“Two People Fell in Love” by Brad Paisley
— Friday, March 11th, 2011 —
Last week while traveling in my homeland of south Mississippi, I stopped off on my college campus, to look around at the old place and reminisce. A lot has changed since then. They’re tearing down my old dorm, and they’ve built a lot of impressive new buildings. But the classroom where I took biology is still the same. I walked into it and looked at the desk where I sat in 1992, where I made a decision.
In that class, that day, I decided to pursue a high school senior girl (I was only two years older, so it’s not as creepy as it sounds). I wrote a note, right there in that desk, and my entire life has been shaped by that five minute decision to ask my now-wife Maria if she’d go out with me.
I think about the seeming randomness of that decision a lot when I hear this song, Brad Paisley’s “Two People Fell in Love.” Today on “The Cross and the Jukebox,” we’ll listen to Brad sing and then look at God’s providence and how the little details are part of a big story.
There are many little decisions that we make it life that we are either unqualified to make or do not realize the enormity of where that decision will take us. I feel the same about my wife. I’m not sure I knew what I was doing the first time I asked her out (I was younger, only eighteen at the time), but it was a great decision and I see God’s hand in it. She is His gift to me.
Yet another gem for the Cross and the Jukebox. I love to hear people’s stories and the incredibly interesting ways that God will bring people to himself and work in and through their lives.
I’m glad to have a new episode this week. Thanks for being back.
I believe Dr. Moore also touched on some of the poorer “random” decisions folks make, which have also changed the direction of their lives, even when not necessarily premeditated. In that regard, I’ve made a handful of those.
Also, as I was married just shy of 40, that played a role in how God built our family, as we had one child biologically and one via international adoption. Never would I have imagined being head of a multiracial family, but here I am! How unsearchable are His ways, His paths beyond tracing out!
Great memories.
Just today, I walked my daughter through her new school. As it was the high school I attended, I thought I’d “show her the ropes”. I was lost the moment I entered. So much has changed. Yet here and there I saw reminders of a time that still seems like yesterday. Time is strange. Memories seem very near and very distant all at once. I was thinking back to that young schmuck I was. I’m sure he never considered walking his daughter through those halls. To him it would have been decades in the future. To me, today, it seems the blink of an eye. Carpe diem!
The song is a little maudlin yet enjoyable, although when I hear those lyrics about “all because two people fell in love”, I’m reminded of a certain direct member of my family tree, several generations up, who came about as a result not of two people in love but rather via a criminal assault. To me, it’s a testament of God’s love that even with a darker branch of family history with numerous non-believers that, generations later, Christ lovingly chose to draw me.