It’s Going to Get Worse Before it Gets Better

Sometimes a life lesson hits you over the head at the most unexpected times.  For me, it was at my sweet 10 year old’s piano lesson a few weeks ago. 

Emma was feeling pretty good about a Frozen piece she had been practicing when we went to her weekly piano lesson and she showed her teacher.  I watched Ms. Becky as she listened carefully and circled a few places in the book toward the beginning of the piece, then put her pencil down and settled in to enjoy the rest of Emma’s song.  She smiled and praised my daughter for her hard work in figuring out how to play the piece.

“But,” she turned slightly serious, “there were several places where your fingering wasn’t right and the rhythms weren’t played as written.  It still sounds very good, but if you want to master this piece, you are going to have to UNLEARN a lot of what you’ve already taught yourself. I would be willing to help you and to keep working on this, but you may just want to keep playing it the way it is, because it sounds pretty good.  It’s your choice, but if you want me to help you get better, you’re going to have to get a lot worse, first.”

I watched my daughter as she thought about the option her teacher laid before her:

1) Present good versus future great, with a ton of work in the middle, or

2) Sound just fine to most people and avoid all the work and pain of unlearning and relearning. 

I couldn’t help but think that this question is also laid before us in the spiritual life.  Most of us have friends and neighbors who think we’re “pretty good people.”  I mean, to the untrained eye, we may seem like we have it together in our marriage, in our family, AND in our spiritual lives.  But the Lord does not give us just a cursory glance,

“I the Lord test the mind and search the heart,
to give to all according to their ways, according to the fruit of their doings.”

Jeremiah 17:10

He asks us the question: are you willing to settle for being “okay” or do you want to do the hard and hidden work to “be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect”?  Matt 5:48.  When we work on our virtues, we oftentimes have to unlearn our bad habits, things that might be crutches for us and help us be our “okay” selves, but keep us from who we are made to be.  If we decide to really try to become the “best version of ourselves” we are likely going to find that we get worse before we get better.

My daughter didn’t think about it for very long.  “I want you to help me,” she told her patient teacher.  She now has many more hours of practice ahead of her, and I get to hear “Let it Go” about a hundred more times than I would have, but I am proud of my little girl. I hope it is just one of many such choices in her life to choose to do the hard and often hidden work to become the best she can be.