by Ronnie Steadman
945 Worship Lead
With its soaring guitar riff and it's catchy repeating chorus it's no wonder that John Mark McMillan's How He Loves is a favorite worship song. What sustains the song for me though is the gritty, earthy and "sloppy" verses. The words come rapid fire almost like an Eminem song, and though they are poetic they are organic and packed with feeling. You talk them more than sing them. Somehow, at least for me, the song is at once sad and searching, but hopeful and victorious at the same time.
David Crowder's version of the song, which is great by the way, takes out the lyric "heaven meets earth like a sloppy wet kiss" and replaces it with "unforeseen kiss". I like the "sloppy" version. It speaks to the mess. It's forceful and chaotic just like my relationship with Christ. In this mess, in this chaos, in this doubt, He still loves me. He is still jealous or like Drew mentioned in church "zealous" for me. In my doubt He is still there.
The author of the song wrote it at a time when he lost a good friend to a car accident. In the haze of confusion and loss he was just plain mad at God. And this song was part of his conversation with Him where he expressed that frustration and anger and he found that God loved him through all of that. I have certainly had my times of being angry with God. That is something I would not have thought okay when I was young. It would have felt blasphemous to me to express that anger, to question my beliefs, to let myself be frustrated with the things He lets happen in our lives. Things weren't really allowed to be messy when it came to talking about God. I have come to believe that the Christian walk is a struggle not a breezy walk with no questions, but a true struggle, a journey, a mystery. It's messy. It's ugly sometimes. And sometimes it doesn't look "Christian", at least in the way I used to see it. We have to work it out. And God is okay with that. He's much bigger than that.
He loves "like a hurricane". He loves so passionately it is overwhelming. I don't think I could've fully understood that line until I became a parent. You love that kid so hard. So hard they could never understand it. And it is not always pretty either. But even though they make you crazy, and they don't do things like you want them to, you still love and you love hard. It doesn't really matter what they do. It's not going to make you love less. Our grace may not be " ocean-like" such as God's, but it extends further than the grace you have for anybody else. And somehow God loves me even more than that! And the song pays that off so wonderfully with the chorus of "Oh's" and in one of these versions even "Whoa's." Whoa, how He loves us!
Check out the song on our Spotify playlist (on the right). I also encourage you to check out the story behind the song as told by the author, which has live version of the song at the end that is worth the experience..