer the instrument will stay in tune.
As we were tuning the ukuleles, I thought about my relationship with God and how important it is that I stay in tune with him. Sometimes life throws us a curve and our faith is stretched. Our health may fail, we may become grieved as someone we love starts going in the wrong direction, we may lose our financial security, we may encounter disaster and we may become overwhelmed. Our faith may become stretched and the enemy may try to pull us away from God. During those times, we must remain in the Father’s hand and allow him to tune our hearts and strengthen our faith.
The more we allow God to work in us and through us the more we settle down and are able to keep in tune with him. We will continue our whole lives to be pressed and plucked as we face new challenges, but the more we submit to God’s tuning, the longer we will go before needing a major tune-up.
“Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.” ~Jude 1:24-25