I was sixteen when
Going Public was released, though I remember being a bit older -- seventeen or eighteen -- when listening to it, sitting in my car with my brother, conversation going silent as the bass began to play...
I have always felt that "Elle G." is an example of music crafted to its finest:
Music, lyrics, the pain inherent in both.
I know that I led a blessed, charmed life. While friends of friends were hurt or hurting themselves, my closest friends remained safe, as did my blessed, charmed life.
That doesn't mean I can't appreciate the grief portrayed, even back then, before sickness began stalking my family. Before I became a wife and mother and began having visions of every trauma that could befall my babies. Before my cousin's wife took her life. Before cancer and miscarriages and, you know, adulthood.
Isn't it a magnificent comfort, knowing that our God not only sees and hears our weeping, but that He weeps with us through the darkest hour and then brings joy with the morning? Through the smaller stresses of day-to-day living and in the deepest well of grief, He holds us in the palm of his hand.
His is a Magnificent Love, is it not?
