There’s a line from a Karine Polwart song which goes “you put me back together again, just when I thought I was broken forever, so broken that nothing in this earth could mend me, you put me back together again.” Like many song lyrics which contain that word ‘you’ my soul hears the divine and for many years I’ve claimed that lyric for the work God seems to do deep in my soul to mend and restore me. I don’t think Karine is talking about the divine here but it’s an excellent short cut to finding words for the healing work God has done so many times in bringing me back to sanity and to strength and peace at the core of who I am. 

This year has been one of massive identity shifts. I have felt battered by the waves of change, the new situations, the loss of the old, the grief over the huge shifts in my day to day life. I have needed this sense of being put back together over and over again as I have dived into despair, into fear and into anxiety about the future. It’s really only ever this sense of the divine at work deep within which brings me back to solid ground, to the bedrock, to the finding of the bottom and discovering at the bottom of everything is a love which will not let me go. 

But this isn’t really about that discovery, 

This is about another evening of finding my soul pieces being put back together again. An evening of remembering that I remain Kath through all of the circumstances and ups and downs of life. An evening of hearing songs I have heard from my teenage years, through my 20s and 30s, through getting married, becoming a parent, changing churches, training as a Spiritual Director, and now through moving countries. It’s good to have the songs which stick around, which aren’t dependant on the times and seasons you are living in right now but which have carried you through all the times and seasons. 

Yes, if you know me at all, you’ll know I’ve been to another Martyn Joseph gig. Hearing him live in Belfast, in the country I live in, singing to my soul in this context I find myself, was deeply healing. I remembered the other times of massive change his songs bore me through and I felt the gentle call that I’m ok here, that things will be alright, that despite everything hard there is a bottom line of love, that in the midst of despair there is hope, that this golden thread of music will carry on enabling me to walk on through this life. 

I think I’m pretty fortunate to find someone who so perfectly expresses so much of my inner world, who knows the melancholy and yet sings so sweetly into the darkness to lighten the way. I am grateful for the smile on my face this morning and the firm ground I have found again in my heart.