Living the Change
For more than a decade, you could find her there. On the streets of Melbourne, Australia. Natalie sat, hunched over a small keyboard, bent and broken. Her metal walker stood nearby like a bodyguard. Her twisted and hooked fingers moved across the keys as if they were young and slender and light. The swollen joints did what she commanded, as if in these moments, on the bustling city street, they didn’t bring the ache to her tired hands, the ache that kept her up at night. Here, they were soft and supple and beautiful.
She played songs that she composed herself, at least one written when she was thirteen years old, back when she was a young promising virtuoso, just beginning what was sure to be a brilliant career in music. She played songs that she learned during her years of classical training, songs that moved her heart then, when the world lay before her, so promising. And now the songs moved her in a different way, in the way that loss and heartache and great struggle move and change a person on the inside.
She was married once. Four children: two girls, two boys. She was surrounded by her brood just like any sweet mama you know today. But accidents and disease are no respecter of mamas or their sweet loves. Both of her girls died before they had the chance to decide who to be. Her marriage fell apart. A son stepped into the pit of drug and alcohol abuse. And, eventually, she found herself alone, without a home. Living on the streets, glory days of musical accomplishment and precious moments with babies on her knee were far behind her.
For nine years Natalie lived with no place to lay her head, save the dark alleyways that she would’ve been afraid of in her younger, shinier days. But the music inside her wouldn’t lie quiet. She began playing in a hotel lobby and won herself a room. She began playing there regularly and took her music to the streets as well, aching for people of all walks of life to hear her message–that there is beauty, still, in the middle of the chaos. In the noisy street, where broken-hearted people and cheery people and lost people float past all day long, and they all got a dose of what she has to offer: the music that lived in her heart and never died. Before long, she became an internet sensation and had millions of viewers every day.
In this world, the chaos comes and never seems to go. We read the news and we look at the vast lostness and craziness, and we feel the chaos creeping into our hearts. We feel the overwhelming urge to shut ourselves away, just us and what we know, stubborn world be damned. It would be so easy, to sit back and hoard what is inside us: the love of Christ. But what we carry, what lives inside through the pain and the suffering and the great heartaches of life, it is the beauty in the chaos. It is the stunning tune on a busy street. It is the only hope for humanity.
For whatever reason, our God wants to use us, in all our selfishness. He wants us to be like Natalie, shooting little notes of beauty into what seems chaotic. Our song is the hope of the gospel, and the only purely beautiful truth that this world will ever know.
How can we hide in the alleyways now, when the world is desperate for a glimpse of that beauty? For a taste of the goodness of God?
Natalie played on the streets of Melbourne until her health wouldn’t allow it. I wonder if people still picture her there, white hair blowing in an unruly wind, imperfect fingers playing in perfect tune. Once, people passed by and tossed change into a box at her feet. They were changed by her notes.