You Cannot Make It Perfect

Daniel has tuned pianos for thirty-one years and nobody has ever noticed one of them.

That is not self-pity. It is a technical fact about the trade. A piano that is properly tuned is inaudible as a piece of work: what you hear is the music. The only tuning anybody ever hears is bad tuning.

He works with a felt mute, a lever, and his own ear. He can hear beats, which is the wobble two nearly-identical notes make against each other, and he can count them, and he can tell you the difference between two beats a second and three without thinking about it. That took eleven years.

He does about four a week now. Schools, mostly. Two churches, a village hall with a terrible upright that he keeps alive out of stubbornness, and about forty houses where he has been going since the children were small and the children now have children.

And on the drive home he sometimes wonders what any of it weighs.

Not in a dark way. He is not a dark man. Just, on the A46, in the rain: I have spent my life on a thing that cannot be heard and does not last, and I do not know what it is for.

The village hall thing happened in the spring.

He was packing up and a girl came in early for something, seventeen or so, conservatoire audition coming, the kind of young person who is very serious and slightly rude without meaning to be.

She played about eight bars and stopped and said, "How do you make it perfect?"

And Daniel said, "You cannot."

She looked at him like he had failed.

So he explained it, and he does not usually bother. He said that if you tune the fifths perfectly, the octaves go wrong. That is not an opinion, it is arithmetic; the numbers genuinely do not fit. So a tuner cannot make everything pure. What a tuner does is take the impurity and spread it out, a tiny amount into every interval, all the way across the instrument.

"So nothing is perfect," he said. "But nothing is unbearable anywhere, and you can play in any key you like."

She said, "That is depressing."

And he said, "No, it is not. It is the reason you can play the piece you just played at all."

He got in the van and sat there for a minute before he started it, because he had said something out loud that he had understood with his hands for thirty-one years and had never once heard in words.

Skill is not a small thing to God

There is a proverb about competence that people rarely preach, probably because it sounds like career advice.

Do you see a man skilled in his work? He will stand before kings; he will not stand before obscure men.Proverbs 22:29

Read it as what it is: God noticing craftsmanship and saying it goes somewhere.

Skilled in his work. The Hebrew word behind it carries the sense of quick, ready, practiced. It is not about talent. It is about a person who has done a thing so many times that they are fast and accurate at it, which is exactly what eleven years of counting beats produces.

So hear this over you, on the A46 in the rain. Your skill is seen and named by God, and thirty-one years of accuracy that nobody could hear is not weightless in His accounting. That is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described in Scripture as the one who gives skill and understanding in a craft, which means the eleven years it took to hear the difference between two beats and three were His work in you as much as yours.

Now let me guard this at once, because a proverb about skill can turn into a ranking in about four seconds.

This does not mean skilled work is worth more than unskilled work.

Proverbs is not building a league table. And I will not have a reader whose job requires no training read this and conclude they are further down something, because the whole of the rest of Scripture is against it: the same God fills a craftsman with His Spirit and also says a cup of cold water handed to somebody does not lose its reward.

Skill is one good thing. It is not a rank.

What it does mean is that the years you put into precision were not thrown away, and that God is not indifferent to accuracy. He made a world that runs on tolerances. Bones knit at a certain rate. A bridge stands because somebody calculated. A piano plays in any key because a man spread an error thinly across eighty-eight of them.

And that brings me to the thing you said in the van.

You cannot make it perfect. You spread the impurity so that nothing is unbearable anywhere.

That is not a sad description of a compromise. That is a description of how a great deal of faithful work in a broken world actually gets done, and it is closer to the character of God than the perfectionism you have been quietly measuring yourself against.

The word says He is upholding all things by the word of His power, and He is doing that through nurses on nights and men with levers and felt mutes and women who check things twice. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a person able to keep doing careful work that nobody will ever hear, year after year, without the applause that would make it easy.

There was a man five hundred years ago who was in love with music and said that after theology he gave the highest honor to it, and that a person who works honestly at any craft is not doing something beneath the notice of heaven, because God Himself is the one working through those hands to keep the world running.