Singing the Same Song

dreams of marriage and love songs

Last week, Randy and I were cleaning out the storage room, and we found a bin of old letters and notebooks that we knew we didn’t have time to read. One small composition book with Randy’s handwriting on the cover rose to the surface, and I peeked because I didn’t remember ever seeing it before. There were entries dated 1998, the year before we met. I didn’t mean to read it, because you really shouldn’t read other people’s journals, but my eyes fell on a passage where he was describing a recent dream. It was after a time of deep sadness and loneliness in his own life, and he had a dream that he met his future wife. She was turned away from him, so he couldn’t see her face, but he could hear her singing. As he moved closer and closer to her, he began to recognize that the melody she was singing was the same song of his own heart. He saw her, they embraced, and their voices joined together, singing in perfect unison.

Our love story is unconventional. The day I met Randy, I was 17 years old, and he was 31. I had been invited to sing as the opening act for Randy’s band. It was the first time I had gathered up enough courage to sing a song I wrote for strangers. Randy had lived the life of a musician for a decade, and he had been everywhere and seen everything. When I was getting out of the car with my guitar, he walked over and asked if I was singing. I said yes, and he said he’d written a song that had a girl’s echo part, and asked if I would sing it with him. Within five minutes of our first hello, we were sitting around the back side of the gym, singing The Lord’s Prayer together. And so the song began.

We have been married twenty years. I think the picture in the dream gets to the heart of marriage: two people who are trying to sing the same original song, learning it as they go. In unison, or in perfect harmony—something beautiful and holy, the only song of its kind.

The music that flows out of this love is unlike any we could have imagined at the start. We never knew how our voices would change, or that we would have a children’s choir to accompany us one day. And yet here we are, still singing, still trying to tune our lives to one another, still learning what two become one means.

Oh God, give us the grace to sing the song you planted in our hearts. To let love grow into the song you created us to sing.

(This is an old photo of Randy and me circa 2006 playing the first love song Randy ever wrote me, called All of My Words Escape Me.)

Dear friends,

Thanks so much for reading these weekly letters. It means so much to me. I want to share a new song with you that is really special to me, because it is a love song that Randy wrote a few weeks ago. It’s called Stay. I hope you like it.

We have been through many seasons in our marriage, but I can truly say that the love of God is surprising, and that He is teaching us, even after twenty years of marriage, new ways to love one another. This song will always be a reminder to me of the work God is doing in our lives. And I can’t tell you what it means to me to hear my 10-year-old son walking around the kitchen, humming a love song that his dad wrote to his mom. I am thankful for the redeeming grace of God, and for the forgiveness that he gives us so that we can forgive and be forgiven and love can blossom into beautiful song.

Sending love and turning leaves,

Mackenzie

From the Podcast:

Posted a few days before our twentieth anniversary, here are some more thoughts about marriage and growing in love.