Tune My Heart
“Sorry, we are not listening at this time”, read the top of the standard rejection form letter from several record companies. Thank you Mr. Byers for your demo – but we are not listening at this time. My dream to be a staff songwriter was going nowhere. All creative writers of books or music experience this rejection in an effort to get your work published – After you copyright a work you become a member of a performing rights organization to provide royalties if your work is published. I was a member of ASCP (American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers). You then send your work to a publisher or recording company - They were not listening because they had too many songs at this time. The first step in getting published is to be heard – and you can’t be heard if no one is listening. My songs were not stellar – but we ALWAYS think our work is good. I wrote three Tribute songs for the dedication of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC that were good but not commercially marketable because they were never heard. My works were not tuned into what they wanted to hear.
In Mark 10:47 -when Bartimaeus cried – “Jesus Son of David have mercy on me” – Jesus heard – listened and took action. When I experienced transformation from a “prone to wander” wanderer to a child of God – my plea and prayer was similar to the blind man and Jesus heard (listened) to my hearts cry. My songwriting changed overnight from Pop and Country to Christian music.
The Holy Spirit is real and will transform your thinking from a world view to an eternal perspective. We have all experienced when we were talking but not truly listening to or understanding what the speaker was saying. Sometimes we just TUNE out their noise because of disagreement. We may say “I hear you” but are really not hearing but waiting for our turn to talk. We are not receiving or responding or getting something done. We play a game of “one way tennis” where the ball goes over the net but never comes back. Most of us truly are not great listeners because we want to be heard.
Humans can detect sounds in an audio frequency range from about 20 Hz to 20 kHz. God has tuned our ears to this range for protection in his wonderful design. How chaotic our minds would be if we could hear lower sounds or higher pitched noise. The planets in our solar system are making noise right now – If we could hear the dreary drones of the sound octaves, it would drive us mad. Most of us can tell if a musical note is off key even if we are not musicians with perfect pitch. Our ears are tuned like the radio I built in vocational high school electronics class. After many hours spent building it over weeks, I heard only static when I turned it on - UNTIL I tuned to a station and heard music. I was not in tune with God until I listened and responded to His spiritual voice. Once I shut off my mind to the noise and static from the world, God was able to TUNE MY HEART and MIND to His.
SONG: Come, thou Fount of every blessing; TUNE MY HEART to sing thy grace;
This work Published around 1760 Come, thou Fount of every blessing
Author: Robert Robinson (1758); Martin Madan (1760) Tune: NETTLETON
Come Thou Fount ~ Audrey Assad
SONG: Listen to our Hearts
Listen To Our Hearts-Geoff Moore and The Distance (With Lyrics)
~ Steve Byers and his wife Debbie have lived in the Charlotte area since 2017 and have been attending LIFE Fellowship for five years. Steve is a musician and songwriter and sings in the Oxygen Choir. Steve and Debbie, have one son, Josh and a daughter-in-law, Avery. They are grand parents to Jaxon and Grayson.