I picked up the guitar for the very first time when I was five. My dad had found a tutor near where we lived, and I remember going to classical guitar lessons with a full‑sized nylon string guitar (which was about twice my height). I went to these lessons for about two years before my parents decided it was better for me to learn the piano formally. 

Did my parents’ church suspiciously need a pianist at that time, and was I an easy recruit? Maybe. I guess we’ll never know. 

I began playing regularly in church and other settings, where I was mentored by godly men and women who taught me not only musical skills but also that those abilities were not truly mine but gifts from God I was called to steward. 

The gift became more important than the giver 

As I started performing more, I loved the applause and the praise that playing in front of people brought, and this applause started to feed a desire to be better than everyone else. I decided that I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing music, that it would be the singular focus of my life. Slowly, being a musician became the source of my identity, and it took the place of God in my life. I derived my worth from my performance and started becoming quite anxious to perform in front of people. Playing well was no longer something to enjoy and celebrate; it became the baseline requirement, and failure was crushing because it meant I was a failure.  

When music, or any gift God has entrusted you to steward, takes the place of God Himself, it becomes cruel. It demands more and more, constantly whispering that you are not doing enough and that you’re not enough – you’ll never be enough. The harshest blow to my identity came when I was not able to go to university to study music because my family could not afford it. It felt like everything I had built my life on was starting to crash and I blamed God for this. 

Walking in freedom 

As my heart became calloused and God felt distant, particularly because I felt like He had impeded my happiness, I needed to hear a few truths again.   

First, God is a good father. Matthew 7: 11 says: If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! 

In this section of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus refers to God as a Father who gives good gifts. The implication here is that God is for us and that He will never give us what is bad for us. He knows more than we’ll ever know, and He sees things that we’ll never see. If you’d asked me if I believed this to be true, I’d probably have said yes. But that was mental assent; it was something that my head knew, but my heart did not feel to be true. In reality, I thought by denying me a chance to actually study music, God had proven that He was not good. This truth that God was a good father had yet to permeate my heart and it’s something that the Spirit had to help me understand.   

Secondly, my primary identity is child of God. John 1:12 says: Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. I was looking to find my identity in things – good gifts that God had given me. I was placing a weight on these gifts that they were never meant to hold. God had already claimed me as His own – as his child, not because of anything I bring or something I’ve done but just as I am. There’s nothing I could do to make Him love me more than He already does. As these truths sank in, God started to reshape my relationship with Music. I engaged with it from a place of freedom, knowing that I had nothing to prove to anyone (including myself) and that I could just revel in the fact that a good God created something so enjoyable. 

So, go. Go enjoy the gifts that God has given you – go try and get that promotion, release that single, produce that film but do so from a place of security knowing that you have a Good Father who has given you gifts and has claimed you as His own.