These are the things I will trust ...

Songs seem to have their moments in my life, and now is one of the moments for this song (which I have mentioned before). Maybe it’s the NF in my personality, but certain things get tied up with meaning and symbolism in my mind, and stay that way. When I was a teenager I learnt The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy (the first poem I ever posted on this blog), just by reading it over and over, and I can still recite it. It is about a thrush, which illuminates the 'growing gloom' with the 'ecstatic sound' of its song of 'joy illimited'. Then I read the poem Red Bird, by Mary Oliver, about a red bird that comes 'firing up the landscape' in the dead of winter. And then I listed to this song by Sara Groves, about a cardinal bird, which happens to be red and sing beautifully, that arrives to sing outside the window.

So now, even though I have never seen a living cardinal (they live in the Northern Hemisphere) they have come to symbolise a kind of  “hope” to me, and a trust in the loving sovereignty of God.

Then I get subjectively sentimental, to the point that my Mum was going through the Christmas things when I was up there last Christmas, and she asked me if I wanted one particular decoration, and when I looked at it featured cardinals, so I snatched it up for no other reason.

It’s a shame this is the only video on youtube, because the end is cut off, but it’s nice. There are things in my life that don’t make any sense to me right now, but this song is just about trusting that, when we can’t see very far, God knows exactly what is happening, and his “wisdom is my perfect peace”, as that other song says.