Jesus to a Child

I forget sometimes how evocative music can be. 

This song made me remember.

I was driving down the road hitting the advance button on my iPod over and over again while thinking "WHY DOES EVERY SONG I OWN SUCK SO BAD!!!"  (Just a side note here... people trying to play an iPod while driving are much more dangerous than drunk drivers or people trying to text and drive.  Some compassionate lawmaker should consider addressing this situation.) 

So after hitting that button forty seven times, I heard the first strains of this song comes through and almost had to pull over.   Countless shuffles and this song had never come up.  (Thanks iTunes!) Hearing it reminded me  vividly of the first time I heard it in 1996. It was raining.   I was sitting in my car wondering where it all gone wrong.   I was only 23 years old so I had no idea how wrong things would go from even there but at the time I only knew that it was really, really wrong right then.  I had made a series of terrible decisions (why does that sentence come up so often when retelling my life story?) and I was living out  the consequences of said decisions.   And I was regretting just about everything from high school graduation on.  

I heard this song and I thought George Michael was singing specifically to me.  (I found out later he was actually singing to his dead boyfriend.  Who knew?) The song really had nothing to do with the situation I was in but there was something so haunting and beautiful about it. It gave me hope that love like that could exist and that if I could ever get out of the mess I was in that I might someday find it. 

And I did.  

Just ten years and three kids later.