The Bright Maidens topic of the month (you’d think as a Bright Maiden I’d be better about participating each month, but…I’m not) is: “Write about a non-Christian song, movie, or book that inspired you spiritually or revealed something about God to you!”
Normally something like this would be right up my alley. I’ve featured countless songs on the blog before – Christian and non-Christian, and yet when it came time to sit down and write I simply couldn’t pick a song. There were a lot of maybes but nothing jumped out, nothing said, “Pick me!” until I came across one of my more recent jams and listened to it with a different ear.
That’s right, Justin Timberlake caught my heart. “Not A Bad Thing” is a wonderful and catchy love song…that could also easily be about God’s desire for us. Take a listen.
Some of the lines I chuckle at thinking about God saying them to me. “And is it too much to ask for every Sunday?” Well, He gets my every Sunday in some sense, but how fully am I giving Him my heart? In the song Justin sings about letting him/Him borrow our hearts – do we let God borrow our hearts or do we hide them away? And while we are at it, is it really too much to ask for every Sunday to truly be His, to honor Him and love Him with the activities we do and don’t do on Sundays?
The truth is, as Justin sings, that people make promises all the time and then turn right around and break them. But God could be that ‘guy’ to heal it over time (He wants to!) and He won’t stop until we believe that He does want to heal us. So often we act like it is a bad thing to truly fall in love with God. We don’t need Him, we can’t or don’t want to be dependent on anything other than ourselves. We look around trying to make our dreams come true anywhere else. We spend our time and our money running after other lovers (see the book of Hosea) only to find out that His love is true.
God wants to be the last voice we hear at night (prayer!) and the first voice we hear in the morning (more prayer!). Starting and ending our day hearing His voice is a good place to start but God wants our whole hearts, our whole days to be centered on Him and His will for our lives.
The bridge is perhaps my favorite love line in this song and fits perfectly with the idea that God could be singing this song to us, “No I won’t fill your mind with broken promises and wasted time. And if you fall, you’ll always land right in these arms, these arms of Mine.” Fall. Land in these arms of His. After all, its not such a bad thing to fall in love with God, is it?
