By Robert Clements
For months I had prepared to launch my book, One Note at a Time at the party after the concert at Jamshed Bhabha Theatre. I had imagined applause, smiling readers and books disappearing from the table.
The books were on the table. Unfortunately, it was the readers who were disappearing, most of them towards the buffet, where dinner appeared to have received considerably better organisational attention than my launch.
People had waited for someone to begin the proceedings. Then hunger took over, and I discovered that even a book about harmony struggles to compete with the musical clatter of dinner plates.
The organisers had apparently not understood how much this occasion meant to me. There I stood beside months of work, watching my carefully imagined evening threaten to become an expensive table decoration.
I thought of David at Ziklag. He had returned to devastation, found his people distraught, and faced the anger of men who were even talking about stoning him.
Nobody was threatening to stone me, of course. Though watching everyone head for dinner while your books sit untouched can make an author feel that his literary funeral has begun without him.
But David found strength in the Lord his God. And standing there amid the confusion, I did what I have learned to do when my own arrangements run out.
I prayed. No polished speech, no impressive theological vocabulary, just a distressed author asking God to take charge of an evening that seemed to be slipping through his fingers.
Then things began to change. The Madras choir gathered, and suddenly a page from my book rose into the room, sung beautifully in four part harmony to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.
Imagine that for a moment. Words you have written, sitting quietly between covers, suddenly acquiring voices, wings and a glorious musical life of their own.
Then someone put a microphone into my hand. Now, a microphone in my hand is rather like an AK47 in the hands of a soldier, except that my ammunition is generally laughter.
I knew what to do with it. The words flowed, the evening came alive, and what had threatened to become a fiasco became one of the most beautiful launches I could ever have imagined.
Even the world famous music director Gregory Rose asked me for a signed copy. A little earlier I had wondered whether anyone would pause between the starters and the main course.
Later, outside, I raised my head in gratitude. Psalm 18:6 came to me: “In my distress I called to the Lord; I cried to my God for help.”
Then verse 16: “He reached down from on high and took hold of me; he drew me out of deep waters.” Those words felt wonderfully personal that night.
My deep waters had been a roomful of confusion, disappointment and departing guests. His answer had arrived in four part harmony, followed by a microphone.
Call on God when everything seems against you. He heard David at Ziklag, and that evening, above the dinner plates, He heard me too...!
