When the World Takes Us Off-Key
Years ago, I brought a friend home from college for the weekend. While there, my parents successfully dropped a guilt-bomb to go to church. We decided to humor them…so, away we went.
Sitting in the pew directly behind us was Jeanette, a close friend of my grandmother. Standing 4’10” and weighing all of 90 pounds, she was adored by everyone. She had a heart of gold with an easy smile and an endearing down-to-earth charm.
That warm feeling quickly evaporated when we stood up to sing the opening hymn. Bless her heart, but Jeannette’s singing could be accurately described as a lonely coyote in heat. Her high notes could have shattered the stained glass windows.
At that moment, I found out what it really meant to suffer for my faith.
In my peripheral vision, I could see my friend fidgeting, both of us trying not to make eye contact, lest we both burst out laughing. It was a constant struggle trying to hold it together with Jeannette’s voice behind us searing into our brains like hamburger on a grill.
Recalling this experience with both a grimace and a chuckle, I realize there are many people in our lives who are much like Jeanette. Even with the best of intentions, they do things that take us off-guard and sometimes cause us to doubt ourselves. For example:
- You had a great idea at work and spent considerable time putting together a solid plan, only to have a team member chime in with twenty reasons why your idea won’t work.
- You just facilitated a training class or a project implementation, and all the evaluations were glowing . . . except for one that contained lower marks, some for very trivial reasons.
- You researched and compiled information at someone’s request, and upon sharing your results, are told that wasn’t what they wanted.
These situations happen to us fairly often, and those well-meaning or hard-to-please people can make us feel deflated and thrown off-tempo
So, how can we continue to sing the right notes while someone near us is loudly and obliviously hitting all the wrong ones? Your first instinct may be to give up, when the real solution might be to just forge ahead and not get discouraged.
- So your great idea was rejected. If that idea is one you really believe in, you may just need a different audience to sell it to. Or, it may be a great idea whose time hasn’t come yet. Tuck it away and bring it up again down the road when the time feels right.
- So someone gave you low marks on an evaluation. Unless others also gave low marks that indicate a trend, chalk it up to the fact that it is just one person’s opinion . . . and then move on. A confident person knows that anything they do, no matter how worthy it is, will not be liked by everyone.
Take a page from Jeannette’s songbook. Even the most wonderful people in the world will sometimes take you off-key. Life is all about our choices — not just in the proactive choices we make, but how we choose to respond to the things that happen to us. So, if you know you’re singing the right tune, choose to stay focused, put on your metaphorical ear buds, and do whatever is necessary to drown out the background noise.
Is it easy? Of course not. Jeanette didn’t allow her horrendous singing to impact how she lived her faith. Even those who don’t believe in God have to admire her spunk. It made me realize that she was actually hitting all the right notes, at least in her own mind. That, in and of itself, made her the lovable human being she was. And that’s not horrendous at all.
