I think I’m gonna start a blog series all based off of song lyrics.
Switchfoot has a song titled, strangely enough, “The Shadow Proves the Sunshine”. It’s a brilliant, thought provoking song, at least in my opinion.
Now I won’t pretend to know what the intention of the song actually is, but I will elaborate on how I take it.
The key two lines of the song are, “We are crooked souls trying to stay up straight”, and “The shadow proves the sunshine”.
Firstly, crooked souls trying to stay up straight, that line just knocks me over every time I hear it. Just picturing the state of my soul, bent, broken, fractured, out of alignment; and all the effort I put into to trying straighten myself back out. But it also shows me why I tend to do the things I do.
Like I’ve said previously, we all have a bent, a tendency towards something. This shows us why. At the “fall”, our original state of wholeness, was broken, fractured, and bent from its original purpose. So now we are inclined to lean towards sin, selfishness, pride, jealousy, anger, bitterness, and malice. And ever since then, mankind has been trying to straighten itself back out. This is called religion. By definition religion is man’s attempt to get back to God on his own.
We’ll come back to that thought.
The second line, The shadow proves the sunshine, give us an interesting insight into the nature of sin, hope, and God.
The way I interpret this, is that the shadow is our sin, or the reflection of our crooked soul, and the sunshine is God. Try to stay with my logic here.
Maybe the fact that we even recognize something as being wrong, is proof that there is a God. Even Scripture tells us that we inherently know that God is real, and that He has standards, and that we must live up to them, because He has written His law on our hearts, and has shown us His glory through His creation.
But we often see God more clearly through the reflection of our brokenness, than the directness of His beauty in creation, and revelation.
And so we try, and try and try to fix ourselves, to reshape our crookedness, iron out our bents, and patch up our ugliness. But as hard as we try we can never do it. This is why religion never works, because man can’t get to God on his own, He needs God to get to him. Because religion screams DO, DO, DO and God will have to accept you, and Jesus declares, from the cross of love, DONE, and He says I came down to earth, I came to you, I paid YOUR debt for you, and now say that it is finished.
So there is hope. Hope in recognizing the shadow of our crooked soul from the sunshine of His love, grace, forgiveness, and mercy. Because if we recognize that there is a God who sees our brokenness, than we can also surmise that there is the same God who can do something about it, and not only can, but did.
So let the shadow of your crookedness point you to the sunshine of God’s grace, and the hope that He can make you whole again.
Interesting take on the song…Inspiring. I would say you got it right.