The Lost Chord

Where did it start, this deep longing? What stirred this tender, secret place in me as a child? It may have been the way the wind sounded coming through the pine tree in our yard, so different from the eucalyptus leaves as they swayed and whispered. It made me ache. The sound of waves on the beach made me long for something I did not understand. I could even be found as a little boy with my ears around a string of blinking Christmas tree lights, because I had found that each bulb emitted a tiny “ping” sound with each blink, and they were all different. They reminded me of the blinking of stars in the cold windy winter nights and what they must have sounded like.  

From the very beginning, music and words captured me. I listened to classical records, Disney records and standards every chance I got. I loved Perry Como’s “Catch a Falling Star,” Jiminy Cricket’s “When You Wish Upon the Star” and an instrumental called “Cast Your Fate to the Wind,” which I immediately figured out how to play on an autoharp. One day I found myself upstairs in our attic/music room, playing a fairly major part of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by ear. Mom heard me, and surprised by how I took to music, signed me up for violin lessons. Through the gentle hand of a dear 86-year-old man named Mr. Hutchinson, I was soon on my way to mastering the instrument, reading music, and playing better than expected. I felt the music. I longed to play it all the time. An unfortunate demand from a school orchestra teacher forced me to let go of my dear teacher and instead place myself under a cruel instructor who singlehandedly destroyed my desire to play and erased my ability to read music, which never returned. I forgave, but the scars remained.

And yet, my God is such a loving redeemer…

A 5th-grade teacher asked our class to find a song they liked and explain what it meant. Kids picked songs like, “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,” or “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” I picked an obscure, mysterious song that made me get that funny feeling inside that seemed to make no sense, but I got the meaning of it:

Streets full of people, all alone

Rows full of houses, never home

Sun coming out in the middle of June

Everyone’s gone to the moon.

Eyes full of sorrow, never wet

Hands full of money all in debt

Church full of singing, out of tune

Everyone’s gone to the moon (Jonathan King)

Somehow, I understood it, explained it, leaving the teacher to kind of look at me with concern, like “You’re an 11 year old kid. What the heck?”

Inside I was searching, and I kept searching, and aching, and listening for other songs that would stir up that unexplainable longing for that unknown Place, far beyond this world, and the pain and the adolescent lonely cried for love and meaning…

That redemption came after much darkness filling my life from childhood to my teen years. Dark, depressing, and demonic music drew me in. Cream, Led Zeppelin, and The Doors took my mind and twisted it into nightmare thoughts. Listening to Jim Morrison’s “The End” drew me to the brink of thinking I would be better off ending my life. The Crazy World of Arthur Brown’s hair-burning ritual onstage as “The god of Hellfire” stirred dark and destructive urges in me.

And one day, I heard these words on the radio: “Why do we never get an answer when I’m knocking at the door? I’m looking for someone to change my life. I’m looking for a miracle in my life.” The longing in these pleas from Moody Blues turned my heart to say, “I need a miracle.” I felt the same ache, through another’s aching, almost desperate chords and words.

One day came a book called “The Cross and the Switchblade.” I read it at 14, and it laid me bare. I was lost. I felt unloved and unlovable. I read it, angry, scared, and hurt. “Are you there?” I asked the heavens. “Is there a God who loves me? Is Jesus real? Can He love me like this book says?” I sat sullenly in the backseat of my parent’s car on the way home, torn between pain and hope. Another song came on. The chords and voice were haunting, piercing, unworldly almost. “I nearly lost myself, trying to be someone else, all of my life I’ve been playing the game. Gotta get out of myself, it seems, life’s not real when you’re in a dream, hang onto your head and give it a try. To live, you must nearly die, giving up the need to say ‘I’; just look to your soul for the answer.” (Johnny Rivers, Look to Your Soul) It resonated, but I looked to my soul and found darkness, despair and sin, hopelessness, and fear.

That night, I cried out to Jesus, and He came for me. Within a month, I made full surrender in a house meeting surrounded by worship, love, and life. I never turned back.

There was an ache that remained that I could not identify, but it most often touched me through music. It was a chord or chords that just touched a deep longing in my heart for, what? And that was the frustration. Sometimes I would play a song with that certain sound over and over, like the opening chords to “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying” or the final notes and voices of “I’d Like To Get To Know You.” The haunting voices singing “Beau Soir” by Debussy elicited the same achy feeling in me. But what was it? And what was it about certain songs, or parts of songs, that took me out of my here-and-now and caused me to catch my breath, bring a lump to my throat and stop and listen deeper? What was it in certain sounds of nature that called to such a deep place in my heart - waves on a beach, wind through a tree, owls on a summer night, a church bell chiming on a Sunday, even the sound of children laughing and playing on a warm summer day?

One secular band, Moody Blues, titled one album, “In Search of the Lost Chord.” That seemed to speak to it…looking for a lost chord that seemed to come from somewhere beyond here. I learned later someone had written a poem about this longing coming through music. It read,

Seated one day at the organ,

I was weary and ill at ease,

And my fingers wandered idly

Over the noisy keys.

I know not what I was playing,

Or what I was dreaming then;

But I struck one chord of music,

Like the sound of a great Amen.

It flooded the crimson twilight,

Like the close of an angel's psalm,

And it lay on my fevered spirit

With a touch of infinite calm.

It quieted pain and sorrow,

Like love overcoming strife;

It seemed the harmonious echo

From our discordant life.

It linked all perplexèd meanings

Into one perfect peace,

And trembled away into silence

As if it were loth to cease.

I have sought, but I seek it vainly,

That one lost chord divine,

Which came from the soul of the organ,

And entered into mine.

It may be that death's bright angel

Will speak in that chord again,

It may be that only in Heav'n

I shall hear that grand Amen.

_____________________________________________

 I was glad to later learn that that heart-longing that some music created was not something I alone felt. There were others…this was something more. It was my Unfillable Ache.

I looked to Jesus…and found it all.

 He was the Lost Chord. He was the Home I felt homesick for. In one moment, the Lost Chord became a found Savior. I was Home.

And yet, in some unexplainable way, the Unfillable Ache remained. Slowly, I began to understand what it was - it was a longing for a Place I had never yet seen but that Jesus told us about. “My Father’s House.” Our real Home. Heaven.

Perhaps CS Lewis explained it best this way:

“The fact that our heart yearns for something Earth can't supply is proof that Heaven must be our home.”

Or put another way, the mere fact that we long for things that nothing in this world can satisfy is proof that we were meant for another world.

My first introduction to “Christian music” was hearing a duo called “The Sojourners.” Not my kind of music at all. Yet they somehow hit that Unfillable Ache in my heart with their gentle lyrics and Spirit-touched vocals. I wore out that album, an unexpected resonant chord from the simple and powerful songs and voices of Dick Williams and Gary Phillips.

It was the dawn of the Jesus movement. I had been saved and swept up in it and was soon immersed in the new and powerful “Jesus music” – bands with Jesus People who wrote and recorded songs that were not of this world. I wept when I first heard Love Song’s “Feel the Love” and “Little Pilgrim.” Songs like Barry McGuire’s “Calling Me Home,” Randy Stonehill’s “There’s A Rainbow Somewhere,” Erik Nelson’s “Flow River Flow”, “Share” by Harvest Flight and Parable’s “I know What It’s Like” weren’t just songs. They were doorways into God’s presence. They pulled me out of this world for a moment and reminded me that this world was not our real Home and let me taste of that Place where the Unfillable Ache would be filled at last.

My brother gave me my first guitar for my birthday (thank you, Michael) shortly after I gave my life to Jesus. I learned 4 chords and wrote a simple song. Many more followed, some that came from those intimate moments with my Savior that were a meeting place where I for a moment, seemed to grasp and play chords from heaven and words of healing and life.

That’s how it began, and what led me here, to this.

These songs were written over many years, and many had those moments of “The lost chord.” I stopped writing after many years of sporadic singing and concerts. It seemed its time had come and gone.

Then a young friend from my youth group brought a six-string acoustic guitar to Bible Study one night. I asked to play it, and within moments, a flood of hundreds of songs and hymns and choruses came flooding into my memories and my fingers. I bought another guitar shortly after. The ache was back, and the search…

Just months later, God’s always sovereign trail crossed mine with a kindred soul who heard my heart and my songs and offered his rare gifts and insight and heart to the creation of this story you now hold in your hands or in your music player. I am forever thankful to God for Danny Pelfrey for his labor of love and vision, and belief that this story was important, special, and needed to be heard.

Each of these songs – with perhaps the exception of a lighthearted one and one that confronts the dangers of New Age thought – came from a moment of intersection with Jesus, friends, loved ones, and that “longing” that seemed to answer it in a moment of revelation, desperation, transformation or broken surrender to the heart of Jesus.

I don’t consider myself a musician or singer, yet somehow God touched my heart, and my hands, and these songs came through. I felt His touch on them.

That is the heart of this album. It is a story, about life, about loss, about love, about joy. It is a story about coming to Jesus, and longing for Jesus, and it is about the horror of running from Jesus and finding you have lost Home and Father’s embrace until you find yourself broken and alone, and then make your way back Home.

It is about a longing for heaven, for that Far Country, which, again, as Lewis said, “Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.” The moments of hearing the chords of heaven on earth are God calling us Home, and preparing us for a Home that is far beyond our fondest hopes and dreams.

As Danny and I discussed this project, I told him I wanted something someone could go into their secret place with God with, their own room or solitary walk in the woods or by the sea or in the hills and just spend an hour experiencing the sweet presence of Jesus, connecting the Lost Chord in their own heart with the Father’s love and His eternal Home – that Far Country -  and be reminded that they are not alone, and that His love will carry them through everything, and that they are truly just a stranger to this place.

My prayer for you is that as you listen, your heart will be filled to overflowing with the Savior’s love.

Gregory Reid