The Piano With the Lid Down

The piano is against the long wall in the front room, and there is a runner across the top of it, and on the runner there are five photographs in frames.

That is the arrangement. It has been the arrangement for a long time. His mother put the frames there and then his mother moved out and he kept the house and he kept the frames, and now opening the lid would mean moving five pieces of glass and finding somewhere to put them, and that is more decision than anybody makes on a Tuesday evening.

The piano still gets tuned. Every other year a man comes with a case and a felt strip and does his work in the front room, and every other year he says the same thing, that it is a good instrument and somebody ought to be playing it. And every other year the answer is a shrug and a check written at the door.

It is a good instrument. It has been a good instrument for fifteen years with the lid down.

He was thirteen. That is the whole story and it takes eleven seconds to tell, which is part of what makes it unbearable. Music room, third period, eight kids and a teacher with a clipboard doing a listening test. He got four of the intervals wrong in a row and she stopped him, not cruelly, in the flat kind voice adults use when they think they are being merciful, and she said it in front of the room: some people just do not have an ear. There is no shame in it. Better to find that out at thirteen than at thirty.

He went home. He did not slam anything. He put the lid down that week and he never made a decision about it, which is the thing nobody understands. There was no moment where he chose the silence. There was a week where he did not play, and then a month, and then a summer, and then it was simply a fact about him, the way his height is a fact about him. He tells people at parties that he does not play. He says it easily. He has said it hundreds of times.

He is twenty eight now. Every so often, late, when nobody is over, he puts one hand flat on the closed lid, the way you would put a hand on a horse.

And here is what he cannot get anywhere near: he did not do this. A woman with a clipboard said eleven seconds of words and it cost fifteen years of a life, and no part of that is proportional, and no part of that was his. Somebody else's sentence became his silence, and he has been walking around introducing it as his personality.

You have your own lid. Maybe it is a piano and maybe it is a sketchbook, a language, a kitchen, a body you stopped moving in public, an application you never sent because of what one adult said one afternoon while you were still small enough to believe them. You did not decide. It just settled, and by the time you noticed, it had a shape and a name and you were the one carrying it. You are seen, precisely and by name, in the room where it happened. It is written in Genesis 16:13 that a woman alone in a desert called Him the God who sees, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept the whole scene, third period and the clipboard and the eleven seconds, without you having to make anybody understand it.

The line runs back further than the classroom

There is an old man in Psalm 71 doing exactly what you do late at night with a hand on a closed lid: looking backward down the whole length of his life and trying to find where the thread starts.

He is not young. He says so, more than once, and he is worried about being cast off in his old age. And in the middle of that, he says this:

For you, O Lord, are my hope, my trust, O LORD, from my youth.Psalm 71:5

Read where he puts the beginning. Not at his conversion, not at his best decade, not at the point where he finally got serious. From his youth. There is a continuous line from the boy to the old man and it is drawn on God's side of the page, and nothing that happened in the middle of it broke the line, because the line was never being held up by the middle.

That matters here more than anything else I could say to you. Whatever the boy at thirteen was, he was not a boy with no music in him. He was a boy who missed four intervals on a Tuesday in a room with bad acoustics and a clipboard. Those are two different sentences and only one of them got spoken out loud.

You have a line that runs back past that classroom and it was never cut on His side. That is Psalm 71:5 and not my optimism, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been holding the far end of it the entire time, in the fifteen years you were telling people at parties that you do not play.

Whose silence has this been

Now the part I want to be careful with, because this is the place where articles like this one usually go wrong.

I am not going to tell you what to do about her. Not one word of that. Whether you ever think about her again, what you feel when you do, whether you are angry after fifteen years, none of that is the subject here and none of it is being assigned to you as homework. Your anger is not a spiritual problem. The account of what one sentence cost is God's, and He has it, and it is not a thing you have to keep or prosecute or settle before anything else can move.

What I am going to say is about the silence, because you have been holding it as though you chose it.

You did not choose it. Say that slowly. There was no evening where a boy weighed the options and elected fifteen years of a closed lid. A thing was taken and the taking looked like nothing at all, and one of the cruelest properties of that kind of theft is that the loss arrives already wearing your face. You are not lazy. You did not quit. You were thirteen, and the adult in the room had the clipboard.

And restored is not the same word as replaced. I want you to have that plainly before you go anywhere near a keyboard. Nobody is handing you fifteen years of practice. A twenty eight year old starting is a twenty eight year old starting, with all the awkwardness that carries, and the recordings that were never made are not going to exist. Replaced would give you the years and leave you the same man who lost them. Restored puts back into the person what was taken out of the person, which in your case is not technique. It is permission.

You have a gift that is sitting in you right now and it did not expire in a music room. His word says in 2 Timothy 1:6 to stir up the gift of God that is in you, present tense, still there, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the stirring, at His own pace, in a man who has not touched a key since he was thirteen.