Dave Matthews ~ Minstrel of love, patience, perseverance in The Space Between

I posted this song on our Facebook page where it received a few comments. One of them, “the lyrics do lend themselves to that “shiver down your spine” feeling…none of us want to be there.”

No, none of us do want to be in a relationship that’s broken, filled with hurt, pain, anguish. It’s the kind of relationship our well-meaning friends counsel us, get out, let it go and don’t look back. Yet love flourishes in the space between the spinning out, the wicked lies and crying pain. We hear again the consistent beat of its heart on the calm, gentle ride back to the top of the roller-coaster.

I know this kind of love, not so bitter or twisted as the one Dave sings about, but what friends might call hurt, wounded love. Broken love. Don’t we all?

We each of us read so much into a lyric, more than its author ever intended, and often contradicting those intentions. So I wonder if Dave would agree that I see here not a love that is broken. Rather, there is a wound, a gash, in the being of one or both. The love is true, but the suffering of individuals all but sunders it.

All relationships have spaces between moments of pain, anger, betrayals large and small. It’s when those spaces become constricted, become fractional parts of a relationship, that we deem the relationship itself toxic, that we fall out of love, that our friends urge us to move on.

I wrote a dear heart recently, “You are due for a man without baggage. Overdue. You deserve a man who has learned just to love, and be loved in return.” We all do deserve that kind of love. But we also deserve the kind of love that perseveres, that waits for us in the space between when it’s our own baggage, our wounds and brokenness — or theirs — ours — that causes the pain, the anguish. We all deserve a love that can heal when it breaks, that can find a way out of the pain, that grows the spaces between until they fill our lives.

That’s the love that Dave sings so wistfully and hopefully about in the final stanzas…the stanzas that never fail to move me…the moment that elicits the shiver down my spine…