The Master Tuner

Next Saturday will be my 38th birthday. Thinking about that reminded me of a story that goes back 20 years.

It was October of 2000, and I turned 18 that year. I had played the harp for a year at that point. When I received my harp the year before, the harp maker encouraged me to consider purchasing an electronic tuner to tune my harp with. A cheaper option, they said, would be to tune my harp to a piano if we had one. Thankfully, we had a piano, and I tuned my harp to our piano that first year of playing. I'd play a key on the piano and tune the corresponding string on my harp to that note. That seemed to work well!

One day, I remember tuning my harp to our piano as I always did. That day, I remember having a harder time getting all of the octaves to sound in tune with each other. Something was sounding a little off. I went back and made sure I tuned each string correctly to our piano, but I still had a frustrating time getting the octaves to sound in tune with each other.

Since I had a birthday coming up, I mentioned the idea to my parents that owning an electronic tuner might be a good idea and dropped that as a strong hint to them. Sure enough, my parents purchased that as a birthday gift for me, and although I'd never used one before, I was excited to begin using it to tune my harp with!

My 18th birthday - October 2000

That evening, after finishing some cake and ice cream, I went back into our living room with my new electronic tuner so I could tune my harp with it.

As I plucked each string on my harp, the electronic tuner showed each string being about half a note off.

Hmm, that is odd, I thought.  

For example, an A string was showing A "flat" on the electronic tuner rather than A "natural" as the string should have been. All the strings on my harp were this way. 

Surely not, I thought.

It took me a few minutes to figure out how to use the tuner, but once I understood how to use it, I decided to just follow what it said. After a while, I had all of the strings on my harp tuned to the electronic tuner. 

After that, I decided to play a harp CD that evening by someone else, and I was overjoyed! My harp sounded exactly like the harp on this recording. My harp was in tune for the very first time after an entire year of owning it! I felt like I had a brand new harp that night. My harp sounded so different and so amazing!

To our dismay, we discovered that our piano was badly out of tune by an entire half note (flat), and I had been tuning my harp to it for an entire year!

When we moved to Colorado from California two years earlier, we never had our piano tuned after the move. Our piano was out of tune, and we didn’t know it because all of the piano strings had gone out of tune in sequence with each other so it didn't sound that bad. 

A short time later, my parents had a piano tuner come to our home to tune our piano. How fun it was to have our piano tuned as well!

That made me think of an analogy. As Christians, sometimes we can compare ourselves to each other. We can “tune” ourselves to what other Christians are doing, thinking that we’re totally fine, rather than checking to see if we match the “master tuner” - God’s Word.

I see people do this all the time. We tend to follow others. That is not a bad thing as long as the people we’re following or looking up to are “in tune” with God and His Word.

But if we’re following or looking up to people who are not “in tune” with God or His Word, we have to be careful because we may slowly begin to “tune” ourselves to them, exactly like I was doing when tuning my harp to our piano that was badly out of tune! It came as a total shock when I compared what I thought was a “in tune” harp to the correct tuner! My harp was way off! 

The beautiful part is that, when we follow God’s Word, we are encouraging others to do the same. When Christians are properly tuned to God and His Word, it’s a lot like a grand orchestra of many instruments that have all been tuned to the master tuner. 

The end result sounds glorious!