You may not know this, but for the past few years I have attempting to learn piano. 🫠🫠🫠🫠 God actually gave me a promise about this in 2011, that I would learn to play with "unearthly speed as I master this instrument".
I have tried several avenues to do this, and none have really been beneficial. I've tried in-person, online, YouTube, everything! The biggest issue is that although I truly, truly desire to play, I have just not been dedicated enough to push past the difficulty when it seems too complicated a goal to attain.
Thankfully, in my leadership group chat, I have daily accountability check-ins to see if I am doing what I have committed to do (20 minutes of practice each and every day). When we have completed our self-assigned tasks, we place a "1" in the chat. If we have not, we place a "0".
This has been a tremendous help in developing discipline in this area since I just don't want to be "that person" who is always putting a "0". 😂
All week I've been practicing the left hand portion of an arpeggio exercise to build proper fingering and scale recognition. The instructor said it was a good idea to take a week to get this portion, so I did.
As I was practicing tonight, I began with my left hand and then thought to duplicate this by including my right hand to play the same pattern along with the left hand. Major speed bump. 😖
While playing the left hand, I was fast, confident, and triumphant! I've been practicing this hand for this entire week, and so I've become quite familiar with what it feels like, and what notes are in the pattern. But as soon as I included my right hand to do the same thing, it was as if I had just begun learning to do the pattern with my left hand, too. See, my right hand was weaker than my left, because my right hand was not included for a period of time.
It was as if I was catapulted from the graduating class of seniors to the entering class of freshmen on an exercise that I have become very competent in. It took me slowing down to a glacial pace in order for both hands to move in tandem and not break the rhythm, or tap the wrong keys. Boy was that annoying.🙃
At that moment, I had a thought, isn't this is just like interpersonal relationships? Namely interracial relationships, necessarily romantically speaking. It's like when you're starting on a journey to know someone different from you.
You may not know this, but for the past few years I have been attempting to learn to play the piano. 🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠�🫠🫠�m the South, etc. The right hand represents anyone who is different from those ident
You want to be open to this because you know it's right and necessary, but it's hard navigating the differences and breaking through the impasse to reach unity.
You are familiar with how you do life, but throwing a new person with new ideas and ways into the mix complicates things.
It's not until you slow down with compassion to accommodate the area that requires a little more patience that you can reach true harmony.
We go about life in the routines to which we have become accustomed: how we think, eat, move, speak, enjoy, learn, dress, etc, with ease. Our cultures, upbringing, and environment have created how we exist in the world. We are like walled cities. Those routines have essentially defined us. We know them and they know us. But when you have to bring someone else into that fold, it suddenly becomes an uphill battle. The life that once made sense has now become arduous and cumbersome.
Why cumbersome?
Because it completely throws you off your rhythm to try and integrate something that was not a part of the equation before. Your brain starts to work overtime to gain understanding. It's not until you slow down and allow the new information to settle in, even at the cost of inconveniencing the part of you that does not normally have to fight this battle.
It sounds like "love is patient".
When we come into fellowship with each other, learning different cultures, faiths, backgrounds, ways of expression- it requires some major adjustments. Not everyone thinks like you, lives like you, talks like you, looks like you. That can be very frustrating to the hand that's already settled, the hand that already gets it. But if we really want to be truly integrated; if we want to be in genuine fellowship with one another, we must slow down to the pace of the weak hand, or the piece that is new and different.
It may take some time, but just like my hands on the piano, it will happen and will make for a much more full and robust sound than just the one hand by itself. Love is patient.
I bet you didn't know that God can be found everywhere around you if you are simply open to see and hear. It seems as though everything I see is teaching me the true focus of this life, beyond church, beyond religion:
Love God.
Love yourself.
Love people.