Beautiful Things

A year and a half ago, at a service at MPPC, I heard a song that made me cry. It was played as background music to a video then. I have completely forgotten the video, but the song is burned into my mind. I remembered it in fall 2011 and looked up the lyric snippet I remembered: "You make beautiful things / out of the dust."

And I found it, and cried again. It was a hard moment in our marriage, and it took hope and faith for me to sing along. Things were not as I had imagined they would be, and I couldn't see a way forward. This song was my cry of pain and my cry of trust.

I bought the whole album by Gungor: "Beautiful Things," the song and the album are called.

 This past Sunday, O. and I were at MPPC together, and what song should the worship leaders close the service with but "Beautiful Things"? My heart was quiet as I listened and joyful as I sang along. Things are so different now than they were when I first discovered this song; things are so much better. God has been faithful and he has made beautiful things in O.'s and my relationship. Our marriage will be a beautiful thing someday, and indeed it is already, and if it ever crumbles to dust, I will still trust that Christ will remake it into a beautiful thing, and make it new--make us new. Make me new.

Welcome, 2013. Come, Emmanuel.

Wassail

On Christmas day, my family was singing "Here we come a-caroling," and the lyrics I remembered did not match the words in our songbooks. I remembered a version from a long-ago video featuring Peter Rabbit and other Beatrix Potter characters in a cozy village, in which the carolers sang, "Love and joy come to you, and to you your wassail too."

"What the heck is a wassail?" S. responded.

We had to look it up. Wikipedia provides the following:

Wassail (Old English wæs hæl, literally 'be you healthy') refers both to the salute 'Waes Hail' and to the drink of wassail, a hot mulled cider traditionally drunk as an integral part of wassailing, an ancient southern English drinking ritual intended to ensure a good cider apple harvest the following year.

Good to know!

And to top it off, we discovered this fantastical song in one of our less explored caroling books:

Wassail, wassail, all over the town,
Our bread it is white, and our ale it is brown;
Our bowl it is made of the maplin tree,
So here, my good fellow, I'll drink to thee. 

The wassailing bowl, with a toast within,
Come, fill it up unto the brim;
Come, fill it up, that we may see:
With the wassailing bowl I'll drink to thee. 

Come, butler, come bring us a bowl of your best;
And we hope your soul in heaven shall rest;
But if you do bring us a bowl of your small,
Then down shall go butler, the bowl and all.

This page lists five more verses but our version ended after v.3's threat of sending the stingy butler down to hell! They don't make Christmas carols like they used to...

Songs

Friday's question at Ten Thousand Questions:

In your memories, what song is inextricably tied to a particular group of people or an activity that you participated in years ago?

This song by Death Cab for Cutie:

--and this song (and every other by Postal Service), reminding me of a boy years ago who was so proud of his musical tastes, telling me he liked Postal Service and indie bands and hated pop, telling me he felt so vindicated when he visited a friend at Berklee and found the music students all liked the same music he did:

He quoted from the first song to me--

Sorrow drips into your heart
from a pinhole
just like a faucet that leaks
and there is comfort in the sound

--and I said I didn't understand. How could sorrow be comforting? It can get addictive, he said. I was eighteen, and innocent. That was February. At the end of May, with regret and shame leaking through pinholes into me, I understood.

That summer, interning in children's ministries at my church at home, I cried on the stairs before work, after the worship services before putting on a costume to lead Sunday school, at home on my bed when my sister wasn't in the room. In the fall, back at school where I might run into him, I stared around me into the shifting crowds, hoping for and dreading a glimpse of him. Every navy-blue jacket, every tall slumped dark-haired figure--I would stare, blink, run away.

Listening to those songs, I am right back there sitting in the cafeteria with him as he mocks me over pizza and makes innuendos that I am unwilling to understand. I am back under the low ceiling in the other room of the cafeteria as he tells me he never talks about his relationship with his mother, how she's an actress and so dramatic. I am back in my darkened dorm room reading his instant messages on a glowing screen.

I wonder if he is still as sad and mistrustful as he was in those days. It is four and a half years later and the songs he listened to still fill me with melancholy. When I hear Postal Service I pray for change in his life. I hope it has come.

As for me, I am happy and grateful where I am now, as I was then before I met him, and I never seek out Postal Service.

Restless

I love this song:


This is the place I am. Restless, restless, unsure of my path, unsure of where I'm running. Why? I keep wondering. Switchfoot tells me what I should know of myself: "I'm looking for You."