Every Sunday morning the Christian radio station in Waterloo broadcasts the live service of a small church in the area. When we had band practice before church, Matt usually picked me up right as this church’s band was playing. As we scanned the stations, we’d sometimes go right past their service, but other times we’d stop to listen for a few minutes.
One day as we listened, Matt’s nine-year-old son Ben, in his refreshing youthful transparency, said what Matt and I were both thinking: “These guys aren’t very good.”
It was true. The sound mix was unbalanced, the singers were off-key, and the music had no dynamics. As two musicians on their way to play in their own church band, it was easy for us to be critical. Yes, we sometimes made mistakes during our set, and we weren’t always together, but we definitely didn’t sound that bad. And if we did, we wouldn’t let ourselves be broadcast on the radio for the whole city to hear.
In David James Duncan’s modern masterpiece The Brothers K, the narrator, Kincaid, recounts a story from his fictional childhood. At his church was a girl named Vera. She was a harelip, which is a slang term for someone with a cleft lip, and this gap in her lip caused a severe speech impediment. One day at the end of Sunday school, she volunteered to give the closing prayer.
Vera’s passion is juxtaposed with her garbled speech as she prays: “Oh nYeesus! Nyearest nLord! How snorely nwee need nthy mresence!” Kincaid describes how the rest of the kids began to laugh and mockingly repeat her words (“Snorely!”), but that her determination was unwavering. She continued to pray with fervency to Jesus alone, with no regard for anyone around her, her words almost unintelligible, even as the Sunday school teacher tried unsuccessfully to cut her off.
Let me pause and consider where I could take this. I could say that the band on the radio had the musical equivalent of a speech impediment, a cleft lip, and the lesson to be learned is that it doesn’t matter how talented you are as long as your heart is in the right place.
But that’s not the point I want to make. Not exactly.
I have to go a step farther and say that God Himself fills the chair of Kincaid in that story, and that every last one of us, without distinction, is Vera. No matter how eloquently we may speak or how beautifully we may sing, it’s all impedimented in the ears of a perfect God. It’s only our delusion that makes us believe we are better than anyone else.
Those mornings on our way to church, Matt and I got a small taste of what our band must sound like to Him. I’ve come to realize since then that what we do often obscures who we are, and that the only true test of substance is to burn away all the layers of talent so that we are as God sees us: off-key, harelipped. When we played poorly, was it still evident that we were worshipping God? If our talent was lifted from us, would there be anything left?
