the Answer and the Promise

All over the quiet plains, beneath the snow on the high mountains, rustling through the cattails that congregate along the water, you can feel the presence of a promise. On cold nights when you look at the sky, sometimes your breath catches in your throat at how bright the night can be. The dark spaces between the stars aren’t as dark as you thought they were; not nearly as dark as the tree line on the horizon, and as you stand there shivering with your hands bunched in your pockets suddenly you remember that you’re standing on a rock in the middle of space. Suddenly the notion that there’s a Someone who made it all and knows us all no longer seems quite so far-fetched; indeed, it seems too good to be false.

But here we toil and we till the hard earth, where even the warm times with friend and kin are lonely because we know they won’t last long enough to quiet the ache. Our sadness points to Home the way hunger points to the feast, the way the light of the cratered moon is always facing the sun, always pointing to where the dawn will come like a pillar of fire when this rock we walk on turns again to burning day. All over the quiet plains and the cold stone cities full of dying and shame the promise is not drowned out by the weeping; it is declared by it.

God died as a man and rose again, and the sound of the fiery blast of Death exploding shook the firmament. Throughout the wail and shudder, over the shriek and moan of man the thunder has sounded and sung, and it is both the answer and the promise. It sings still, and you can hear what it says if you listen: Love never fails.

~Andrew Peterson, liner notes from Love and Thunder