One Flesh

Track twelve is a husband and wife duet, and it is the most intimate song on the album - but notice how it handles intimacy. It does not describe. It frames. One Flesh takes the marriage bed and reads it the way the whole album reads everything: as a rendering of something eternal.

The husband sings, when I reach for you in the dark, I am not beginning anything. I am continuing what the Author wrote before the foundation of the world. The wife sings the same truth back, I am not giving you something new, I am giving you the thing the Author gave before the first frame of the filmstrip moved. That is the framework again, and it changes everything it touches. Marital intimacy is not a contract being executed and it is not an appetite being met. It is a thought the Lord thinks, rendered in our hands, in our eyes.

And the song tells you what the rendering is a rendering of. A rendering of Christ and His bride. That is what marriage was always for - to be a living picture, in two ordinary people, of the love between the Savior and His church. What God has joined, the grave cannot divide. The covenant keeps past the morning, past the years, past the seam where the body fails. This is intimacy sung reverently, kept between the lines on purpose, because the point is never the bodies. The point is the Love older than the two of them that had them both before they ever had each other.