X-ray worth more than 10,000 boxes of bandages

Music is to the soul what water is to the body: life-sustaining.

Music is everywhere present for those who pay attention to the sounds. Church bells calling us to communion, marching band practice pouring from high school parking lots, corny commercial jingles you sing at a red light and the sweet music only Mama can make humming lullabies to their sleepy babies at night.

Even the infamous sound of a tornado siren has its own eerie melody.

The sounds of music roar like fierce ocean tides, but the real question remains largely unanswered: Are we living in harmony with the rhythms of life’s musical tides or are we marching to the beat of our own deafening drums?

Recently, I was Walmart in Eliza­bethtown when the tornado siren rang out and all customers were asked to wait near the shoe section. I overheard a customer asking if they had to stay.

Management assured the customer they couldn’t hold them, but highly recommended they wait for the storm to pass.

With my emergency scanner on my phone reporting a large tree falling on a house, the customer turned and walked out.

How do we not hear the sound of the music? Do we just have selective hearing, only hearing the genre of music we want? Or have we marched to the beat of our deafening drum so long we no longer hear anything else? What difference does it make if we’re in harmony with the rhythms of life’s music or if we just turn a deaf ear to the roaring of its sounds?

If music is life-sustaining, then sometimes the sounds are divinely disturbing by design.

At 12, I broke my foot playing soccer. My stepdad refused to allow my mother to take me to the doctor. I clearly heard the music my throbbing ankle was making.

I pleaded with my mom, and my neighbor, a nurse’s assistant, also sternly spoke to my mom about medical attention. Three days later, under direst, our doctor took X-rays and only would release me to my mom if she took me immediately to Dr. Tanamanchi. I had emergency surgery the next morning and my ankle was repaired with a pin.

Thank God for those who hear the music. Neighbors, mothers and doctors who help us find meaning in the music and sing in harmony even with the hard notes. Like a line in one of my favorite songs, “Nothing More to Say” by Andrew Peterson, “So turn off the radio and let’s listen to the songs we know,” pains a song whose musical notes are hard to hit.

If we get in tune, we find healing in the X-rays, surgery and pins that are part of the melody of the music that sustains us.

Thank God for the sound of music. Even my painful song was good. I still have a foot to tap to music.

What happens when we refuse to hear the disturbing songs and march to the beat of our own deafening drum?

I worked with someone and one day noticed a growth on his skin. When I asked about it, he assured me it was just a sunspot.

Weeks later, the spot was covered with bandages. As time passed, he was using more bandages, so I asked him about seeing a doctor. He finally admitted he had been to the doctor and there was nothing they could do.

Bandages required to cover the spot became bigger and bigger until eventually, he stopped coming to work. Months later, he died. People shouldn’t die from a sunspot, but bandages often are our denial marching to the beat of a death drum drowning out the music our pain’s playing; it’s like that tornado siren screaming in our ears and a customer still blatantly leaving the store.

No one likes broken ankles or tornado sirens and the painful notes they play as part of the songs of our lives. In the end, those songs and our ability to get in harmony with their notes are what sustain our lives.

Music is everlasting and the songs of wounded hearts always play loudest because they remind us the struggle is to get in harmony with the purposes of their pain. If all we hear is the genre or style of music we like, then we selectively hear what we want and participate in the managing illness model that’s willing to keep handing out bandages instead of turning off the radio and listening to the music and the songs we all know our pains and hurts are trying to sing to us.

I guess sometimes one X-ray is better than 10,000 boxes of bandages.

In the end, the hard notes help us get in touch with the real meaning in the songs of life. Maybe it really is time to turn off all the bandage songs and listen to the songs our souls are singing.

It’s a song’s melody that sings healing harmonies over our wounded hearts. So what song are you singing along to?