Your Love Broke Through

The music takes me back. I'm forty years old, but in my mind I'm ten years old again, and laying on the orange carpet listening to Auntie Kathy play the piano. It's 1978 and the music she is playing is Keith Green. I don't know it yet, but the melodies will be with me for the rest of my life. The music wrapped itself around the four of us, the three kids, and my aunt, and created a bond that has yet to be broken. We have had many disagreements, but the one thing we have never disagreed on is that music. It was real. Down to Earth. It reached out to where we were and picked us up, and took us to another level. It told us there was a life to be lived. It spoke of hope, and peace, and healing. Things I desperately needed were offered. I reached out and took the offering, and it changed my life.

Many years later, after we were all grown up and married, my aunt decided to give the piano to my youngest sister. The only hitch was, that my aunt lived in Texas, and my sister lived in Arizona. My middle sister, Heather had a moving van, and had volunteered to bring it to her, since her new home was now close to my youngest sister's house.  Heather's husband, Ian, Heather, myself, and Auntie Kathy spent three hours moving the piano from Auntie Kathy's front porch out to the moving van, over broken sidewalk, mud, and grass. It was a monumental effort. After we got it in, everyone piled in the car, and we all went to my house, to spend the night.
The next morning, Heather and Ian loaded up their car, and prepared to head to Arizona, to drop off the piano at my sister's house, and then head to their new home. After everything was loaded we persuaded Auntie Kathy to climb up in the back of the van  and play us some music. She began to play. It was Keith Green. As the sound flowed around us and down the quiet street, we were overcome with emotion, and Heather and I stood in the street with tears flowing down our faces. The music was so haunting, taking us back to our strife ridden childhood and the peace found, laying there on the orange carpet. There was an overwhelming feeling was that this was the last time we would ever hear the sound of Auntie playing her piano. Other pianos were not the same. It was this piano, this music that had embedded itself inside of us, and become a physical part of our flesh and blood.
So tonight, on a whim, I got on Youtube, and typed in Keith Green. Out of the speakers began to flow the music of my childhood. Everything around me fades...Back, back, back I go, to a time before kids, before marriage, before the house, before the cares of growing up consumed me...