I swore many years ago that I’d never make a music video. Back when my career began no one had ever dreamed of YouTube or Vimeo. If you wanted to watch a music video by a Christian artist you had to wait till the televangelists had gone to bed and the network couldn’t think of anything else to air, and so too few people would see it for the amount of money it would cost. But times have changed. Now people watch their computers as much as their televisions, and I figured a video like this might be good for somebody out there, even if they’re watching it at work when they’re supposed to be tweaking spreadsheets or something.
I sat in a little coffee shop in Nashville with Ben Shive and director Grant Howard to brainstorm, and in about thirty minutes I went from being wary of it to being excited about it. My only stipulation was that I wouldn’t have to dance, even though the song is about dancing. We had the idea to shoot the video in an old house that had weathered a century of storms, and to invite a few luminous older couples who had weathered storms of their own to dance around in that old house. We wanted to make something that, like the song, would celebrate marriage in all its terrible beauty. Below the video is the little blurb I wrote about the song for the record label.
Feel free to send the YouTube link to every human you know, as I’m pretty sure it’ll guarantee you a long, healthy life.
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https://youtube.com/watch?v=NtTa81LyuQM%26hl%3Den_US%26fs%3D1%3Frel%3D0
In December of 2009 my wife and I celebrated fifteen years of marriage. A few days later, we got in a silly argument and I wrote this song after she went to bed. Marriage, see, was God’s idea. It’s one of the most potent metaphors in all of Scripture for the way God loves us and the way we’re to let ourselves be loved by him. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. To the contrary, it’s fraught with peril. Any good marriage involves a thousand deaths to self—the good news is, in Christ that marriage involves at least as many resurrections. We lay our lives down and enter this perilous dance with another human being who has done the same. Why should we expect to emerge unscathed?
(In case you’re wondering, two of the couples are my in-laws and Ben’s in-laws, and the other two are from Andy Gullahorn’s church and Todd Bragg’s church (both teach marriage classes in Sunday School, from what I gathered.)