Ephesians 5:20: Give thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at something for months or years and missed something that, once you saw it was so obvious that you wondered how you didn’t see it for that long. I once owned a S-10 pickup and didn’t realize for several years that it had a third door. I also didn’t know it had a burglar alarm until I set it off by accident one evening. And I didn’t see the arrow in the FedEx logo or the “31” in the Baskin-Robbins logo until someone pointed both of them out to me. We try to be observant and aware of our environment, but we miss out on important things sometimes.

Every week for decades, I have experienced a blessing which I never paid too much attention to, and it comes when Becky practices the music for the next day’s worship service. I’m usually upstairs when she’s in the piano studio downstairs, and I hear everything she plays quite clearly. She practices piece by composers we’re all familiar with—Joseph Martin, Mark Hayes, Dan Forrest, Handel, Mozart, Bach, Jules Massenet, Jean-Joseph Mouret, Beethoven, Franck, and the list goes on.

Now, Becky says she’s practicing, and occasionally she will stop and go back over a difficult passage, but for the most part the music sounds very close to what she plays the next day. It’s a private concert and a preview of the music that has touched and moved people in church and elsewhere for years. And only I and Nacho the cat hear it. It is indeed a blessing and until recently, I missed seeing that blessing. I am thankful to God for Becky, for her talents and for her willingness to use her gifts to bless so many. May each of us go and do likewise. Amen.