The Purpose of Dents and Dings

     My brother makes trumpets. He bought a business that employs techniques that have not changed for hundreds of years. He purchases sheets of brass and by using precision technology, is able to cut a beautiful bell-shaped flat sheet which is then ready to be molded into a conical trumpet bell. The next step uses, not a robot-guided multi-thousand dollar 21st century machine, but a ball peen hammer and a cone-shaped form. The brass is formed around the cone using the hammer and an artisan’s eyes and hands. The brass is pummeled thousands of times to create the perfect bell until it is seamed together with another hand tool. Because it is hit so many times it gives the illusion of being smooth, when in fact it is comprised of thousands and thousands of minor dents and defects. 

     You might be thinking, “Really?  This day in age when so many products can be made through automated processes, why do you stick with what sounds like practices from the dark ages?  The technology certainly exists to extrude a perfect trumpet bell with a machine and to the naked eye no difference would be perceived. But a trumpet for display purposes only would be quite silly. 

     What has been discovered is that the multiple pings, bangs and dents actually produce a superior sound to the less labor intensive robotic-guided modern process. Imagine the sound which a trumpet player produces as it goes through many inches of tubing and exits the bell bouncing off all those micro surfaces. Acoustical engineers spend a great deal of time and effort building auditoriums with the optimal number of physical objects in order to introduce to our ears a beautiful sound. Years ago someone placed a pipe organ in Luray Caverns in Virginia discovering the amazing natural acoustics of thousands of stalactites and stalagmites. 

      So, if beautiful sound is produced through defects and imperfections in the making of a brass trumpet, could that also relate to our lives?  The world we live in is imperfect to say the least. Tragedy, pain, heartache, sadness, evil and death threaten to unravel our ability to see any good in our short span of years upon this earth. It would be easy to agree with the writer of Ecclesiastes who said, “So I hated life because the work done under the sun was grievous to me.  All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind. I hated all the things I toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to one who comes after me.”  

     I have a different perspective to offer. What if God, in His genius, made bad things turn out for good?  Here it is up close and personal: Can good come from Tracy’s death?  Will I become a better person as a result of her passing? (See blog post: “I Will Be Different”put url). Did her suffering amount to anything that we could label as positive?  What did she have to say about this? 

     I remember two things that stand out: 1) “If my death can bring about the salvation of my family, then so be it” and 2) “I am so thankful, I am so thankful” spoken in the midst of possibly one of the worst pain episodes she experienced as a result of the tumor in her lower spine.  

     What did Tracy understand that enabled her to see God’s genius in the midst of excruciating pain and the mental and emotional trauma of facing death?  Like Moses when faced with the death threats of Pharoah, “She persevered because she saw Him who is invisible.”  I believe she, with one foot in this finite world and one foot in eternity, began to grasp what Paul writes about in The letter to the Ephesians, “…how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ and to know this love that surpasses knowledge and was filled with the measure of all the fullness of God.”

      In one sense it makes me envious of Tracy. But she and we can only experience this incredible supernatural love when we submit to and view the hammering, bending and forming of our characters into His likeness. Suffering will happen. Tragedy will strike. Trauma is unavoidable. Death awaits us all. But in the hands of a Creator who brought us into being out of love, we have hope. The promise of redemption and restoration awaits all who put their trust in Him. 

     We are still on this side of eternity.  Tracy has graduated. For her 1 Corinthians 13:12 has  been fully realized, “For now we only see a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully even as I am fully known.”