A New Perspective

For some years—I’m not sure how many—I have disliked strong winds, especially at night. This may stem from living for seven years in a house with a river birch right next to my bedroom. When the wind blew, branches scratched and beat on the wall, and it was not at all restful. I’m not going to say that I began to dread windy nights, exactly, but I didn’t like them. At all.

A couple months ago I took the plunge and bought a wind chime. It’s one of the bigger and therefore more expensive ones. At the place where I made my purchase, they had almost a dozen different chimes hanging, and I listened to every one. I had known previously that East Indian music, for instance, isn’t just a different style than European music, it’s actually built on a completely different scale—and though I am not here to condemn it, I’d be less than honest if I said I liked it. What I hadn’t realized was that wind chimes are designed around scales, also. There are at least half a dozen different types (Japanese, etc.) and obviously a chime doesn’t play different styles of music; the different types of chimes play not only different pitches, but different scales.

So I listened to every chime they had in their stock, and bought a Pentatonic (I assume that’s a European scale) Mezzo. Not a soprano, and not an alto, but somewhere in between.

And I love it.

It sings to me. Gently, sweetly, and in something that doesn’t actually qualify as a song, it sings to me.

Last week we had a windy evening, and for the sake of the neighbors, I thought perhaps I should remove the windcatcher from the chime, so it wouldn’t be so vocal. I felt like I had just killed my best friend, or something. I mean, I felt like the bottom of my heart was dropping out of it. So the next windy evening we had, I didn’t remove the windcatcher. The chimes sang to me all night long.

And I don’t dislike windy nights anymore.

I believe that this is what emotional healing is generally about. Once we’ve been wounded—once a memory has been created—we can’t undo it. We can’t make it go away, and we can’t always even make it stop hurting. Sometimes even when we introduce logic, and chose to think differently, we still can’t change how we feel about a certain thing.

So what the Lord loves to do is offer a new perspective. When the Lord Himself meets you in an amazing way in your pain, the pain doesn’t hurt quite like it used to. When you find a spring in your desert, you don’t fear the desert. When your horrific experience makes you able to help someone you love, how can you continue to despise it?

The night winds sing to me now, and I love their music.

THAT is what healing is about.

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