I didn’t come to that relaunch service to make a scene. I came to say goodbye to the sanctuary I’d loved for thirty years. But God, it seems, had other plans.
The band was loud and bright, and the young pastor beamed. Then, midway through, the sound system cut out — a dead hum, then silence, in front of a packed house. The drummer fumbled. The singers lost their place. And into that awful quiet, an old man in the third pew, whose wife I’d buried the year before, called out, “Somebody play ‘It Is Well.'”
No one on that stage could. So I set down my purse, walked up to the organ I thought I’d never touch again, and I played. The first chords rolled through those old pipes and filled the room the way electronics never could, and the whole congregation — young and old — began to sing. By the second verse, people were weeping. The band stood still and listened.
When it ended, the young pastor was quiet for a long moment. Then he came down off his stage, took the microphone, and told the church he’d been wrong.
He said the organ was depressing — he’d mistaken reverence for gloom, and it took a room full of tears to teach him the difference.
He asked me back that morning, in front of everyone. Not to compete with his band, but to play alongside it — the old hymns and the new songs together, the pipes and the guitars sharing the same loft. It turned out the church didn’t have to choose.
I teach the children’s choir again on Wednesday nights. I still play every wedding and every funeral. And on Sunday mornings, when the band finishes and the organ swells up under those old hymns, I watch the gray heads and the young ones sing side by side. Thirty years, and it turned out the sound we were building toward needed both of us all along.