I recently shared one of my favorite stories while on the trip to Atlanta with our college young adults. I’ve referred to it simply as: Living Life on One String.
One evening Niccolò Paganini, the famous nineteenth-century Italian violinist was performing before a packed house. As he played through a number of difficult pieces, one after another of his strings began to break on his violin. Amazingly he finished the piece on one string! As expected, the audience jumped to their feet clapping their hands and cheering loudly … never asking for an encore. Paganini, seizing the moment with a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his face shouted, “Paganini … on one string!” The audience sat in amazement as he played the entire concerto again on one string!
You may be wondering why I was sharing this with a group of young adults. It’s simply because I’ve been in ministry long enough and heard enough stories to know the difficulty of life at any age. Everyday hardships can leave us feeling like we’re down to one string. The lost opportunity is when, instead of seeing the one string we have left, we are too focused on the three that have snapped. This can lead us to a sense of bitterness, sorrow, self-pity, and perhaps even blame. We feel incredibly frustrated that we don’t have four strings like everybody else. However, we should never lose sight of knowing that we have the greatest string left … our attitude.
As Pastor Chuck Swindoll once famously said;
The longer I live the more I realize the incredible impact of attitude on life. You may not like this but attitude is more important than facts, it is more important than the past, education, money, circumstances, failures, successes, than what other people think, say, or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness, or skill; it will make or break a company, it will cause a church to soar or to sink. It will be the difference between a happy home or a home of horror. It’s attitude, and the remarkable thing is that you have a choice everyday regarding the attitude you will embrace for that day.
You can focus your life on the three strings that dangle, or you can play your melody on one … and oh the difference it makes. We cannot change our past. We cannot change the tick of the clock. We cannot change that march toward death. We cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way and do certain things, we cannot change the inevitable. Those are the strings that dangle. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have and that is our attitude. Life is 10% what happens to me, and 90% how I react to it.
And so it is with you. Our attitude keeps us going or it cripples our progress. It alone fuels our fire or assaults our hopes. When our attitude is right, there is no barrier too high, no valley too deep, no dream too great, no challenge too tall.
Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus … Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise. Keep putting into practice all you learned and received from me—everything you heard from me and saw me doing. Then the God of peace will be with you. -Philippians 4:6-9
