When I was teaching piano and voice, besides my own annual Spring Program and Awards Ceremony, my students sometimes participated in as many as seven joint recitals a year, programs featuring the students of several teachers at once. 

              Sometimes the students were chosen according to their age—the Young Performer’s Recital was strictly for talented beginners.  It was their chance to shine rather than being lost among a studio’s advanced students.  Sometimes it was all about their music—the Parade of American Music featured students playing or singing the music of American composers.  If his best piece that year was Mozart’s Rondo in D, that particular student was ineligible.

              Sometimes a panel of judges chose the students based on their performances in a recent competition.  The year we had five chosen for the Student Day Honors Recital was a banner year for us.  To have one or two chosen from a group of over two hundred students from a dozen studios was a good showing.  Five was almost unheard of.

              At the receptions after these events, we teachers always enjoyed basking in our students’ successes.  We mined each other for teaching strategies and resources.  The experience exposed us to more crowd-pleasing music we could use with our own students, and our students to teachable moments we could discuss at the next lesson.  They could see for themselves why I insisted on such picky things as not taking your fanny off the seat until your hands left the keys when a student from another studio stood up without doing so, looking as if someone had glued her fingers to the ivory.  They could hear why long fingernails were verboten when it sounded like someone was trying to tap dance to Debussy and Haydn.  It also worked wonders for parental attitudes—suddenly they appreciated things they had before viewed as silly.

              My favorite moments after these recitals came when people approached me with these words:  “I can always tell which ones are yours.”  It wasn’t because they played or sang particularly well—every student at these recitals did that—but not every student performed well.  We spent hours on things like how to approach or leave the piano, how to hold a pose over a final note, what to do in a memory lapse, how a singer should hold the mood until the accompaniment stops, and especially how to bow.  It’s one thing to know your piece; it’s another to be able to present a polished performance of it to an audience.

              Sometimes I imagine God as the teacher watching our performances.  He knows we can do it.  He gave His Son to show us how.  …because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example that you might follow in his steps, 1 Pet 2:21.  I don’t think it is out of line to think of the angels saying to Him, “I can always tell which ones are yours.”  Isn’t that the picture we get in Job 1?  Perhaps not literally, but in essence if nothing else. 

              If life is one big recital, we should learn from the performances of others—what to do, what not to do, why some of the picky things we have always heard are important after all.  We should learn from our own mistakes as well—why do I always miss the same note?!  Your daily practice should take of that.

              God is in the audience, along with all those celestial beings we read about.  As a proprietary teacher myself, I can easily imagine that He wants to hear from them, “I can always tell which ones are yours.”
 
By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother. 1 John 3:10
 
Dene Ward
 

The day of our 20th anniversary marked the day I had lived with my husband as long as I had lived without him.  Well, not exactly, since I did not marry on my birthday, but you understand my point.  Every year after that meant I was further and further removed from my “first life” as a dependent of my parents.

              As the years went by I saw even more “lives.”  I spent several years as a full-time preacher’s wife and homemaker who taught a few piano lessons here and there among the many moves we made.  Then I went through a life when my husband worked the regular hours of any provider and my in-home music studio became nearly a full time job.  Now I am in another life, one of increasing disability.  Yet in many ways it is the best “life” yet since I am finally able to spend hours in Bible study and writing, and have come to know the joys of being a grandparent.  I suspect there will be yet another life sooner or later.  All things being equal, as they say, I will probably be a widow someday, and due to this eye disease will be blind and once again living as a dependent.

              When I was young, I remember people speaking about a TV show called “I Led Three Lives.”  I never saw it.  It first aired on Oct 1, 1953, before I was even born, and its last episode was broadcast May 1, 1957.  It was a product of the Cold War, loosely based on the life of Herbert Philbrick, an advertising executive in Boston who infiltrated the American Communist Party for the FBI.  His three lives were as advertising man, “Communist,” and counter spy.  A little mulling it over and I realized Christians all lead three lives—first sinner, then believer, and finally immortal.

              The New Testament even speaks of it as “lives.”  In Col 3:9,10, the old self and its practices are put away for a new self, “renewed by knowledge.”  The old self was corrupt through “deceitful desires,” and the new self was “created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” Eph 4:22,24.  The old life was lived for ourselves, the new life is lived for Christ, 2 Cor 5:15.  We crucified the old man, one enslaved to sin, and the new man was set free from that sin.  We were once slaves of righteousness and are now slaves of God, Rom 6:6,7,19,20.  We used to live for human passions; now we live for the will of God, 1 Pet 4:2.  At one time we lived in darkness and now we live as children of Light, Eph 5:8.  Once it was I who lived, but now it is Christ living in me, Gal 2:19,20.

              And that leaves only the eternal life to come, 1 Tim 4:8, the one Paul says is “truly” life, 6:19.  That one depends upon how we live this second life.  We must feed on the bread of life, John 6:51.  We must sow to the Spirit, Gal 6:8.  We must have patience in well-doing, Rom 2:7.  We must do good and believe, John 5:29; 6:40.  We must be righteous which, in the context of the verse, Matt 25:46, means we must serve, and we must love our brethren in order to experience that eternal life, 1 John 3:15. 

              But simply making a list and following it won’t suffice.  The life must be such an integral part of you that the “list” takes care of itself.  Philbrick lived his three lives simultaneously; ours are supposed to be consecutive, one completely giving way to the other.  Anything else is a sham that will keep you from that third life.

              Paul never speaks of eternal life as anything but a certainty.  As surely as you are living a life now, that final one will come too, the life that is “truly” life.  It will make these other two seem like nothing in its length, in its glory, in its joy.  “I led three lives,” we will say.  No, we only led two.  We will lead the last one forever.
 
Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the sake of the faith of God's elect and their knowledge of the truth, which accords with godliness, in hope of eternal life, which God, who never lies, promised before the ages began, Titus 1:1-2.
 
Dene Ward