When the Chord Sounds Wrong
I've been sitting with a question all week: what does it feel like when something you've been neglecting has finally drifted too far?
Not a dramatic falling-apart. Not a crisis. Just that quiet moment when you pick something back up — a practice, a relationship, a part of yourself — and realize it's not where you left it. The drift was so gradual you didn't notice. And now the chord your life is playing doesn't quite sound right.
That's exactly what Eric Church walked into when he stepped onto the stage at the University of North Carolina this year — not with a speech, but with a guitar. He played a chord that was out of tune and let it hang in the air. And then he said it: your whole life works on this principle.
Six strings. Faith, family, your partner, your ambition, your community, and you. When all six are in tune with each other, the chord is full and resonant — the kind of music that can carry a broken person through the worst night of their life. But when even one string drifts, you hear it the moment you strike.
The line that stopped me cold was this: tend to your faith not just when you're broken, but when you're whole.
That one's been living rent-free in my head all week. Because most of us — myself included — have gotten pretty good at emergency prayer. We know how to cry out. We know how to reach for God when the bottom drops out. What's harder is the daily, undramatic returning. The tending that doesn't feel urgent until it's gone.
Praying in the In-Between
This week we're on the Seventh Sunday of Easter, and I want to tell you something about where we are on the church calendar — because I think it explains something about where a lot of us are in life right now.
Jesus has ascended. The Spirit hasn't arrived yet. The disciples are in an upper room in Jerusalem, and they're just... waiting. They've seen the resurrection. They've watched him go into the clouds. And now there's this suspended, in-between stretch where nothing dramatic is happening.
So what do they do? They pray. Together. Constantly. Not because the roof is caving in — but because they understand that prayer isn't just a rescue operation. It's a practice of staying present to a God who is already present to you.
I find something quietly beautiful about that image. These are people who have been through the most disorienting weeks of their lives — Palm Sunday to Good Friday to the empty tomb to the Ascension — and instead of scattering, they're in a room together, tending the string.
That's where the work actually happens. Not in the dramatic moments. In the ordinary, daily showing up.
Peter Wrote This From the Other Side of Failure
I want to spend a moment on Peter — because I think he might be the most honest voice in the entire New Testament.
This is a man who failed in the most public way imaginable. He sat around a charcoal fire in the courtyard of the high priest and denied knowing Jesus three times. And then the rooster crowed. He knew what it felt like when the string he thought was solid just... wasn't.
And yet here he is, writing to a community that is suffering — people being mocked for their faith, people anxious and tired and wondering if they made a mistake — and he says: cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you.
Not some of it. All of it.
There's a particular kind of anxiety that doesn't announce itself loudly. It accumulates quietly, like a string going slowly out of tune, until one day something in your life sounds wrong and you can't quite name why. Peter knew that feeling in his body. He'd lived it. And he wrote from the other side of it, to people in the middle of it, and said: the God of all grace will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you.
Four verbs. Not vague comfort — a structural promise. God intends to put you back together from the inside out.
One String Tuned in Isolation Is Just a Note
In John's Gospel this week, we're given something almost too intimate to hear. Hours before the cross, Jesus lifts his eyes to heaven and prays — not for himself first, but for the people in the room with him. For the ones who are about to scatter.
He prays that they would be one. As the Father and the Son are one.
That's when Eric Church's six-strings metaphor earned its full weight for me. He said the strings have to be in tune with each other — not just individually, but in relation. One string, perfectly tuned in isolation, is just a note. Six strings in harmony are the chord that carries a broken person through the worst night of their life.
That's what Jesus is praying for. Not that each of us would individually be fine. That we'd be in tune with each other. That the community we form when we actually show up for one another would be something the world can hear and recognize as real.
This faith has never been a solo instrument.
So I want to leave you with the question I'm sitting with this week: what string has drifted? Not catastrophically. Just quietly. The faith you tend only in the breaking. The community you keep meaning to get back to. The stillness that used to be part of your mornings and somewhere got crowded out.
Things don't settle down and then you tend. You tend — and that's what keeps you grounded enough to navigate whatever doesn't settle down.
The same God who moved through Jerusalem is moving through your ordinary week. You don't have to be in crisis to reach for him. You don't have to be in a cathedral.
You just have to show up.
Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts, and if it found you at the right moment — pass it to someone who needs it.