My wife Shauna is a squeezer.
Tonight we were celebrating sixteen years of wonderful marriage by enjoying dinner and an early showing of The Time Traveller’s Wife. Yeah, it’s a chick flick—but I liked it. I like anything that helps people take a deeper look at love, marriage, commitment, and holding hands with your wife of sixteen years. All that good stuff.
Anyhoo, three quarters through the movie, the plot was starting to yank at our heart strings and Shauna reached for my hand and gave it a squeeze. I squeezed back, but that’s not what makes her a squeezer. What makes her a squeezer is her habit of squeezing to a rhythm. It’s like palpating drum beats in mini-squeezes. But not just random ones. To a song that’s playing in her head.
She’s been doing this as long as I’ve known her. Sometimes she can name the tune, sometimes she’s doing it so unconsciously that she’s not aware of what song she’s squeezing to.
Neat, huh?
So there I am, tearing up as the movie was soaring to it’s climax, and here’s what occurred to me: There’s literally a song playing in her head, and there’s figuratively a song playing in her head.
No, no, stay with me. As we move through life, it’s like we’re accumulating a soundrack CD to the story of our life. There’s the theme track, of course, but there’s also a bunch of other “songs” that play during stressful times, danger, victory, you name it. Some people’s soundtracks are sad. Some are joyful. Some are angry. You get the idea.
The thing is, no one can hear our song but us (and Jesus, of course). But everybody dances to the song playing in their heads. Their actions, their words, the look in their eyes, all these things give us hints as to what song might be playing at the moment. We may never totally and perfectly hear another person’s song, but we can try. It’s a metaphor for genuinely trying to understand another person’s heart.
Shauna is the love of my life, and I desperately want to hear the music that moves her soul. I want to know her deeply, intimately, tenderly. I want to dance with her to the soundtrack of her life.
Thanks God, for sixteen years. And for the little squeezes that give me the rhythm of her soul.