Our Mistakes Are Part Of The Melody

I took a lot of piano lessons growing up and one of the instincts that I had was when I was playing a piece and made a mistake, I would want to stop everything and go back to that section and play it again correctly. But my teachers would try to impress upon me over and over again that when you are in a performance, the audience may notice if you make a mistake and they may not, but everyone will notice if you interrupt the flow of the music to try to play a section again correctly. The thing is, in a piece of music, every note is connected to every other note in a musical chain and if you try to go back and play over an incorrect note you've broken the chain and all of the notes you've played previously are no longer connected to the notes that you will play after you stopped everything and tried to correct the mistake. In life we make mistakes. We spend a lot of our thoughts and energy wishing we had the power to go back and do that part of our life over again without the mistake. We imagine this would make things better, and maybe it would and maybe it wouldn't. It's possible that the lessons we learn from that mistake help us to avoid an even worse mistake. But the important thing is that unlike in playing the piano where we do have the option of going back and replaying that section we messed up on, even if it's a stupid idea to do so, in real life we can't go back to yesterday, or last week or second grade and do it all over again. Time marches on implacably, and much as we would like to turn back the clocks and have another crack at a difficult passage, we don't get that option. We just have to keep playing our song one note at a time, wincing perhaps when we play a wrong note but still moving on to the next note all the same. There is some degree of comfort in this. It doesn't matter if you played a section beautifully or poorly, you still have the privilege and the obligation to go on to the next section just like everyone else. But even more comforting is that although we may be clunking and jangling our way through our performance of a lifetime, and although we are powerless to go back and play those wrong notes right, the Savior does have the power to go back through our song and play over those mistakes. And the truly wondrous thing is that in addition to weaving His own rich melody into our performance, He is able to take our mistakes and incorporate them into His glorious symphony so that when we listen back on it, thanks to the infinite grace of His Atonement, not one strident note will sound falsely but every step of our lives will ring out true and clear and beautiful, and all of our seemingly worst mistakes will make for some of the most beautiful passages. We can't go back and remove our mistakes and thank God for that. Our mistakes are a part of the melody of our lives and, sure, they may require a more complicated and intricate key change to accommodate them, but our mistakes will help us to work with our Savior to make music far more beautiful and glorious than we could have possibly imagined before we had made those mistakes.