A curious 15-year-old boy named Adrian was taking piano lessons from a teacher when a question hit him that would change the next five years of his life. Grand piano fanatics know that the strings of a grand piano are set to different lengths to accomplish the frequency required to be in tune. Some may not realize that the lower strings cannot create the proper frequency at the length the standard grand piano is generally made, so copper wire is wrapped around the strings to deepen the sound without adding the extra length. Adrian asked his piano teacher, “Without copper wire, how long would the bass strings need to be to hit the right notes?”
And so it began. Adrian went out in his backyard, strung up some piano wire, and found the proper notes at full length, which totaled 22 feet. The sound was described as “amazing”. The next step would be to build a grand piano long enough to hold the wire at length. This proved pretty challenging and took a lot of hard work and dedication. After much problem-solving, he finally had a completed project. The piano measures 18’9” and weighs over a ton. It’s the world’s largest single-keyboard grand piano, and it exists because a curious 15-year-old kid asked the right question and wouldn’t stop until he had a real answer.
Maybe the state of our spiritual health can be narrowed to a single question that, if we ask it, will tell us all we need to know about the components at work under the surface that are causing the church to sound the way we do. In Ephesians 4, Paul revisits a very basic yet powerful idea. What does it look like to be truly “new” in Christ?
