Are we listening to hyms of offering?
Have we eyes to see that love is gathering?
All the words that I've been reading
Have now started the act of bleeding into one.

When David Cook was about twelve, and I was already pushing 30, I met a fantastic man who eventually became my husband. While we originally met in person through mutual friends, we got to know each other almost exclusively through email and chats. As a result, the written word played a leading role in our early relationship.

We were both in graduate school at the time, although at different universities, and I would sit in my living room at my computer until the wee hours of the night exchanging emails or chatting online with him. There was always music in the background. He was listening to Lead Belly and The Who and I was listening to Collective Soul and U2. Eventually our CD collections would collide into an impressively eclectic collection.

One night while I was sitting there in the ubiquitous glow of my CRT and giving in to the undeniable fact that I was falling head over heels for this guy (against the rules that I had established following a divorce at the tender age of 25) I heard those lines as if for the first time...

Are we listening to hyms of offering?
Have we eyes to see that love is gathering?
All the words that I've been reading have now started the act of bleeding into one.

Right then and there I realized that somewhere along the way all the words I had been reading, in all those emails and chat sessions, had bled into one: love. I wrote those words down and put them where all of life's important observations and works of art belong ... on the fridge door.

Fast forward something like thirteen years and I'm sitting in another living room, in another state, still in love with the same man who is now sitting beside me with our four year old asleep down the hall. We've recorded the final night of American Idol season 7 and I'm a burgeoning David Cook fan sitting on the edge of my couch and holding my breath over his last performances. When he sang The World I Know that night I felt my whole jaded, hectic world pause and just hang in amazed suspension for that too brief moment of time. All the crazy, whacked out jumble of emotions that constitute falling in love came crashing back to me and I turned and just stared at my husband.

I believe it's this kind of moment that good artists come to understand - that the simple act of singing a song might release a torrent of emotion and meaning for some total stranger sitting on a couch somewhere in Texas. I recall David alluding to this in one of his many interviews - that he was struggling to understand the impact what he did had on people even though to him it was "just singing on some TV show."

I still have that scrap of paper that I put on my fridge door over a decade and four addresses ago. I still love that man. Love still gathers here. Thank you, David, for bringing it back home.