Better than Life

Our new worship leader at church just introduced us to a great new song: Better than Life. We got to sing it this morning. It comes from Psalm 63:3 - "Because YOUR LOVE is better than life, my lips will glorify you." Have you sung it at your church yet? Just curious where it has reached. 

Fortunately, this was not the song during which the power to the whole sound system went out (though the overhead lights stayed on) and we had no more drums, bass, keyboard, or amplified voices...at least we still had acoustic guitar to keep the otherwise a cappella music in tune...Jason considered moving from the temporarily useless electric drum kit over to the unoccupied conga drums, but before the song was even over, David had figured out what had happened, taken the key downstairs, found the fuse box, reset THREE fuses that had blown, and gotten everything up and running again. It turned out that it was really cold in the kids' rooms, and people had plugged in too many space heaters and blown everything. I loved that we just kept singing, and the leader kept playing his guitar, and we started and ended with richer sound, but had the unexpected "unplugged" part in the middle, and it was just fine! Funny, though.

We had four Covenant Players staying at our house for three nights this week. Covenant Players' motto is "Drama is what we do." They travel around in close-knit units of 3-5 people, usually in a beat-up van, performing plays in prisons, schools, at military bases, in the street, or at churches (and in our living room when we're lucky, like yesterday). Their plays can be just a few sentences, or up to a three act play. They can be funny and serious at the same time, or poignant, and mostly leave you thinking afterwards about the deep implications for your life. They did two for us yesterday, one in German, and one in English. The anglo one centered around the word "hope" and how we use it; the difference between saying you hope something, and truly having hope. The one in German read profoundly between the lines about the relationship between prayer and love. The woman thought her husband didn't love her anymore because he didn't tell her so, and in fact didn't talk to her at all. At the same time, she said she was a Christian, but that she didn't really pray because there wasn't anything to say, she and God just loved each other.

Interesting. Stirring.

David and I met twenty years ago this month. I first laid eyes on his handsome face on the 24th of February of my freshman year in college, at Yale University in Connecticut, though neither of us attended Yale.

227 months ago we agreed it would be an excellent idea to begin dating each other exclusively, though he lived in Rhode Island, and I in Massachusetts.

928 weeks ago, we got engaged, and then missed our flight to Florida in the excitement. We did make it there later in the evening to share the news with his parents.

6,244 days ago, we married on a gloriously overcast, cold, snowy day, and I moved in to his apartment in New Hampshire, which became "ours."

A little over 134,000 hours ago, we became parents together in Illinois.

Six and a quarter million minutes ago, we added a little girl to our family, now four of us in California.

About 145 million seconds ago, we moved our family across a continent and an ocean to Europe, where we've been living ever since.

But that's pretty hard to make sense of, isn't it? Lucky you, you can make all your own nonsensical calculations.

All I know is that nothing compares to God's everpresent, all-encompassing love, except that David's love for me comes pretty close (allowing for his much more limited resources), and I intend to keep on talking to both of them with love as long as I have thoughts and breath. God's love is better than life, and David's love makes life better.

Posted via email from K's Café