The Parable of the Trumpet: An Easter Story

Friday night I had the opportunity to go up with my family to hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra on Temple Square perform Handel’s Messiah. Having never seen that classic work in its entirety, I was excited for this event. The rich melodies were performed beautifully by all of the performers and I was deeply moved by the text. About two hours into the performance, there was a brief pause between songs as the conductor prepped the orchestra to begin the next piece. All of a sudden, in the midst of the silence, was a single clear note of a trumpet, an entire count early. The reverberations of the trumpeter’s mistake hung in the air of the Tabernacle, and all eyes turned to the bow-tied perpetrator. After a split-second of silence, however, the entire orchestra began playing and that very trumpeter who had come in early began playing one of the most beautiful trumpet solos I have ever heard. I was in awe of his trills and the clarity of the tone as he carried the orchestra on his wings.

And that gave me pause to think. As a flautist, I have had many similar experiences—here comes the big solo, oh, I missed that breath mark, and now the rest of my solo is thrown off and I’m flustered and miss the rest of the notes.  And that’s how it goes sometimes—you make that first mistake and then it sort of throws you off and you aren’t able to focus anymore and you mess up the rest of the solo. You let that first mistake stick with you and affect the rest of your performance.

It reminds me of a principle my seminary teacher taught me on one occasion. He had been a high school wrestler and shared a story of how he lost in his semi-final round. If he had won that round, he would have played in the championship round, and even if he had lost he would have taken home the second place trophy. But because he lost that round, he was going to have to win his next two rounds in order to even take third place. And then came this statement that has remained with me over those years since sophomore seminary: “It’s harder to take third place than second.” To come away with that third place trophy, you have to not only have the physical endurance to win your next two rounds, but you have to have the emotional capacity to set behind you your previous mistakes and focus only on the task at hand. And in that moment of coming off a loss, you’ve taken a pretty severe physiological blow and giving up seems like a really viable option. It’s hard to recover from that. You have to summon a lot of emotional stamina in order to come back, in order to keep your head in the game. Coming back from a mistake is hard.

 And such is life. We all mess up. Each of us (more frequently than we sometimes like to admit) stand in the shoes of that trumpeter. We come in early for our cues. We do something we didn’t mean to. We make a mistake we knew we shouldn’t. Sometimes these are honest mistakes. Sometimes they’re sins born of pride and rebellion. But no matter the cause, these mistakes strike a blow to our psychological stamina. You fail that first midterm, and suddenly it’s harder to study for the class the rest of the semester. You do poorly at a job interview and become discouraged. Recovering that motivation is rough.

Perhaps the most dangerous sphere in which this discouragement appears is in regard to righteousness and sin. Finding the motivation to study your scriptures is always harder after you’ve missed a day. Coming back to activity in the church is harder than staying active in the first place. It’s hard to start living morally clean when you feel that everyone sees you as the bad kid. It’s hard to break addictions. It’s difficult to let go of an offense, to extend an apology, to move on.

But mustering up that moral and mental stamina to change, to come back is essential! Christ didn’t give His life so that we could throw down our trumpets after the first wrong note we played and leave the stage forever. He didn’t offer us salvation only for us to reject it when we fell short of perfection. He atoned precisely because He knew that we would mess up. He gave His life to redeem us from those mistakes—to lift us up and help us become better. And He is there to help us gain and regain that stamina we need to come back.

And I think that we not only need to remember the Atonement’s power in our own lives, but be willing to extend that to others, too. We all need to be a little more compassionate when people mess up. Even the best of trumpeters come in a count early sometimes. Even the greatest wrestlers lose a match sometimes. And it’s hard for them to come back, to change, to move on. As Elder Holland recently stated, when a stranded seaman is struggling to come back to the shore, we shouldn’t be out there, beating his boat with our oars—we need to support everyone’s efforts to come back, to change, to repent. The worth of a person’s soul is not evident in just the single, imperfect action you may see. We need to allow people to access the Atonement and move on from their past.

I know that the Atonement is real. I know that Christ extends to us the strength we need in order to overcome our mistakes, to move on from them, and to move forward. Because of Him we can achieve the greatness that is inherent in each of our souls.

Because of Christ, even our most visible mistakes can be healed. We can move on from those wrong entrances in the concert of life and go on to create music that inspires all around us. If only we will rely on Him.