An Hour Somewhere Between Then and Now

Sometimes the songs we grew up with wait for us to live long enough to understand them.

I do not get away from my desk much these days. There always seems to be something happening, someone needing something, or another problem waiting for me. But for some reason, I needed to get out of the office for a while and stretch my legs.

I drove over to a fast-food restaurant, went through the drive-thru, then came back and parked at the far end of our parking lot. I was far enough away from the front office that I could not see much of the normal insanity. No reminder of what was sitting on my desk. Just an hour where I could eat lunch alone and be somewhere else without actually going anywhere.

I opened the music streaming app on my phone and started one of the stations it recommended.

Then the music started.

The first song was familiar. Then another came on that I had not heard in years. Then another. Every time one ended, the next one seemed even better than the one before it. These were songs from when I was growing up, songs I had heard on the radio, at home, in the car, and probably hundreds of times without giving them much thought.

At some point, I decided I needed to make a playlist and started taking screenshots because I could not believe the run of songs I was getting. It felt like someone had reached back into the radio stations of my childhood and built a playlist just for that hour.

I knew every song within the first few notes. Some of them I had not heard in decades, but the melodies were still somewhere in me. Lyrics I had not thought about in years came back before the singer even sang a word.

What surprised me more was how different they sounded.

But it was not the songs that had changed. I had.

When I was young, I loved music. I listened and sang along without really understanding what the singer was singing about. There were songs about love, marriage, friendship, loneliness, staying together, growing older, and wishing life had turned out differently. I understood the words, but as a child, I just did not have enough life behind me to understand what they meant.

Now, sitting in my truck eating lunch, I had enough life behind me to understand a little more of what those songs were really saying.

A kid can sing a song about loving someone forever, but forever is hard to understand when you have only been alive for a few years. You can hear someone sing about staying beside another person without knowing what it means to choose that person through ordinary mornings, difficult times, mistakes, forgiveness, laughter, worry, and years of life together.

You can sing about losing someone before you have really lost anyone. You can sing about friendship before you learn how rare a true friend can be. You can hear words about regret before you have enough experience behind you to wish you had done a few things differently.

Now those songs have faces.

They make me think about my wife and son. They make me think about friends who have stayed and friends who are no longer here. They make me remember places I have lived, things I have gotten wrong, things I am grateful I got right, and a life that turned out very differently from anything I could have imagined when I first heard those songs.

Maybe that is why this caught me the way it did.

Somewhere during that hour, I found myself thinking about Saint Paul and his words about love in First Corinthians. Right in the middle of the chapter where Paul tells us what love looks like, he says, “When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child.” (1 Corinthians 13:11)

He goes on to describe becoming a man and leaving behind the understanding of childhood. Sitting there listening to songs from my childhood, that line from Paul made sense to me in a new way.

Growing older does not mean everything we loved as children becomes childish. Sometimes growing older finally gives us the ability to understand what was there all along. Maybe love is like that. As a boy, love was mostly something I heard about. As a man, I have had to live it.

I have learned that love can be romantic, but it also takes out the trash. It sits beside someone when life hurts. It apologizes. It forgives. It worries about bills. It waits in hospital rooms. It shows up when it would be easier to stay home. It laughs over things nobody else would understand. It says I love you on ordinary days when there is no anniversary, birthday, or reason to say it other than the fact that it is true.

And even after all these years, I am still learning what love is.

That made me think about my faith too. We hear Scripture when we are young. We learn the prayers. We memorize words at Mass. We hear Jesus talk about mercy, sacrifice, forgiveness, trust, and love. We can know every word and still have more to understand.

Then life happens.

You need mercy yourself, and suddenly mercy means something different. Someone hurts you, and Christ’s command to forgive is no longer an idea. You become a parent and begin to understand something about the love of a father. You stand beside someone through a difficult season and realize that love is sometimes less about what you feel and more about the decision to stay.

God’s Word does not change as any of that happens.

We do.

Maybe that is part of the gift of growing older. We keep returning to words we already know with more life behind us. Scripture, prayers, wedding vows, advice our parents gave us, and even old songs can meet us differently because we are no longer the same people who first heard them.

By the time my lunch hour was nearly over, I had gone through more memories than I expected when I drove to the back of the parking lot. I pulled my truck toward the front of the office and shut off the music app, but before I went back inside, there were a couple of songs I wanted to hear one more time.

They had made me think about my wife.

So, I looked them up on a video app and sent them to her. I did not write anything profound. I just wanted her to know that I was thinking about her and that I loved her.

That may have been the clearest difference between hearing those songs as a boy and hearing them now.

Back then, I could sing every word.

Now they made me reach for the woman I love.

I sat there another minute before going inside. Somewhere during that strange little trip through my childhood, a few tears had started welling up. They were not sad tears. I was thinking about how much life had happened between the first time I heard those songs and where my heart is now.

There had been good years and hard ones. Friends had come and gone. I had made mistakes. I had asked for forgiveness. I had become a husband and father. God had carried me through things that the kid listening to those songs could never have imagined.

For an hour, I had been somewhere between that kid who knew the songs and the man sitting in the truck now.

Then lunch was over.

I dried my eyes and walked toward the office door, dabbing away the last of the tears and hoping nobody would notice that I had apparently spent my lunch crying in the parking lot. The same desk was waiting for me. The same work was waiting. Nothing outside the truck had really changed.

Maybe you have songs like that too. Songs you knew long before you knew what they meant. Songs that can still take you back to a bedroom, a car, a school dance, your parents’ house, or some other place that has not existed the same way in years.

Maybe someday one of them will find you again.

When it does, let it play. Listen not only for who you were when you first heard it, but for everything God has allowed you to live since then.

The words may be exactly the same.

You won’t be.