This is perhaps one of the hardest Jars songs to listen to, even harder to sing-- to recognize the willful rebellion, willful betrayal. For we'd all "rather feel the pain all too familiar
Than to be broken by a lover [we] don't understand."
There's something almost scandalous about love, how it disregards propriety and reason, and simply pursues the object. What is it that scares us from God's love, why do we "choose the gallows" even after tasting Life?
Personally, I find the heart of the (altogether deep) song in the last lines. The barriers, whether the need for intellectual justification of faith (the hardest struggle for me), the spectres that call us unworthy of this love, or simply the desire for self-sufficiency--- all crumble in the force of this unrelenting love. Emotions of worthlessness, the arguments for or against God are deemed insignificant in the face of Truth.
And so, I am "finally subject...to grace."
I love that image, that grace, so freely humbly offered in Jesus' death, commands my humility in response. Perhaps that is what I fear most, perhaps that's why I flee-- the idea of finding myself as a subject scares me. To be loved by anyone, most of all God, requires loss of control, requires acceptance of the strange, life-altering gifts he'd like to give us. Gifts like joy and peace, so foreign and rare that we've discounted them as illusions and settled for pursuing less.
But... he's still running after us. What if, this time, we stopped?
This is perhaps one of the hardest Jars songs to listen to, even harder to sing-- to recognize the willful rebellion, willful betrayal. For we'd all "rather feel the pain all too familiar Than to be broken by a lover [we] don't understand."
There's something almost scandalous about love, how it disregards propriety and reason, and simply pursues the object. What is it that scares us from God's love, why do we "choose the gallows" even after tasting Life?
Personally, I find the heart of the (altogether deep) song in the last lines. The barriers, whether the need for intellectual justification of faith (the hardest struggle for me), the spectres that call us unworthy of this love, or simply the desire for self-sufficiency--- all crumble in the force of this unrelenting love. Emotions of worthlessness, the arguments for or against God are deemed insignificant in the face of Truth.
And so, I am "finally subject...to grace."
I love that image, that grace, so freely humbly offered in Jesus' death, commands my humility in response. Perhaps that is what I fear most, perhaps that's why I flee-- the idea of finding myself as a subject scares me. To be loved by anyone, most of all God, requires loss of control, requires acceptance of the strange, life-altering gifts he'd like to give us. Gifts like joy and peace, so foreign and rare that we've discounted them as illusions and settled for pursuing less.
But... he's still running after us. What if, this time, we stopped?