Brothers and Sisters, Aloha. My thanks to the administration for giving me this opportunity to speak, and my gratitude for the generosity of those who have sanctified BYU–Hawaii with their dedication, sacrifice, and aloha, allowing me to teach here. Since arriving more than five years ago, my family has been amazed and humbled continually by the kindness and charity extended to us.
I’m particularly grateful to my brother, Daniel Bradshaw, and my late father, Merrill Bradshaw, both music professors and composers, for the selection we just heard. Music has been an integral part of my family. It was what brought my mom and dad together, and it is a common thread that runs through many of our family’s memories and associations in wonderful, enjoyable, spiritual ways.
While I am not a musician and not really accomplished on any instrument, I have picked up a hobby that draws me closely to the musical roots of my family. Sometime early on in our marriage, I took some piano tuning classes, figuring that it would be a good way to earn some extra money, and I worked hard to develop my skills as a piano tuner. It’s an interesting way to interact with music and musical expression. Your work is necessary for the piano to produce beautiful sounds, but you yourself are not very good at producing those sounds. It takes someone who has spent thousands of hours practicing and performing to produce beautiful music for you. It is a valuable skill that has taught me to listen to, to feel for, and to think about music in ways that are very dear to me and that have helped me appreciate, even more, the beauty and artistry of a well-played piano piece. I thank my brother for his hard work on that. He's the one spent thousands of hours practicing. If you’ll bear with me, I want to walk you through some of the basic steps in tuning a piano. I hope that I can draw some helpful analogies to the principles I have learned along the way to encourage us here at BYU–Hawaii to rely on the Savior and gain a greater appreciation for His role in our lives and His presence on our campus.
The Principle
For tuning a piano, the most common note or pitch that people start with is known as A440. That means that when you hear A440, 440 sound waves hit your ear each second. Let me play it for you on a tuning fork.
[Play a tuning fork]
When a piano is out of tune, a piano tuner will tighten or loosen the wires—we’ll call them “strings”—of the corresponding key on the keyboard to raise or lower the note to that pitch first, before any other notes are tuned. That note is near the center of the piano and is one of the notes our ears most easily hear. Now, I want you to listen to the relationship between two notes that are 99.5% the same:
[Play tuning fork and A442 tone]
What did you notice? Just the smallest percentage of difference can actually lead to disharmony. So, I take a tuning hammer, and I turn the pins that hold the strings until the notes vibrate in unison. Now, as I tune more and more notes, the vibrations aren’t all supposed to be the same; otherwise, the piano would sound like one note. Instead, I have to carefully listen to the relationship between the vibrations of one note and another and make it so that they complement rather than replicate each other. Each note has, often unheard pitches and vibrations that a piano tuner can hear and use to ensure that other notes have their proper places above and below A440. You can actually train your ear to hear these, but it takes a lot of practice. It requires stillness, silence, and listening. Most of all, it requires patience and trust in our abilities to hear the proper tones.
As members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we are continually looking for ways to attune ourselves to the truths of the gospel and the influence of the Spirit. You could say that in my analogy, A440 represents the teachings of the prophets, the commandments, and eternal principles we seek after. Indeed, A440 as the essential note to my tuning could easily be a metaphor for the Book of Mormon as “the keystone of our religion” [1] or, as Isaiah pictures Christ, the cornerstone and foundation of our belief. [2] I wholeheartedly endorse and encourage these and any other connections you can make, and, as an English professor, I invite you to think of other faith-affirming analogies inspired by my demonstration.
There are other connections we can make that focus on behaviors and dispositions to go along with these analogies. I mentioned them earlier—stillness, silence, listening, patience, and trust. Careful attention to the subtlety of the sounds is of the utmost importance in determining how one note aligns with another. While I demonstrated a simple difference between two tiny variations of the same note, the piano has 88 keys with each key having one, two, or three strings that make up a single note. This gets incredibly complicated and intricate, trying to make over 200 different sounds align correctly in their own ways with A440. For me, it sometimes takes three or more hours of intense listening to get all of the notes where they need to be to make the piano sound “in tune.” To do this, I need to tune-out external noises so I can focus on the subtle and quiet relationships between the notes.
We can see in the scriptures the potential that these distractions have for the faithful and their trust in the Savior when external “noise” overcomes their ability to accurately perceive the Lord’s will. In Exodus, chapter 14, when the children of Israel become trapped between Pharaoh’s advancing armies and the Red Sea, the anxiety and distraction presented by this danger drives them to forget their covenant with Jehovah, and they complain to Moses:
"Is not this the word that we did tell thee in Egypt, saying, Let us alone, that we may serve the Egyptians? For it had been better for us to serve the Egyptians, than that we should die in the wilderness." [3]
And Moses’s reply here is instructive. He proclaims, “Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the LORD.” [4] Notice how the children of Israel, in a time of great duress, quickly retreat to their previous enslavement as a safe-haven. Surety and servitude is preferable to freedom and faith in the face of danger, and the very things that were enslaving them are the things that they long to return to rather than trust in Moses and the Lord. Notice too how Moses immediately commands them to “stand still” and then to see the salvation of the Lord. It is not as if the salvation of the Lord has not been there the whole time; rather, it is a matter of disharmony because of their fear: they are out of tune with the Lord’s will, and this causes dissonance and distress in their lives. “Stand still” is a command to stop moving, but in a gospel context, it also implies a need to cease resisting and show a willingness to align our behavior with God’s will.
This stillness also shows up as a precursor to other miracles in ways more intimate and personal. Many times we have our own fears and anxieties that prevent us from properly relying upon the Spirit when we need it most to receive personal revelation. I was assigned to speak at this devotional well before Christmas, and I eagerly have been taking notes, looking up scriptures and quotations, writing different paragraphs and pages over the past several weeks, and praying earnestly for help. However, as the time drew nearer to complete the talk, all of my good intentions just weren't coming together. I didn't feel like I had the time or could even give myself permission to actually sit down and collect my thoughts: I've had worries about critical points in my children's lives, the health of extended family members, concerns about people near and dear to me who are struggling, and, it has seemed, a mountain of administrative work that I am still learning how to do. I think our administration will attest to that. On top of that, I think I gained five pounds this past month!
With all of this stress, I finally resolved to isolate myself and just read the scriptures to give me a little perspective. As I was trying to pull all of my thoughts together, I kept thinking about my need to hear the promptings of the Spirit. That struck me as a little bit funny because I’ve always thought of it as “heed” or “feel” the promptings of the Spirit. Then, I thought about Samuel, hearing the voice of the Lord as he served Eli, the prophet. So I decided to go totally “old school” on the scriptures. I shut my office door, put my phone on “do not disturb,” closed down my computer, pulled out my old missionary scriptures and started reading in 1 Samuel. After just a few minutes, I felt a calmness come over me as I read about Samuel lying down to sleep and then mistaking the Lord’s voice for Eli’s, three times. Verse 1 tells us that “... the word of the Lord was precious in those days; there was no open vision.” [5] So I wonder if Samuel hadn’t really been taught yet how to identify the Spirit, or, at least, that perhaps he couldn’t fathom that he was actually being addressed by the Lord. But each time, he quietly returned to his bed until he heard the Lord's voice again. It was not until Eli said to Samuel, "Go, lie down: and it shall be, if [the Lord] call thee, that thou shalt say, Speak, LORD; for thy servant heareth" that Samuel realized he had been hearing the voice of the Lord. [6] After listening to and obeying Eli’s words, when the Lord came again, Samuel was ready to hear His words and understand the magnitude of what the Lord had in store for him as the future prophet.
When I arrived home that evening, Jennifer told me that earlier in the day she had talked on the phone with our daughter, Sally, asking her what advice she would give to her dad to help him deal with all of his stress. Her reply, probably spoken near the same time that I was reading in my office, was “Tell dad just to be still.” When I heard that, I felt immediately that my erratic and dissonant previous weeks and days were starting to formulate around an idea, and that the stress I was experiencing was helping me see the relevance of the ideas that I wanted to talk about. In those two moments, being still and carefully listening opened up a space for me to receive answers to my prayers and relief from my anxieties about what to say. It really was as if a still, small, formerly unheard voice unified my discordant soul with a spirit of peace. It didn’t write my talk for me, but it considerably lightened my load as I was able to see the importance of what I had been trying to write about and how many of the ideas I’d struggled with could fall into place when I stood still and opened myself up to receiving inspiration and personal revelation.
Like the children of Israel standing still to see the salvation of the Lord, I had to make myself be still for a while to hear the voice of the Lord and come to an understanding of an idea that was always there. Like Samuel’s willing attentiveness to the Lord, our being still is a gesture towards our Savior and being open to His presence that can help us align ourselves with His plans for us.
I would encourage you to find your still places, both physically and metaphorically, where you can hear the voice of the Lord and attune yourself to His will. Whether that is on a hike, quietly thinking at the beach, or finding some private space on campus, purposefully giving yourself the time and the space to receive answers is essential to your emotional, spiritual, physical, and intellectual well being. The most obvious and available place for standing still is, of course, the house of the Lord. Elder David A. Bednar shared, “The temple is another holy place specifically set apart for worshipping and serving God and learning eternal truths. We think, act, and dress differently in the house of the Lord from any other places that we may frequent. In His holy house, if we will, we can be still and know that God is our Heavenly Father, we are His children, and Jesus Christ is our Savior.” [7]
BYU–Hawaii has started a tradition where incoming students go to the Laie Hawaii Temple as part of their New Student Onboarding to help them understand the necessity of these still and sacred places in the Lord’s house. And, many are following up on this beginning to their education, by attending the temple regularly to do ordinance work, and serving as temple workers. This is a remarkable blessing, and it is the place where we figuratively stand in the presence of the Lord to better understand His revelation. I encourage all of us to take advantage of this sacred place, as a place to prepare for and as a place to attend—a place where we can be still before the Lord and participate in the work of salvation. The temple’s presence here can function as A440 for you when you’re feeling spiritually out of tune.
Inharmonicity
In a very real sense here at BYU–Hawaii, this stillness isn’t always easy when we’re trying to work harmoniously on this campus with others. I’m speaking here to all of us: faculty and staff, administration, and students. Sometimes when I’m tuning two different notes on the piano, they may both individually sound fine to my ear, and they may both be individually appropriately and theoretically perfect in the way they are tuned to A440, but, for a number of factors, they don’t sound very good when I play them together. One of the biggest reasons is due to a principle tuners call “inharmonicity.”
It sounds like a made-up word, but it really means that there are factors, such as length and thickness differences in the string, how much pressure each string is under, and what kinds of materials are used to make the string that result in the actual sound of the note needing to be a little different than the theoretically perfect tuning that would exist in a theoretically perfect world with theoretically perfect materials. Also, sometimes the pins in the piano just won’t hold the strings exactly where they need to go—they slip a lot. So, when I’m tuning, I have to make compromises between where the note should ideally go and how well it sounds in relation to the other notes on the piano. I just have to do my best with each note and work to make sure that one note brings out the truest sound in its neighbors. When I am able to do this, the piano takes on its own personality and has its own unique and beautiful sound that is a product of the many adjustments and compromises that have been made. However, the essential center of the piano, A440, has still maintained its exact perfect pitch and can still be used as the standard for keeping the piano in tune.
I like to think of these compromises as a type or representation, generally, of how we get along together in this imperfect and fallen world, but, more specifically, of how we have to make room for each other as “fellow citizens with the saints” [8] at BYU–Hawaii. We come from many different backgrounds, all with a testimony of Jesus Christ. We all have Him as an A440 to align ourselves to. However, sometimes, in our desire to be exacting, correct, obedient, and to do our duty, we don’t always harmonize well with those around us. Things may be done a certain way in our home country, or our hometown, that just don’t happen here. In our lay ministry to each other, we’re all trying to apply the principles of the gospel to our immediate surroundings, even though those surroundings may now be very unfamiliar to us. Perhaps at BYU–Hawaii, we might miss the old traditions or ways of worship we were used to as we grew up in our familiar culture. Or we may feel that here we are spiritually on our home soil and that others “just don’t get it.” And, we may have other pressures or anxieties that our roommates, classmates, colleagues, and instructors don’t understand.
All or some of these worries are probably true for a lot of us. We even might feel that we have a valid excuse to criticize and condemn because of someone else’s bad behavior towards us or a slip-up on a text or a rude online posting. We study and work here, together. We’re forced to learn to live with inconsistencies and imperfections that can be quite distinct from person to person, even as we ourselves strive to follow Moroni’s injunction to “[c]ome unto Christ, and be perfected in him.” [9] Inharmonicity is a problem that is a natural result of, as my bishop, Greg Maples, says, our “trying to live celestial in a telestial world .” I don’t have a simple three step plan to reconcile disagreements and disparities but I have been praying and worrying about this dynamic and how I might play into it, really, from the moment I accepted this job, and I have been blessed enough to see a number of answers to this dilemma in the testimonies and actions of BYU–Hawaii students.
The primary thing that strikes me about solving these problems of inharmonicity is that we need to focus first on our common testimonies of Jesus Christ as the gauge by which we determine what it means for us to “be in tune.” If we are firm in that conviction, then it allows us to be more generous to our neighbors in their exercise of their faith, and it creates a profound sense of humility in us and helps us realize a more expansive role for Him in all of our testimonies rather than limiting Him only to our own experience. It is a sacred relationship that we rightly guard and personalize, but this can come with potential hazards if we don’t grant others the same privilege of personalizing their experience with the Savior. Once we allow ourselves to see Christ through the eyes of our fellow Saints, we get a much broader understanding of His role in our lives.
Before coming to BYU–Hawaii, some of my biggest educational highlights involved my travel with American students to foreign countries. In a sense this has proven true for my time at BYU–Hawaii; however, the roles are somewhat reversed as I have had these memorable experiences traveling with diverse groups of BYU–Hawaii students to the American mainland. For the past two years, I have been lucky enough to accompany Brother Jared and Sister Stephanie Marcum with two groups of students from Oceania and Asia to learn about early Church history. We traveled to many of these sites in the northeastern and central United States with the hope that students would be able to understand through literature, travel, and Church history the early American religious contexts in which the Restoration occurred by visiting important sites where the gospel was restored.
For me, most moving are the trips to the Sacred Grove historic site in Palmyra, New York, where Joseph Smith’s First Vision took place. On our visit there, we were given the time to wander around the woods and trails where the vision occurred. Alone with my own thoughts, I wondered if I had prepared the students well enough to appreciate the importance of the First Vision. It has certainly played an important role in my own testimony, and, as an American literature professor, I wanted to make sure that they had read the right things and were prepared to understand it in relation to the American philosophers and writers we were reading about. I felt that I had something important to teach my students who came from other parts of the world about the importance of this moment so it could deepen and strengthen their convictions. After we silently walked and contemplated for about 30 minutes, Brother Marcum had us participate in a small testimony meeting, just on the outskirts of the grove.
This informal meeting quickly became one of the most memorable experiences of my teaching career. I noticed a pattern that developed as the meeting went on with student after student testifying to the power of the First Vision in their own lives, even though they had grown up thousands of miles and two-hundred years away. Each student shared an intimate connection to the struggles that Joseph Smith and his family had in trying to follow the convictions of their testimonies that echoed many of the trials for them and their families in their own homelands.
As students bore testimony about answers they had received to their own struggles with faith and shared worries with each other about the state of their own souls, they found in Joseph a kindred spirit, kneeling in the Sacred Grove, believing that an Eternal God had an interest in the welfare of his soul. As each student walked to the front of the meeting, it was almost as if I watched Joseph, over-and-over again, walk into the grove with the same concern for his salvation. In a way, I had my own minor vision there that helped me realize the enormity of the truly prophetic work that Joseph was to undertake and that we are all inheritors of that legacy, no matter what background we come from. As I saw the role of the Restoration in the lives of my students and witnessed their own vision of the Savior in their lives, my understanding of the significance of the First Vision grew far richer and more expansive.
A little over two weeks ago at BYU–Hawaii’s devotional, Elder Gerrit W. Gong similarly called attention to the opportunities we have here to expand our knowledge of the plan of salvation and the Savior’s role in that plan by broadening our perspective through a proper understanding of “gospel culture.” He said:
“... gospel culture encompasses God’s love for His children in every nation of the world—in every culture. In gospel culture, in the household of faith, there are to be no strangers, no foreigners, no rich and poor, no ‘outside’ others. Gospel culture respects and includes all.” [10]
I was really moved by his presentation of artistry from different places that related to different truths of the restored gospel. In each case, these renderings were based on the artists’ varied and rich relationships to Jesus Christ and the plan of salvation. Viewing these helped expand our sensitivity to the connections that others have formed to Jesus Christ, and if we took the time to see these truths through their eyes, then the art worked to “enlighten [our] understanding” [11] We can use the diverse perspectives we are surrounded by on this campus as lenses through which our own testimonies of the Savior are given nuance and depth.
Conclusion
I would like to close by wrapping up my tuning analogy with one final example that, I hope, helps you to value and cherish what is happening on this campus while you and I are here. When I have finished tuning all of the notes, I run through each one several times to ensure that the adjustments I have made hold and don’t slip, and I make any necessary final fine-tunings so the piano as a whole sounds as good as I can make it sound. Piano tuners say that the final test of a piano’s being in tune is whether or not it sounds “pleasing to the ear.” I gather up my tools, and I gently close the cover. When I am done, I am not satisfied that the tuning is complete until I hear someone else play the piano that I have tuned and that it is pleasing to their ears and mine.
As we all engage in our time together here as students, staff, and faculty, I pray that we can think of ourselves as spiritual piano tuners for this campus, helping each other find our true relationship to the Savior, who is our A440, by listening for and seeing Him in both the unexpected places and the tried-and-true. But I also hope that we’ll view ourselves as the piano that is constantly being tuned by a loving Heavenly Father to a standard set by Christ’s life. As we work through any difficulties with the spirit of charity, we’ll find that each of us can also be a unique instrument in the Lord’s hands for making this campus a special place. We’ll find the true character of our campus is able to produce its own genuine sounds, authentic to the mission and the make-up of BYU–Hawaii. And, when we’re done, no matter how soon or far away that is, I hope that we can step back and listen with graciousness and humility as others enjoy the fruits of our labors. I pray for these things in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
Notes:
[1] Introduction to the Book of Mormon
[2] Isaiah 28:16-17
[3] Exodus 14:12
[4] Exodus 14:13
[5] 1 Samuel 3:1
[6] 1 Samuel 3:9
[7] David A. Bednar, “Be Still, and Know That I Am God,” Ensign or Liahona, April 2024, 31
[8] Ephesians 2:19
[9] Moroni 10:32
[10] Gerrit W. Gong, “Your Future Is Bright and Full of Promise” [Brigham Young University–Hawaii devotional, March 9, 2025] speeches.byuh.edu
[11] Alma 32:28