8.1.2024

I love music. I think music has the incredible capacity to take any black and white moment and bring it into color. A cup of coffee in the morning, the gym, a car ride, a summer night on the back deck, ect.

I use the music streaming platform Spotify (anyone who says Apple Music is better is wrong – I’m sorry). At the end of each calendar year, Spotify does this cool thing called Spotify Wrapped, where they give an overview of all the music you’ve listened to for the year and organize it into different buckets. Wrapped supplies information like how many minutes you listened to music, your top genres, top artists, and which songs you listened to most. 

What I love most about my annual Spotify Wrapped audit is that it takes me back through the moments which made up the past year of my life. Eric Church sang it like this, “Funny how a melody sounds like a memory.” When I look at specific songs on my Spotify Wrapped, I’m brought to that one really challenging week at work where I listened to that song on my drives home, I think about listening to that song in the locker room before big games, I reminisce the road trip I went on and listened to that song fifteen times, and moments like that. Songs can bring us to and through both the wonderful and painful moments in life.

I’m not sure what the gates of heaven will be like, but I think the arrival might be like going through my Spotify Wrapped. When I stand before God and we reflect back over my life, I will see both the wonderful and the painful moments. I will see moments when I disobeyed God or took credit for something he did. Moments where God protected me. Moments where I didn’t understand, and then God will show me what he was doing. Moments where he pursued me. Moments where I trusted him and he brought me a little closer. The melody of my days played out before me.

With those days behind me, the reigning good news will be this: Because of my faith in Jesus, his goodness has been credited to my account. This means he took the mess I made, and through his death and resurrection, he exchanged my brokenness with his life so I may walk through heaven’s gates. Whatever my Spotify Wrapped looks like on that final day will be covered by one amazing act of love. So between this day and that one, I will live joyfully knowing my story ends well.

“God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” – 2 Corinthians 5:21