Of Toes And Tuning Forks

Of Toes and Tuning Forks

Recently I found myself in a neurologist’s office watching as she struck a tuning fork (with no musical instrument in sight) and held it to my big toe. “Do you feel a vibration?” she asked. I nodded my head up and down. “Tell me when you stop feeling it,” she said.

So I concentrated on the slight buzz at my toe for a few seconds as it grew more and more faint, then reported, “It’s gone.” When she moved the fork higher and touched it to my ankle, I realized it hadn’t stopped at all! The vibration was animating the fork, even if I no longer felt it in my foot. She repeated the tuning fork test on my other foot and ankle, with similar results.

When I asked what the test meant, she explained that the peripheral nerves in my lower feet weren’t holding the vibration, indicating damage to the myelin sheath surrounding the nerves. I haven’t stopped thinking about that vibrating tuning fork and its movement. The fork had not stopped vibrating, but I had stopped feeling it.

Once “struck” in time, the gospel story—creation, fall, redemption, and restoration—reverberates through eternity in myriad ways. It never stops, even if we stop feeling it. We can ignore the gospel story or deny it, but we cannot keep it from sounding forth.

The love of God in Christ resounds throughout creation. It can’t not hum and buzz. If there is a tuning fork for the love of God in Christ, I want to feel its vibration in my chest forever. I want my heart and body and soul to ring with gospel beauty, always. I want my bones to reverberate with the truth that Jesus died to bring me into God’s family—that I am his and he is mine.

So tap the fork, Father, and let it hum in me. “Come, thou Fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing thy grace!”

All of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to himself through Christ. And God has given us this task of reconciling people to him. For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation.

2 Corinthians 5:18-19