Songs for the Easter Season: “Come Back Soon”

The Internet in general, and social media in particular, thrives on currency. Posts get greater exposure when they relate to current events. It seems that the news cycle keeps getting shorter.

My blog doesn’t get a lot of my time or attention. That will be apparent to anyone who visits. I’m grateful that it is getting a little of yours.

I write posts in my head, but they often don’t get any further than that. This one has percolated in my head since Mother’s Day. It has lost a lot of its currency, and writing it still isn’t easy.

However, it is Pentecost Eve. With Easter Season about to end, here’s one last song from my Resurrection playlist.

“Come Back Soon”

As has become our custom, the kids and I headed out to Robin’s Hill Cemetery on Mother’s Day. We didn’t do much, just hung out in the cemetery for a while. We talked about Jane and death (among other things) as we wandered around looking at gravestones. This is not the way I envisioned spending Mother’s Day when Jane became a mother. But this has become a necessary and painful part of the way we celebrate now.

As we started driving away from the cemetery, Andrew Peterson’s song, “Come Back Soon” started to play.

‘Cause every death is a question mark
At the end of the book of a beating heart
And the answer is scrawled in the silent dark
On the dome of the sky in a billion stars
But we cannot read these angel tongues
And we cannot stare at the burning sun
And we cannot sing with these broken lungs
So we kick in the womb and we beg to be born
Deliverance!
Deliverance, O Lord!

When we started listening to AP’s music years ago on the long drives to Tamana Baptist Church in Trinidad, I could have never anticipated how his music would help me on my journey from there to here… and how much I hope it will help my children. While a number of AP’s songs may have fit the moment, “Come Back Soon” was the perfect prayer for that day as I drove away again from my beloved’s grave with her six beloved children.

Shortly after the release of Light for the Lost Boy (the album on which “Come Back Soon” appears), Jonathan Rogers wrote something that expressed my prayer well:

Those of us who are parents all wish we could protect our children from the brokenness of the world we brought them into. To put it another way, we all wish our children didn’t need the gospel. But they need it as much as we do. And the gospel is sufficient.

The Holy Spirit is the seal of our inheritance! O Lord, come!


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