Busking for the Baby

On Tuesday afternoon, Cambridge was The Hottest Place in all of England - Peter and I had picked the perfect day to walk back from the train station laden with backpacks weighing about fifteen kilos each. Unsurprisingly, when we spotted a cool, shady spot, we sat down (read 'collapsed') for a two-minute break that lasted a mere hour. It was a beautiful, lazy afternoon: families were picnicking and playing frisbee, students were lounging about, sunbathing and eating sandwiches. We lay on the grass and strummed my blue guitar, and a little girl out for a walk with her mum stopped to listen.



Jon Foreman's 'Your Love is Strong' is quite possibly my favourite song. As a prayer, it is everything I want to say, and it zeroes in on the one thing about God that I most want to take hold of - His steadfast love. I feel the emotion of each line so deeply it's almost embarrassing. You can see in the video how very worried I look when I sing the line "why should I worry?" and how relieved I look when I sing "you are strong and you love me/ yes you love me". By the time I get to the Lord's Prayer at the end I usually just want to go "yes! yes! YES!" and grab people by the shoulders and shake them, or jump up and down, or just drop to my knees and laugh. Or weep. I controlled these somewhat extreme impulses quite well in the video, I think. The fact that it would have taken a lot of effort to get the guitar off my chest and get up off the grass might have had something to do with it.