Broken Keys
If you want to know how the third list has been working out for me, it’s been great! Until this last week. It was the perfect storm of a sick child, my ever-growing school and home to do list, and my anxiety and depression that left me crying in the living room after fixing dinner a few nights ago. And not a casual mist. The ugly cry that requires a poncho. The one that comes with intrusive thoughts. The one that makes you feel like you’re in a black hole and will never get out. And sometimes you don’t want to get out. You just want it to go ahead and swallow you.
It scares Brent when I’m like this, and if I’m being honest, it scares me, too. But I’ve walked this path of hereditary anxiety and depression for a while now to know that those times that leave me feeling like I’m going to be crushed by it, well, they don’t last forever. I just have to make it through the night.
Typically, I cook dinner for my family and then while they are fixing their plates, I go sit by myself in the living room just to get off my feet and enjoy the calm for a few minutes. Brent, knowing I was already struggling came to sit with me. As soon as he put his arm around me, I lost it. The panic set in of all the things and how I couldn’t get ahead and how I was a failure. He held me for a few minutes and then left to assist the kids with their plates.
As I sat in the living room by myself, taming my cry down to a whimper, something caught my attention. The broken key on our upright piano. And in that moment, God gave me some divine encouragement.
I don’t know what your broken key is in life right now, but we all have one. That one key that we just can’t get to make music. And unfortunately, that’s the one we tend to focus on. And no matter how hard we strike it trying to get a note out of it, it’s just not going to play, and the constant focus on it will leave you frustrated.
But in the piano of our lives, we aren’t meant to play just one key. God has given us a melody, and all the keys that make up our lives work together to play our song. We can’t ignore the key, but we also can’t put pressure on it for a solo recital. In the same way, we can’t evaluate our lives based on our deficiencies. The beautiful thing is that the other keys compensate for that one lackluster key. It’s one of God’s many graces.
Will anyone notice that you have a “broken” song. No, not really. Because as long as we continue playing, our song is notbroken. It is simply the story of our lives.