“If you could read my mind,love…. what a tale my thoughts would tell….”

I learned the song years ago as I tried to pick ‘n sing Gordon Lightfoot’s beautiful melody in a manner that never did him justice, but hey, the people around me joined in anyway.

The tune’s  a song of love lost and a longing to regain a reality that seems to have slipped away forever.

I never thought I could act this way
and I’ve got to say that I just don’t get it.
I don’t know where we went wrong
but the feelings gone and I just can’t get it back.

If you could read my mind love,
what a tale my thoughts could tell.
Just like an old time movie about a ghost from a wishing well.
In a castle dark or a fortress strong
with chains upon my feet the story always ends.
And if you read between the lines
you’ll know that I’m just trying to understand
the feeling that you left.

As is the case with many songs, they capture a universal theme and longing that resonates in our hearts and articulates inner emotions we couldn’t find words for. The depressing conclusion that most attempts at love end in a dungeon ‘with chains upon my feet’ is far too frequently a bitter truth. If we can’t find a dungeon we fabricate and customize our own with lifestyles, depression, addictions, or for the more sophisticated – work, possessions and all kinds of ‘fun’ … even religion or church!

And if you read between the lines
you’ll know that I’m just trying to understand…

Aren’t we all?

It’s the space between the lines, what we cannot see, and what is not spoken, where so much truth resides in quiet anticipation of discovery. Jesus walks in those places and like the consummate songwriter and ‘word’ that he is – reads our minds and hearts, unlocks the chains, and blows dungeons apart.  He understands that authentic love and acceptance is the cry of every heart and the song of all songs. It’s a love that’s impossible to sustain in human form, altho’ skin on bones is never brushed aside as irrelevant in the eyes of God. He never intended Adam to live without Eve or vice versa; but neither was the plan for them to be ‘enough for one another’. Human love was/is incomplete when divorced from it’s source arising from the heart of God the Father.

If we could read God’s mind what a tale his thoughts would tell.

He desperately tried to convey some of those thoughts through the person of Jesus – the ultimate Valentine message from ‘between the lines’ into full view for all to see and receive. His love is the key to freedom and the foundation for every relationship… and to ‘getting the feeling back’.