Something Better

(The posting today is in honor of my mom.  Today would have been her 98th birthday.)

From the time my mom was very small, it was obvious that she had been granted an incredible talent in music. She was a child prodigy on the violin.  My grandmother was a piano teacher.  She recognized her giftedness, and taught her as much as she could. There was no money for lessons.  Actually, there was very little money at all in those days.

Even as a very little girl, mom played at church.  She won contests as local fairs.  Once, when she was about five years old, she won a pony which they had to sell, because they needed the money to buy a stove. 

They lived meagerly in an apartment above a small grocery, behind a mattress factory. But she was destined for something big.  Everyone knew it, but that path looked pretty bleak.  Her father died, after a long disabling as a result of a stroke, when she was just a teenager.  There was no money to go to college to study music. 

But with the urging of her hardworking mother to not to give up, Mom found a job at a radio station in Fort Worth, Texas, during the graveyard shift from 4 to 8 in the morning, a time slot when it appeared no one listened.  And as Mom did throughout her life, she took a lemon and made a lemonade, turning a lowly invisible job into something spectacular.   

She called herself Cowgirl Bessie and played her violin – well, now, fiddle -- on live radio.  It became a very popular show, and it granted her time to both play and perform.  She finished up work in the morning in time to go to her classes at Texas Christian University.

She graduated, and then performed as a member of the Houston Symphony Orchestra, taught music as a professor at Southwestern Theological Seminary, and continued her radio show.   

She met a wonderful man who was an airman on a nearby base.  They were engaged hours before the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. They married, and then, less than a year later, he was shot down over Germany, and she became a young war widow. Life was not turning out as she expected.

One day, she received a phone call from a man who heard her on the radio.  He offered her a steady job as a performer with an even bigger radio show produced in a church building in another city.  But mom’s sights were set higher than going to a sleepy southern city like Nashville.  New York is where you went to become a celebrity.  She turned him down.  The man’s name was Ernest Tubb, that little radio show was the Grand Ol’ Opry, produced in a creaky old church, now known as the Ryman Auditorium.

Mom took the next step in pursuing her music by getting a Master’s degree from Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, a long long way from home.  Afterwards, she arrived in New York City and started working as a regular on early television on a show called the All-Girl Orchestra, produced by NBC.  She was achieving her dreams.

She married a research scientist, had two children, and continued her career. My widowed grandmother moved up from Texas to help with the household and kids.  And when dad’s job took him to faraway Chicago, she chose to move too, to give up her career, and see what God had up His sleeve.  Two more sons were born. 

But just as it appeared that her ambitions were narrowing, God enlarged her vision.  She went from pursuing achievements to seeking God’s appointments.  And she found that she had not “given up” anything at all.

It was what God was doing through her music.   She became aware of what I call “proximate.”  What  God placed on her path, who God put on her path, and how God could use her in situations right in front of her.   It was not about abilities, but about availability. 

 

God had something much more profound in mind.   It was no longer just about the stage, but all about relationships .   God gave her a new story.

And she began to see and realize that there was not just a connection  between faith and work, but a seamless weaving of the two.  As Os Guiness says, “Living before the Audience of One transforms all our endeavors.” 

  

Times were hard when I was in high school, and my dad was out of work. Mom stepped to the plate to help make ends meet and began teaching violin to students from the high school across the street.  We awoke every morning, not to an alarm, but to beginning violinists scratching away.  

Mom encouraged students not just in music, but in life.  It was a rare morning that we did not find at least a couple of students sleeping on our living room couch with nowhere else to go.  Almost always, we had students sharing our supper, or going through the fridge for leftovers.   It was not about music.  It was about relationships.  It was how she lived out the gospel.  No matter what God gave her to do.

And in her spare time, she gave violin lessons to her 96 year old friend Electa Santacrocci, who had outlived four husbands and who once mentioned to mom, “I always wanted to learn how to play the violin.”  Not about ability, but about availability.  Mom taught her for free a couple of times a week.  And when Electa died, mom and her pianist not only played at her funeral,  they were the only ones there.

Mom had not reached a dead end in her musical career, but simply a change in direction and a change of heart, pointing others not to herself and how great she was, but doing all work – no matter what it was – with great excellence to point others to God. 

  

In her later years, she played her violin at nursing homes, for the elderly and veterans, and at other small hidden venues.   Nurses often remarked about unresponsive patients tapping their feet to the music, and even singing along to the old tunes.  It was not Carnegie Hall, but she brought joy to people who were mostly forgotten.

Because there is God, because you are made in His image, it is not that your work matters, but YOU matter.  All work for the common good has dignity.  No. Matter. What.

When your significance is in Christ, rather than in your work, it changes how you see God, how you see others, how you see yourself, how you see your work, and how you see the work of others.

Mom ALWAYS spoke to the “invisible” people around her and thanked them for their work, be it a cashier at the grocery, the busboy at Old Country buffet, or those who cleaned bathrooms at the airport.    But she could also sense the invisible desperation and loneliness of even those who ran in high society.  People were the same to her, as we used to say, whether the queen of England or a maid at a motel.

When you know your significance, your dignity, is not in what you do, but who you are in Christ, and because you were created in the image of God, you can serve God in every workplace, in every endeavor and bring Him glory in anything you do.  There are no small tasks.  There is nothing insignificant.

A heart changed by Jesus responds to life with more than a different worldview. 

            

My mom has been gone for thirteen years now.  And when she passed away, among some random papers, I did not find her name in a program from Carnegie Hall, but I found a scrap of paper on which she had jotted:  “I always wanted to be famous, but I think better things happened because I’m not.”