Wednesday 10th March 2021: Making an Organ!

A few years ago, when a local URC chapel closed its doors for the last time, I bought its twenty-five-year-old digital organ.  Since then both Matthew and I have had great fun playing it up until a few months ago when it started to go wrong.  What to do?  We knew that a professional organ company wouldn’t really be interested in sending out an engineer, so we decided to ‘deconstruct’ its ‘insides’ and build it from scratch!

It’s been a great project for this third Lockdown.  In reality Matthew has done most of the work and I’ve just paid for the parts!  We have used a computer system called Haupwerk and it has all gone really well giving us a ‘new’ organ at a fraction of the cost we would have paid for one in the shops. 

It’s rather been a case of ‘new wine in old wineskins’ as we’ve kept the wooden framework of the old organ, pulled out most of its interior and used the now vacant space for new speakers, monitors, cables and computer. It’s given ‘new life’ to our ‘old organ’.

All of us, I guess, are allowing ourselves to begin to look forward and imagine how our lives might develop when we enter the second half of 2021.  Some, perhaps many, of the old structures of our pre-March 2020 lives will still, thank God, be there: our families, job, community, and church.  Yet into these we will pour new expectations and fresh energy.  Perhaps much, on the surface at least, will look the same (rather like our organ), yet lift the lid and we’ll see a much more re-focused and purposeful life as we grasp and value much of what we once took so fore-granted and temporarily ‘lost’.

Well, perhaps the music is coming back, slowly, into our lives.  Now it’s a soft diminuendo – let us hope as we enter spring and then arrive at summer it will build to a full crescendo!

May God bless you in all you do this day.

Ian