I always hoped to be able to improvise with as much freedom as the pianist in the recording I mention. Hearing musicians like this is the reason I began the quest to discover how to tap into the music within me. It is why I have spent every day of my life at the piano in order to develop my skill, so that I might deliver the music within me to listeners with the same freedom and flow as this pianist did in this recording. In the moment I was listening, however, it became clear to me that, in a very real way, I had already found what that pianist was looking for. I realized that all of my life I was focused on the gift of music. I spent my life working to understand this gift, to develop this gift, to share this gift and to live this gift.
As I listened to him digging deep to find the music within his soul I saw and I heard with clarity that it was God issuing this music to him at the level with which he could handle capturing it and playing it. The pianist did not know it but he was both seeking and encountering the Spirit of the living God simultaneously.
Now, a new and more excellent way appeared to me. I realized that I must focus my attention on the Giver of the gift and not on the gift itself. This was then and still is truly a life-changing epiphany. My music is not about me in relation to the world around me. My music, my very life, is to be about seeking God, knowing Him, loving Him, and discovering how He relates to all of us.
Our gifts can become a god that we serve whole-heartedly and even unintentionally. In this idolatry of ignorance, or pride as the case may be, we are never fulfilled and we are never content. We believe we are happy, but we are restless, constantly chasing our tails. We base our lives on the way those around us view or treat us. We have it backwards. We should base our existence on the way we view and treat God as our Father and Creator. God in all people. God in all of Creation. Life is not about us. Life is about God.
True happiness and true freedom of spirit comes only when we realize that seeking the Giver of all gifts is more beneficial to our state of being than seeking the gifts that He has given to us, or fixating on what these gifts will do for us. The pursuit of our gifts in and of themselves will find us traveling down a long, complex and arduous path through time, events, persons, places, disappointments, endless lessons, and stories with no moral as the next chapter of our life begins. The pursuit of the Giver involves simply closing our eyes and saying "Here I am Lord. I come to do your will.”
