Broken

Many of you know that for nearly seven years in the 90’s I had a music store. Although I carried everything from grand pianos to clarinet reeds my favorite things were (surprise, surprise) the guitars. I imagine customers watching me remove new guitars from their boxes was akin to a parent unveiling their seven year old's refrigerator art on unsuspecting neighbors. While I would ooh and ah over their curves and tone, my customers, for the most part, just wanted to get their valve oil and leave. The smell of fresh glue and lacquer at places like Spotlight Music or Guitar Center can still send me tripping through their aisles like a child on an Easter egg hunt. At my store I would polish each one, check their intonation and tuning, and then lovingly hang each one up for display like the treasures they are. It is no small thing to take bits of wood and glue and steel and then fashion something so beautiful to look at and hear. Some musicians take the fact that they can play lightly, but me, I think it’s a bloomin’ miracle every time I pick one up and something comes out that is far more wonderful than my puny ears ever imagined.

Because I was miles away from any repair shop, and I was willing to do it, I fixed a lot of broken guitars. One day a gentle old soul came in with a small Gibson that had a badly splintered side and an avocado sized hole in the top. It was the tragic victim of the end of his daughter’s marriage to the fool who decided that trashing her father’s old guitar was the adequate pound of flesh needed to mask his own inability to actually be nice and not hit girls. The damage had clearly been done years before the old man had brought it to me but for a long time all he could bring himself to do was occasionally get it out, stare at it a bit, and then put it back. Repairs can be made anytime but healing takes longer and I guess he just needed the memory to recede a bit. I couldn’t promise him much but I thought I could make it playable until he had the time and money to send it back to the factory. Most of a bottle of glue, clamps, a patch, some sanding, refinish, and a coat of spray on lacquer were needed but in the end it actually played kinda nice. I won’t kid you, it looked like Frankenstein’s Monster and I was a little nervous to hand it over to him but when I did he cried. He played a little tune and lovingly set it back in the case. He never sent it back to the factory. He told me he had learned to love the imperfections.

Every time we celebrate communion the words of institution include a simple yet profound statement by Jesus that the bread we are about to eat is his body broken for us. In a period of my own brokenness I wrote these verses:

Honor abducted

Stolen by Pharisee’s words

Hot days shrivel fruit

Leaves fall on cold grass

Their worth spent on yesterday

I lie among them

Reputation dies

Frost kills the former lifetime

Withdraw to find warmth

God heard me weeping

Old tree bursts forth with new buds

My redemption comes

It occurred to me as I wrote them out again that these verses are his words, his story. He lived them out far in advance of my life and therefore was perfectly suited to receive me in my brokenness, perfectly suited to repair my damaged life.

I knew an over-the-road trucker who bought a beautiful Guild 12 string guitar in Nashville and was so proud of it that he brought it into my shop to get my opinion. While I was a little annoyed that he hadn't bought it from me, I did have to admit it was very nice. A couple weeks later though, his wife came in looking like a women who had not slept well. She opened up the now familiar case to show me the guitar with it's headstock snapped completely off. She had bumped her husband's pride and joy while vacuuming and the rest of the story was a slow motion nightmare as it toppled over and snapped like a skater's forearm. While she prayed for a hole to open up and swallow her, her husband went directly to his truck and drove away. She hadn't seen or heard from him for three days and she hoped I could fix it before he got back. The repair, nearly invisible, was one of my best and the added mass of two screws embedded in the joint improved the tone. He returned, they reconciled, and I credited myself with one repair and one saved marriage. All for under $50.

It is possible to just quietly drive away from our brokenness but in our absence Jesus may be repairing the visible in order to heal the invisible. And who knows? You may find a way to love the imperfections.

Copyright June 2010, John P. Van Dusen, including "Redemption Haiku"

The painting is, "Still Life With Guitar" by Pablo Picasso, 1922