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Playing with broken strings

You might not feel like a finely tuned instrument in God’s orchestra, but you can still make music for the Kingdom, writes Eric Gaudion

The famous and much-loved author Joni Eareckson Tada tells a moving story in her book A Place of Healing. Apparently a great and talented violinist, Itzhak Perlman, overcame severe polio in his childhood to become a hugely respected performer, despite needing leg callipers and crutches to enable him to get onto stages around the world.

During a solo performance once in a New York concert, the whole audience suddenly heard a string on Perlman’s violin snap. The great virtuoso stopped and gazed at his strings as the sophisticated New York audience wondered what he would do next. After a few moments of ref lection Perlman signalled the conductor to begin again. It might have seemed impossible to play a symphonic violin solo with just three strings, but Perlman was undaunted.

He recomposed the piece in his head as he went along, Perlman invented new fingering positions to coax amazing sounds from his three-string violin. When the piece ended, the audience exploded into appreciative applause, rising to its feet as one.

Mr Perlman smiled, wiped the sweat from his brow, and said, “You know, sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.”

You may not feel much like a finely tuned instrument in God’s orchestra today. Perhaps chronic illness, marital breakdown, financial disaster, or personal failure has left you feeling broken and unusable. But Isaiah 28:28 tells us that grain is ground to make bread. The harvest only yields its life-giving goodness when it is broken, even crushed. Sometimes it takes brokenness to reveal qualities that would have remained unexpressed or unexplored.

Whatever strings may have broken in our lives, we can still make beautiful music with what is left. Joni herself has demonstrated that, with her amazing output of life-enhancing books and videos despite being a quadriplegic since a diving accident in her teens resulted in a broken neck.

Moses must have felt that he was completely broken after he messed up God’s plan to deliver the Israelites from slavery by murdering an Egyptian soldier. He had thought that he was going to achieve something great but all he managed to do was spoil the respect he had gained in the royal court of Egypt as well as earn the mockery of the very people he wanted so badly to help.

Forty years in the wilderness running for his life must have piled regret upon ridicule. He was finished, washed up, done. But then God appeared to him out of a burning bush and Moses had a moment of divine revelation. There is no scrapheap in the kingdom of God! The Lord of Heaven and Earth had not finished with this broken individual, nor the race of people that he had been chosen to lead and deliver from slavery.

God’s question to Moses in Exodus 4:2 is so helpful: “What is that in your hand?” God asked Moses what he had left after 40 years of amazingly privileged upbringing and then 40 years of running for his life. Well, he had a shepherd’s crook, and God said, “Let’s make a start with that.” So, Moses’ staff became a tool that God used to set his people free.

Perhaps you feel you don’t have much to offer. Are your strings broken too? Sometimes we just need to find out how much music we can make with what we have left. The important thing is to obey God with what remains, just like Moses did, and just as Joni has done too. The choice is yours.

Eric Gaudion is a retired Elim pastor and author of ‘Through the Storms’ and other books


This article first appeared in Direction Magazine. For further details, please click here.

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