Faith Things I’ve Learned From Ringing Hand bells

Meghan Hamsher

Psalm 150:3-5 NIV   3. Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet, praise him with the harp and lyre, 4. praise him with timbrel and dancing, praise him with the strings and pipe, 5. praise him with the clash of cymbals, praise him with resounding cymbals.

In May, we will be celebrating Music Appreciation Sunday.

Did you know that the first tuned hand bells were developed by brothers Robert and William Cor in England, between 1696 - 1724?

Hand bells -1st set = 10 - were first brought to the United States from England by Margaret Shurcliff in 1902.

In our church, “English” hand  bells were added to the music program in the late 1970s.

Faith Things I’ve Learned From Ringing Hand bells

  1.   We’re totally screwed without a director.   Without a director, we are just a bunch of random notes at multiple random speeds.   When we pay attention to our director, we pick up our bells at the same time, we are at the same tempo, and it sounds like ... well ... music!   If we don’t put Christ as the Director of our lives, our lives get extremely messy, we start losing the focus to our lives, and lose the meaning of our faith.

2. It’s a combination of individuals and teamwork.  Each person has their own set of bells to work with. When one or two people aren’t there, it makes a huge difference.  We must learn to work with each other and listen to one another.  We have two parts of our faith:   individual, personal relationship with God sharing the Good News with others, church isn’t the same when people aren’t there!

3. Every bell is unique and has its own challenges.  Some of us prefer the low to middle-range bells; others prefer the “tinkly” high bells.  God says that each of us is a masterpiece, each unique;   each of us has our own experiences and challenges in our faith-walk.  Each of us has different skills, but we all seek to serve the same God.

4. The music tells us how to play the piece ... The key of the piece (what bells to ring), notes (when to ring the bells),  rhythm (how to ring the bells),  tempo (slow down, speed up) volume, rests, holds, repeats, techniques (bonking with mallets, mart, pluck, shake, tower swings, thumb damp, echo, gyro-wawahs).

God's Word to us is the Bible; it gives us direction on how we're to live our lives.

5. We love our excuses!  There is quite a list of excuses ... from “my partner got me lost” to “the page refused to turn/page turned messed me up” to “the bell refused to cooperate”....  Sadly, we have a list of excuses as to why we don’t participate more in church activities and why we don’t spread the Good News outside our “comfort zones”.

6. Practice is a lot of hard work, and sometimes can be very frustrating.  We spend a little over an hour every Wednesday rehearsing, improving our bell skills.  And yet, sometimes, the next week you’d think we never saw the piece before.  We have to keep working on strengthening our faith.  Sometimes we get challenges that really test our faith.

7. It makes us feel good when we’ve put a lot of love & work into it.  There’s nothing better than knowing that we’ve done the best we could do and hearing  “I really enjoyed listening to the bells today.” God decided it was worth putting all of His love and work into each of us.“For God so loved the world that He sent His only Son, Jesus, to die for us on a cross...”  God loves it when we actually slow down and talk to Him.  God loves it when we realize we can’t do everything on our own and turn things over to Him.  God loves it when we actually thank Him for what we do have.  God loves it when we admit that we are all sinners and ask for forgiveness.

Prayer:  Dear God,   Thank you for giving us the gift of music, and that we can learn about You as we praise you!  Go now in peace,  Go now in peace,  May the Love of God surround you , Everywhere, everywhere,   You may go!