Write This Down

I often begin my day with some fitness exercises. While I exercise, I usually am tuned in to Pandora, the online music station that plays “your favorite music.” I have eclectic interests in music—from religious to Broadway musicals, from ballads to barbershop quartet, and from the Carpenters to Johnny Mathis. Pandora takes my expressed preferences and regularly tests those interests by proposing other similar styles that might be of interest to me.

Although I lived in Nashville for 25 years, I am not a great fan of country music; but Pandora continues to push my interest in ballads in the direction of Country and Western. Some of their suggestions I like; some I do not. The problem is this. Whenever I don’t like a song for whatever reason, I have to stop in the midst of my exercises and go to my computer to click on the “thumbs down” button. Frequently I just let it pass rather than interrupting my exercise routine.

Today was one of those days. Pandora introduced me to George Strait singing “Write This Down,” a country song written by Dan Hunt and Kent B. Robbins. My first inclination was to “thumbs down” this one, but I let it play as I continued my exercises. I’m glad I did, because I surprisingly found some significant religious themes in the song.

When Strait began to sing, “You can find a chisel; I can find a stone. Folks will be reading these words long after we’re gone,” my first thought was of Moses and his tablets of stone. And while Moses was receiving the Torah, the nation was constructing a golden calf. That seemed especially poignant because the words being written on the stone in George Strait's song were: “I love you, and I don’t want you to go.” Suddenly I was reminded that this is the fundamental core message of the Bible. God is saying, “I love you. I don’t want you to leave me or forsake me. I’ve written these words of Scripture to (in Strait’s words) ‘tell yourself I love you and I don’t want you to go. Write this down. Take my words. Read ’em every day. Keep ’em close but don’t let ‘em fade away. So you’ll remember . . . .” Then in the spirit of Deuteronomy 6:7-9, the song continues: “So use it as a bookmark. Stick it on your frigerator door. Hang it in a picture frame up on the mantel where you’ll see it for sure.”

So, write this down: “God loves me and wants me to stay close.” The reminders were written in stone on tablets and painted with blood on a cross. I need the reminders every day. I need to keep those words close and not let them fade away.

So write this down today, literally and figuratively: “God loves me and want me to stay close today—and every day.”