Tell her from this high terrain I am ready now to fall...
I was 23ish working the closing shift in a small bar & grill in Newport News, VA. While brushing cigarette ashes off the side rail of a pool table I held my breath in the game room and felt a sweep of devouring loneliness. Months earlier I had sufficiently derailed and destroyed an engagement with a perfectly normal wonderful man who loved me. It was a self-inflicted, self-absorbed binge of insecurity and unwillingness to mature emotionally. At the time I gave in deeply to selfishness and it cost me the companionship I longed for the most.
There was a song, that in the first moment I ever heard it, froze me in my tracks. It met me in my happiest and loneliest places simultaneously and spoke the words I hungered desperately to hear. A song that you can hear after years without a trace and begin to sing the chorus immediately.
Despising the duty of cleaning that game room off the main dining area in the restaurant I stopped to look at the songs on the jukebox one night. It was late and we were closing soon but the music hadn't been turned off and switched to the TV just yet. Like a needle coming off a record there it was, 'Tell Her This'.
Fast forward to right now. Almost 20 years later. I see the name of a music artist coming in concert and wonder if that's the one that sang that song. I was cruising my fb feed in search of news headlines. (I read news after the news about the news, and then the news itself. Follow me?) The name caught my attention and then I remembered how I froze in happiness and then tears when the chorus played long ago. I would erupt in the last few verses. Still do but for much different reasons now.
So, I searched the internet with a few lyrics because I couldn't remember the name of anything- song, artist, year- all blank. Thank you Google. As I hit play and listened it was the unearthing of a time capsule. Stop what you're doing, what just happened, where did you come from kind of time capsule. It was like pulling out one happy and then painful memory at a time. In layers. So I listened a second time, and then a third. The second round I thought of my daughters and how I hoped music moved them like this one day. (Not the sorrow or bad decisions, and yes I hope they love praise and worship music more, but being held in music when you needed it most and could not communicate otherwise.) Then the third round happened, and it hit me.
Flashback- I was so devastatingly lonely in that smoke-filled room years ago. Blinded. Brushing the ashes off the side of the pool table. Tired of the smoke. Tired of an empty room at home but unable to share it with anyone who truly cared about me. And, there was a break in patrons feeding the jukebox so I played my song while I cleaned. Like dancing with an invisible stranger loneliness draped it's arms on my shoulders, but so did the hope that one day someone would sing about me the way he did in THAT song.
Tonight, I found myself lying next to my forever husband. And God just sank into me. Speaking a whisper as the song played on my laptop and my husband softly snored on his side. "Remember how lonely, how lost, how broken you felt? I heard you." My face got hot and then my chest. "And when you gave me the reins...this great life you enjoy right now...this great love that you have today..." BOY did it sink in heavy right there- God kept whispering saying, "Summer here it is," as the wave of tears and an undeserving embrace of grace consumed me "I love you, I loved you the most, I love you the most. I always will."
Things changed all those years ago. Ups, downs, victories, failures but everything got better. I never understood the phrase 'beautifully broken' and why women especially would champion it like a banner. Really, what were they thinking?!? Then you add Jesus. In Jesus we are made whole so our brokenness is beautiful because our Father sees us as whole. Because of Jesus he only knows us as whole.
I was beautifully broken. Thank you Jesus.
https://youtu.be/NIiwQnJYhEU
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