Songs I Cannot Sing (Volume 4): You Were Mine

Day 112 (Written Monday April 2) ~ Recently we visited the church where I preached when I was in preaching school. The Arlington Church of Christ was my first official job as a preacher. I was there for one year, and had it not been for the opportunity to move back home, we would have stayed there. It was the first church to put my name on the sign as “minister.” I grew up in a congregation of over 400 members, but Arlington was at the time a small (90 people on Sunday morning) family church. We loved it. Going back for a visit was such a blessing to our hearts. When we were there originally, the boys were 3 and 1 years old. One of the ladies who taught Reese in Bible class told me a story recently. She said she was going around the room asking each child what song they wanted to sing in Bible class that morning. There were the usual requests, “Jesus Loves Me”, “Jesus Loves The Little Children”, “This Little Light Of Mine” and then she turned to my son Reese, who proudly stated, “I want to sing the Dixie Chicks!” That little dude loved the Dixie Chicks. I remember when they first came out we bought their tape and wore it out while traveling around preaching. I can still hear him singing “There’s Your Trouble” at the top of his lungs in the backseat of our Plymouth Voyager mini-van.
That story got me to thinking about those days and those songs. I pretty much loved every song on that album myself, but there was one that stood out above all the others. It always struck a nerve with me and had one particular line in it that made it virtually impossible for me to sing. The song was called “You Were Mine.
I haven’t heard, or even thought of that song in probably ten years, but just singing it in my head today brought tears to my eyes. The song itself is about a family that is falling apart due to a husband leaving his wife and kids for another woman, and is written from the perspective of his wife. The chorus is pretty sad, “Sometimes I wake up crying at night, and sometimes I scream out your name, what right does she have to take your heart away, when for so long you were mine”, but that’s not the part that really gets me. Let me preface this by saying I’ve never experienced the circumstances described in this song, but the very end of the song mentions the impact on their children and I can relate to children being hurt by bad decisions. At the very end of the song are these lyrics, “I can give you two good reasons to show you love’s not blind, he’s two and she’s four, and you know they adore you, so how can I tell them you’ve changed your mind?” It’s those last lyrics that kick me in the gut. Having looked into the eyes of far too many children who have experienced this, it breaks my heart every time. When this song came out I had two little ones, ages two and four, so it was a little too close to home.