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First world problem, but here we go: my subwoofer is on the fritz. Everything is now horrible!

I jest, but only kind of.

You know what you value based on what you double-check is still in the house after you get back from a trip. Anything stolen? Some folks go straight for their laptops, others their jewelry, but I always dart to my stereo/CD cabinet. Everything still there? And even if so, I make sure that some of my more expensive box sets haven’t been pilfered on the sly. I imagine that any self-respecting Gentleman Thief would, upon breaking and entering, beeline to the music collection and rifle around for the choicer items.

If aliens would ever choose to invade or infect humanity by hijacking streaming music services, be assured that I’ll survive just fine. My stereo isn’t a Sonos bar; it's a CD console wired to my receiver, which is wired to my speakers. No wi-fi, no bluetooth, just good old American electricity surging through the thing.

(And by the way, if you ever want a contrarian perspective as to why CD’s sound better than vinyl: come at me, hipster! Gen X would have a word.)

I can’t remember a day when at home I didn’t power up my stereo. My kids can discern whether Daddy is at work (including in my home office) versus off-duty based on whether the stereo is on. At dinner, for example, if music isn’t in the air, they’ll wonder why everything is so quiet.

My stereo will kick out the jams such as Bruce, New Orleans tunes of all kinds, blues, rock, pop, some world music, a tincture of classical (especially around Christmas), and a liiiiitle country, but most of the time these past few years I’ll spin jazz. My stereo likes that kind of music the best. The great thing about hearing jazz on a good home system is that it’s a genre that features both dynamism and also open spaces. You can train your ear to pick up not only what instruments are sounding, but where. Every part fills a particular soundscape, and the silences and gaps are just as important as the opposite.

My self-gift for Christmas this year was a used copy of an out-of-print Bill Evans set called Turn Out the Stars. It’s a six disc collection of one of the great pianist’s last performances before he died suddenly in 1980, and true to Evans’ typical form, Turn Out the Stars features a trio—piano, drums, and upright bass.

Which gets us back to the subwoofer catastrophe. While it’s currently taking some spa days at Collingswood Music for repair, I can’t listen to my Christmas present. If Turn Out the Stars is trio music, without my subwoofer I’m only hearing piano and drums. Sure, the rest of my speakers transmit a little bit of bottom end, but my stereo minus the subwoofer means that I’m listening to Turn Out the Stars through only through a glass, darkly. I continually notice where the bass is supposed to be, but it’s simply not there. Although I still more-or-less hear the songs on these discs, my music’s got a bass-shaped hole in it.

I say all of that about the case of the missing subwoofer to say this: it’s reminiscent of what happened to me when I became a Christian all of those years ago. Until that period, life had always seemed to me to have holes in it. I’d work, I’d hustle, I’d strive, I’d struggle, I’d hope, I’d love—often unsuccessfully—but I perceived an undertow of some kind of gap.  A barely detectable negative space. 

Jesus filled in that hole, that lacuna, for me. Life began to fit better, and gaps in the present became not yet’s directed toward a good future.

If you’re not a person of faith, do you not sense those gaps? And if you’re wavering in your commitment to Jesus, please hear me that turning from belief will only reintroduce you to those holes. It’s not leaving for a fuller life but rather going back to black-and-white from Technicolor.

Get your subwoofer back, and keep it.

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