Living by Your Spiritual Ear in This Noisy World

It is both a blessing and a curse for the musician who has "the ear". It's a rarity, and any musician who has "the ear" brags about it ad nauseam. It's like having a pitch pipe built into his ear which enables him to hum, at random, any note perfectly on pitch. All of the great composers of our history had it, and it made their tasks much simpler. Barbara Streisand and Celine Dion both have "perfect pitch", which makes them intolerant of those who do not have it.

The worst thing you could do to a musician with perfect pitch is to make them sit through the qualifying weeks of "American Idol". My gift of perfect pitch turns into a curse as I violently react to these off pitch contestants! It can be a curse to have "the ear".

As I listen to the rhetoric during this campaign season, there are candidates who say all the right things, but they are not "on pitch". Something is off and I can hear it. And when my children, old as they are, try to pull the wool over Mama's eyes with parsed words including just enough truth to technically not be a lie, or deliberate elimination of all of the story, "the ear" hears the disparity. (They still haven't figured out how I usually know they're not being totally truthful!)

It's the same for a Christian who, through years of spiritual growth combined with the walking-out of Christian Faith, hears professing Christians quote passages from the Bible in order to make their own points. Something in my well-trained spiritual ear doesn't ring true. It's "off pitch". Sometimes it takes a while to figure out exactly what's wrong, and other times it just hits me like a pie in the face.

I think of "that time" spoken of in 2 Peter 2:1-3 (NKJV) ...there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them-bringing swift destruction on themselves. Many will follow their shameful ways and will bring the way of truth into disrepute. In their greed these teachers will exploit you with stories they have made up.