The Blind Tuner Who Knew Every Piano by Touch

George Drexler tuned pianos in Cincinnati for forty-three years without ever seeing one. Born blind, he learned each instrument the way a mother learns her newborn — by feel, by sound, by the particular vibration of its voice. He could run his fingers across the hammers of a Steinway on Vine Street and tell you which felts were wearing thin, which strings had been replaced, which keys a student favored most. He once told a client, "You've been playing more Bach lately — I can feel it in the ivories."

His customers marveled. How could someone know an instrument more intimately than the person who played it every day? Drexler would smile and say, "I don't just hear what the piano is. I hear what it's becoming."

That is the kind of knowing the psalmist describes in Psalm 139. The Almighty does not observe us from a distance. He searches us and knows us — every thought before it forms, every word before it reaches our tongue. He knit the fibers of our being together in the darkness of the womb, the way a master craftsman shapes something precious by touch alone. And like Drexler hearing what a piano is becoming, God perceives not only who we are today but every day written in His book before one of them came to be. Such knowledge, David whispers, is too wonderful. It is beyond our reach — but never beyond His.