Sound of Surviving Blog

I’m unsure where I heard it, but I remember hearing a story about a group of blind musicians playing at an orchestra concert. The lights went out during the concert due to a bad storm. The audience was amazed when not one musician stopped playing. Despite the darkness, the concert continued. The concert finished, and the auditorium roared in applause. The conductor at the end of the concert announced that his orchestra hadn’t paid any attention to the lights getting shut off because they were blind, and the lighting didn’t make any difference to them.

Have you ever been completely in the dark? It’s a bit terrifying. But can I let you in on a little secret? The darkness seems so much brighter when we choose not to let it define us, when we choose to play on through it. I imagine that the audience wanted to leave when the lights went out and were a bit scared. But I also imagine that they were so glad they stayed to hear the amazing musical outcome that ensued despite the darkness.

I think sometimes it’s like this in our lives. We get nervous when life gets hard and stormy and the light at the end of the tunnel appears to be non-existent. We want to give up, to give in to the darkness surrounding us. But God is our eternal light. If we just keep playing, and pushing through in the darkness, we’ll reach the light. Or maybe we won’t. But doesn’t music make everything seem a little better in itself? Even if our life (or our music) doesn’t get better or brighter, we still have an opportunity to show others that God walks with us in the dark. He is a lamp for our feet.

There’s a quote I love from Corrie Ten Boom, which states, “When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark; you don’t throw away the ticket and jump off, you sit still and trust the engineer”. I think maybe, we spend so much time thinking of how we would like our circumstances to be when we’re in the dark, that instead of pushing through it, we get stuck on the thought that we feel like everything is off-kilter, that when the storms come, everything seems lost. We’re not trusting our engineer. If we just keep playing, if we just have faith in God, and in ourselves, maybe we can see enough to recognize that when the light around us goes out, the light inside of us gets brighter.