The Boy Who Copied Music by Moonlight

Johann Sebastian Bach was ten years old and newly orphaned when his older brother Johann Christoph took him in at Ohrdruf in 1695. The brother kept a cabinet of advanced musical manuscripts locked away — too complex, he thought, for a child. But night after night, young Johann Sebastian crept from his bed, slipped the pages through the latticed cabinet door, and copied them by moonlight, note by painstaking note.

He could not have explained what drew him. He only knew that something in those compositions called to him — a voice within the music he did not yet have the training to fully understand. For six months he copied in secret, straining his young eyes in the dark, pulled by a force he could only obey.

His brother eventually discovered the copies and confiscated them. But the music had already taken root. What Johann Sebastian had been hearing in those midnight hours would grow into some of the most magnificent sacred music the world has ever known — music he would later inscribe with the letters S.D.G., Soli Deo Gloria, "To God alone be the glory."

Young Samuel heard a voice three times in the darkness of the temple before Eli helped him understand who was speaking. Sometimes God's call comes before we have the language to name it. It stirs in us like music we cannot yet read — persistent, beautiful, and unmistakably real. The only faithful response is the one Samuel finally offered: "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening."