Blessings

Sometimes God just blows me away. The details that he pays attention to…the things that you’d think wouldn’t be important to him. Sometimes, he just surprises me with a present that blows me away. I don’t know why I deserve it. Well, I don’t. It’s just grace. Why now? Why this? Why me? I ask those questions a lot. This is no different.

Knut and I have been on the hunt for a piano for about a year or two. Leisurely on the hunt. We’d like one for the kids to practice. We basically had 2 issues: we had very little money to spend, and my husband was very, very picky. I think we could justify spending a few hundred, but the ones he wanted were a few thousand. Very much out of reach.

I’d go on craigslist.com a few times a month and see what there was out there. Knut just dragged his feet with the whole matter. Whenever I found one I liked and was within our price range, he’d bring up the hassle of driving out to that town, looking at it, deciding to get it, bringing out a farm truck to haul it, getting guys to help him move it, etc. I mean, I know that moving a piano may not be the most fun in the world, but if we want a piano, he’d have to think about the fact that one will have to be moved eventually.

He didn’t like the idea of getting one without knowing the history of it. He thought maybe we should have the piano in question approved by a piano tuner/expert before we purchase. That of course was just more money, and many of the ones I like were snatched up before all of that could possibly be arranged. Knut is not a snatcher. He’s a sit and think about it for weeks and if it’s gone it wasn’t meant to be kinda guy. He looks very very carefully before he leaps.

A few people offered us pianos. However, the pianos that go for free often do for a good reason. Knut wanted one that would hold it’s tune well, would look nice in our house, had nice keys, nice insides, etc. He said he’s moving only one piano into this house and it better be good enough to never have to be replaced.

I began to believe that we were never ever going to get a piano. However, we didn’t need one yet. I tried to let it go, and hoped that when the time was right, we’d find the right piano that would please both of us. One that was in perfect condition for Knut, and one that was free or cheap for me. (Don’t get me wrong, Knut didn’t want to pay an arm and a leg, and I didn’t want a piece of junk. Those just kept being the excuses one of us would give to talk the other one out of pianos we were considering.)

A few weeks ago we got a call from our friend Sharon. Sharon and Grant live a few miles from us, and have been very dear to Knut and I for years, and I believe us to them as well. They watched Knut grow up in church, and we hit it off amazingly well when I started going there. She was delighted to find out we were dating, and when we broke up for 2 weeks that one time, she cried. She wanted so much for us to be together.

Grant and Sharon were some of Silje’s sponsors at her baptism. Not only that, we discovered that when Sharon was in nursing school back in the day, my Grandpa L. was her pastor. She remembers standing at the train station with the rest of the church, waving goodbye to my grandparents as they left to be missionaries to Japan. She keeps reliving that to me, telling me how significant that moment was for her. I think my grandparents impacted her a lot when she was a young adult, and she nearly hit the roof when she found out I was Dave and Esther’s granddaughter.

Anyway, Sharon contacted us in regard to her piano. Her father gave it to her when she started taking lessons when she was 6 years old. As a teen she dedicated the piano to always be used for godly purposes. She’s played piano for our church before and loves using her piano as a means for worship. She and Grant have deemed that it’s time for her piano to go to a new home as they were preparing to make some changes in their own lives. As she had dedicated the piano to God’s use, she felt uncomfortable with the idea of selling it, simply because she could not insure that it would be put to use to serve God’s kingdom.

So she prayed about it, and felt lead to give the piano to Knut and me. She said she wanted to bless the descendants of the pastor who blessed her long ago. She said she wanted another 6 year old (the age she was when she got it) to learn to praise her maker with it. Thinking of all the older generation of people I know who used to come over to her house and stand around that piano and sing hymns to God until the wee hours of the morning, she wanted to give it to someone who shared in that heritage.

She called us up and asked us to come take a look at it. While she pointed out it could always use some refinishing on the outside, we could not deny that the musical condition of the piano is pristine. A few years back she even had the piano tuner (that Knut wanted to help us find a good piano) do some work restoring it with a few pads here and there. His praise for the instrument was exactly what Knut needed to hear.

When you look at the list that Knut and I had come up with for a piano, even down to the fact that we preferred a studio piano, we wanted all the ivories in tact. We wanted it to hold it’s tune well. We wanted to know the history of it. We wanted an expert’s recommendation, and we wanted it free or cheap. There was not a single thing on our list from style to age that this piano did not fulfill. Not only that, but we don’t have to drive an hour away to pick it up, or rush to snatch it up before someone else does!

There’s no way I could have imagined us affording to buy a piano this nice. I’m shocked that God worked it out for us to get something that left nothing off of our “wish list.” While this is not the only thing God has blessed our home with in the past few years, it just gets added to the list of amazing things he has done for us…just because. God does not always bless us with material possessions. We can always look to our right or left and find people who have more than us. He blesses us daily with things that are not material, and most of all, he blesses us with himself. I think sometimes he does something like this to show us that no detail is too small for him, and that he is as real as a wooden and stringed instrument in front of us.

I just have to praise him openly for that. He’s given me a story, and I must tell it.

“This is my story, this is my song. Praising my Savior all the day long!
This is my story, this is my song. Praising my Savior all the day long.”