I admit it. I recently wept after hearing a favorite Christmas song.
It’s a mystery to me how music can move my soul, how it can transform my mindset, and bring back a memory as strongly as a photograph.
When a friend recently told me about research around Alzheimer’s and the difference music can make, I was especially intrigued. In a documentary about Music and Memory, you could see an elderly gentleman with Alzheimer’s literally come to life listening to gospel music from his youth. The man, Henry, had been in a nursing home for 10 years and was nearly unresponsive, always staring down at his hands. But after listening to music, his eyes widened, he looked up and talked intelligibly about some of his favorite songs.
It was like watching someone literally move from death to life.
Isn’t that our story too, when we find the Gospel, when we decide to give our lives to Christ? We are no longer dead, just looking down at our empty hands. Our eyes widen to life and begin to see all the joy and peace and love we have in our Father.
Music reminds me of how extravagant that love is.
Why did God give us music? It seems to have no practical purpose. It won’t make a row of corn grow, sew our clothes or build houses.
Yet, it fills our lives with something so powerful and beautiful and unexplainable. Truly … try to explain music to someone! Yes, you can talk about notes or composition, but you can’t really deconstruct its harmony, its soaring melodies, its haunting dissonance.
Sometimes, I think God gave us music and art, to give us a glimpse of heaven, to remind us that this world is not our home. There’s something so other-wordly and inspiring about it. Something that stirs our hearts and makes us long for heaven.
I love the end of C.S. Lewis’ children’s story “The Magician’s Nephew” as it gives us a picture of God creating the world. The God figure in the story, the lion Aslan, sings the world into being.
In reading a Christmas book with my family, I was reminded that in Genesis 1, the Creation story, we hear God create everything with His words, “Let there be….”
But when it came to man, God said, “Let us make mankind in our image…”
Let US. The Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, altogether, from the beginning, came together to make us in the image of God. A harmony.
Author Ann Voskamp explains it this way, “You alone were formed by a huddle of hearts…The authority of God made all of creation. But it was the affection of God that made all his children.”
God breathed into the dust and formed us. He did more than speak, He breathed on us. That sounds like music to me.
As you listen to your favorite song this Christmas season — or any season — be reminded of that miracle, of the unexplainable, unfathomable, unfailing love of God for you. In every feather of a blue bird, every blossom of an amaryllis, every note of soaring song, begin to let the extravagant love of God fill your heart.
— Donna Dunn