Rekindle the Flame

August 21, 2018

Last night, for the first time in months, I got to play my string bass before a crowd. It wasn’t much—just two simple songs, but it rekindled a joy that had been dormant since last spring when our New Horizons Jazz Band played a couple numbers in a recital. Plucking strings is not a world-shaking matter; events are playing out all around the world that impact hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. Natural disasters, political intrigue, personal and national violence and injustice—the list goes on and on. 

And I am thankful to be playing the bass. An ordinary, uneventful thing. But this morning en route to a funeral, I thought about this woman who lived an ordinarily faithful life, and of the people who were touched by her life and witness. Linda and I talked later about friends with whom we were once close, but now it’s almost as if we lived in different worlds. For some, it was as simple as a physical move that took us in different directions. The years have passed and we’ve lived our lives in different places. Others chose to distance themselves from us. Either way, it’s the shared everyday, ordinary events of life that bind us together. If the sharing and the communication ceases, we drift apart. Our lives are not primarily built upon major events, but on the little events repeated with almost monotonous regularity. 

Tonight, I am thankful for those daily building blocks of relationship that bind me to family and friends. And like playing my bass, every so often I find that I’m missing someone and need to rekindle the relationship with a conversation, perhaps coffee and a prayer. When I do, just like playing my bass, I am filled with a special joy that fills a deep place within me that I hadn’t realized was empty until I picked it up once more.