Someone Decided

Someone decided to program the carillon at the church near our house to play music at regular intervals. I often hear these heavenly melodies around 3:00 p.m. when the day is slipping away, and the evening still stretches ahead. I go on walks a lot in our neighborhood, and sometimes it’s as if nobody lives in the houses I pass. The yards are groomed, cars parked in driveways, but no people to be found except the occasional dog walker. It can feel lonely and somewhat eerie sometimes. But then here come the chimes, a type of beauty that is heard rather than seen. Someone at some point must have decided to program what songs the bells would make. This was an act of faith in itself. Would anyone appreciate the songs? Yet the bells play on. Sometimes I halt my steps and just listen for a moment.

I think about the verse in the Bible that talks about this faithful act of bringing a thing into being:

“Do not despise these small beginnings, for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin...” Zechariah 4:10.

That kind of faith, creating something small and trusting it to grow, reminds me of two first grade teachers I know who taught their students a worship song with tiny six-year-old hand motions. They performed it every year at our weekly school worship — the next year, and the next, and the next. One year, after the song had become tradition, a teacher invited the older kids in the audience, now grown out of the class, to join in. You could tell they’d been waiting to be asked. Hands shot up across the gym, a whole room of students smiling at each other in recognition of a shared memory set to music. Soon the adults in the room were making the signs too. I couldn’t help but join in.

That same quiet faith showed up in my own life, in much smaller, much quieter ways during my battle with breast cancer two years ago. One friend gave us a bird feeder for our backyard, and another friend left off a huge bucket of sunflower seeds in order to alert the neighborhood birds that there was a new source of food in town. A couple of days went by, and then all of a sudden, in flew finches, cardinals, eastern bluebirds, and flickers, to name a few. I watched these feathered visitors daily. They provided company when I was not strong enough to talk to people.

None of these things were grand when they began. A person sat down and made a choice: to program a hymn, to teach six-year-old children some hand motions, to leave a bucket of seeds on a doorstep. They couldn’t have known what would come of it — that I’d stop on my walk to listen, that a whole gym would lift their hands in unison, that finches and cardinals would carry me on their wings through the hardest year of my life. But the Lord rejoiced to see each work begin. Maybe that’s the only way anything good ever starts. Some brave soul takes a small uncertain step.