Music, You Are A Friend To Me

Music moves me.  I used to write out the lyrics of songs.  I didn’t write much else – no diaries, no journals.  Just spiral notebooks with song lyrics to all of my favorite songs.  I remember listening intently to the cassette tape, pressing pause, writing it out and once I wrote those lyrics – I remembered them!  Add to that watching the actual music videos on MTV and VH1 – ahhh those were the days of all videos and no reality TV shows!

Recently, we took a trip for July 4th weekend.  The drive was six hours.  My husband was in charge of the radio.  Typically I just want to hear recent pop music or Christian – because anything else takes me back.  I braved it this time.  A song would play, and I would say the year or age and whatever I thought of when that song came on.  It almost became crazy to me because I would literally connect songs with events, places, people…memories.  Some of them were good and made me smile.  Others, harder.

What I thought about on this trip is how when I could say nothing, I could sing.  I could speak lyrics and sing songs and say words that helped me to make sense of my world.  Those notebooks whispered their secrets to me, and I sang my secrets back to them.  We were connecting.  Music and I.  It was a gift.  It was comfort and companionship in a lonely space.   Thank you Lord.  Music – a marvelous outlet.

My music preferences have changed quite a bit over the last year.  My most recent playlists have songs with an edgy beat, harder, rock…. like Radioactive by Imagine Dragons, and Light Em Up! by the Fall Out Boys.   Pandora stays on Jesus Culture Radio.

Music helped make sense of the madness.   Music gave me words to speak, over and over.  Music gave me things to think about.  Music helped me to be brave.

Dreams.  This was my dream on Tuesday Night:  I was driving back to the house I grew up in.  About a mile before you get to the house there is a fork in the road.  You would stay to the left to get to the house.  There is a cornfield in between, but just as I go to the left I see a marvelous pink sky on the road to the right.  I decide I want to turn around and take the road to the right and see that pink sky, but suddenly I realize there is no more road.   The front right side of my car is hitting corn and the front left is in someones front yard.  The paved road is gone.  I try turning around to take the the other road, but I am tearing up the yard because I keep getting stuck.  When I finally get out and I get to the road on the right….the pink sky is gone.

I wake up humming a song.  I am singing “Music, you are a friend to me…”  What is that song?  I didn’t recognize it right away.  Then I remembered – piano?  Did I play that on the piano? Yes, and my piano teacher was also my Youth Minister at church.  She gave me that song.  I googled the lyrics.  Tears.  Sweet tears.

I ran downstairs and opened the piano bench, but could not find it.  I was devastated.  This morning my husband went into the attic and brought a stack of my piano books to work today.  I could not believe it.

Music, you are and you were a friend to me.  

Thank you Jesus.