Peace Be Still

I’ve been preparing to accompany our congregation’s choir for our Christmas performance today and we’re singing a FORTY-THREE page cantata! The music is so beautiful, but some of it stretches my pianistic abilities. I can sight read almost anything, but the technical aspects of my piano playing are still a work in progress. When it comes to crashing octave jumps and 5 note chords all over the place, I can do it, but with practice. 

Well, I’ve been practicing and practicing and practicing, even dreaming of the notes and I’ve got most of it, but I’ve been feeling stressed about it. I know that usually when I perform I do well, but that extra jitteriness affects the passages that are hardest, making it inevitable that I mess up, sometimes small, sometimes HUGE! I have wanted to get this music down so I can support the choir, because I know that when I am hesitant they are too. So yesterday as I still was making mistakes my guts were just churning with anxiety for today’s performance.

I took some time to attack the anxiety with my arsenal of emotional and holistic tools: attacking the anxiety with essential oils, positive scripting, reverse polarity exercises and lots and LOTS of prayer. I felt a little relief but still that internal shaking and sense of dread persisted. 

I finally sat down to practice again in the afternoon and felt like I got worse and worse instead of better. I was starting to despair, wondering if I’m just too emotionally unstable to successfully conquer this issue, when my mind tuned into the words of the piece I was playing. The cantata is about Christ’s life and I starting thinking about Him, picturing Him front and center in my mind. As I did, I felt a calm come over me and my hands and insides stopped shaking. I felt hope and peace. I felt assurance and confidence that I wasn’t alone and that with His help, nothing was hopeless. I played for over an hour. If I let the image slip from my mind I would lose that sense of calm and start to get worked up again, but no sooner would I cast my mind to Him than I would feel the peace return. It was nothing short of a miraculous answer to prayer.

I’ve always known that Jesus Christ’s grace is real and works in my life daily, but I don’t know that I’ve ever felt it so tangibly as I did yesterday when He calmed the storm that was raging inside of me. The words “Peace be still,” are for me just as surely as they were for a band of frightened fishermen 2000 years ago. (Mark 4:39)