This morning’s word is Hands That Knew.
The anchor verses are Isaiah 40:31 and Matthew 6:33.
Last Saturday night in Sydney, the audience at the Darling Harbour Theatre was halfway through the opening night of La La Land in Concert. The Academy Award-winning composer Justin Hurwitz was on the podium. The house was full. And then one of the musicians was taken ill.
Justin Hurwitz turned to the audience and asked if there was anyone in the room capable of sight-reading a complex score on the fly. A 21-year-old University of Sydney student named Sterling Nasa was sitting in the audience. He plays piano and organ. He even tutors students learning the bagpipes. He hesitated. His friend did not. She raised his hand for him.
Sterling walked from the audience to the stage.
The piece called for a complex solo, the technical one the Ryan Gosling character plays in the film. Hurwitz himself has said it is so difficult that he did not try to sight-read it when he made the film. He improvised it. Sterling, given two or three minutes of briefing, made the same choice. He did not try to play the written music perfectly. He improvised. He stayed in the correct key. He stayed in the correct scale. He played, as one onlooker described it, so that everything flowed and meshed and you could not tell there had been any disruption at all. And the room erupted.
Sterling did not try to be the pianist who was sick. He did not pick up a load that was not his. He played what was in his hands. And his hands knew, because his hands had been knowing for years. Every hour at the piano. Every hour at the organ. Every patient session with a student learning the bagpipes. All of that quiet work had been preparing for a Saturday night in Sydney that he could not have predicted. When his friend raised his hand, the hands themselves were ready.
Katie Hauck, a Bible teacher who writes on the life of faith, writes today that the deepest exhaustion in our lives does not come from how hard life is. It comes from carrying loads that were never ours. The need to control how things turn out. The need to issue justice for what hurt us. The need to understand what has not been explained. That is GOD’s weight, and when we pick it up, we buckle under it. The relief is that supernatural strength is real, and it flows from the right source. Scripture promises that those who wait on the Lord will renew their strength, and that when we seek HIS kingdom first, the rest is added.
Pastor Segun Oduyebo, a pastor who writes on living sent into the world, writes this morning that words carry creative power, that death and life are in the power of the tongue. The same is true of every gift we have been given. The hands at the piano. The voice steady through hard seasons. The kindness patient with difficult people. All of those gifts have been preparing us for moments GOD knew were coming long before we did.
Ignatius writes this morning about the historical reality of Christ. HIS birth, HIS passion, HIS resurrection are not ideas. They took place in time, under Pontius Pilate, accomplished by Jesus Christ. That historical grounding is what makes the improvisation faithful. We are not making something up. We are responding in the spirit of a real Person who has done the real work, and whose Spirit moves through hands that have been quietly knowing for years.
Sterling did not save the show that night. He showed up. His friend saw what he hesitated to claim. The Spirit of the music moved through hands that had been preparing. What the room saw was not an act of striving. It was an act of release. The trust that what was in his hands was enough, because the One who wrote the music was still in the room.
That is the rest on offer to all of us. Not the absence of hard things. The release of what was never ours to carry. The trust that our hands know more than we think they do.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.