The Piano Tuner's Ear

Margaret Kimball spent forty years tuning pianos in churches across rural Vermont. She once told a reporter from the Burlington Free Press that the hardest part of her apprenticeship wasn't learning to adjust the pins or replace the felts. It was learning to hear. Her mentor, a German immigrant named Ernst Hoffmann, would strike a key and ask, "What do you hear?" Margaret would say, "A note." Ernst would shake his head. "Listen again." He struck the same key dozens of times across weeks of training — the same sound, over and over — until one afternoon Margaret suddenly heard what had been there all along: the overtones, the subtle vibrations, the way a single string sang with layers of sound she had never noticed. "The note didn't change," she said. "My ears changed."

Young Samuel heard a voice calling his name three times in the darkness of the Shiloh temple. The sound was real each time, but Samuel kept running to Eli, because he had not yet learned to recognize who was speaking. Scripture tells us "Samuel did not yet know the Lord." It took the old priest's guidance — "Go, lie down, and if He calls you, say, 'Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening'" — before Samuel's ears were opened.

God's voice is not absent from our lives. More often, we simply haven't learned to recognize it. We need mentors, patience, and the willingness to hear the same call again and again until we finally answer, "Speak, Lord."