Songs Map (Pt.1)
Written in early April 2025.
This article is very long and I wrote it for a week.
It looks back at my 5 years (2016-2021) from graduate school to my first job, mostly about love.
Lord, perhaps there’s a deeper reason why You placed a sister who’s always yearning for love so close to me.
Every time Tina and I went out together, nearly half of what she talked about was always love. And I just nodded along, like a tree hollow. But as we got to know each other more deeply, she began to pull me into her world of romantic chatter too. At first, it was talking about the brothers in our church, and asking me what kind of person I liked. Maybe because I always responded so indifferently, saying “whatever,” she eventually took it upon herself to dream up my love story for me-
“I can imagine you being really tender and submissive in marriage, because you’re just so kind.”
“Your future husband will be so blessed—you’re someone who truly knows how to love.”
“You are too sensitive, so you must be with someone who protects you.”
“One day you’ll be with a reborn brother in Christ, and in the evenings you’ll go on walks together, talking about God. He’ll think that’s the most beautiful thing.”
“You should be with a man whose soul is noble in the Lord.”
“I’ll pray to God that He’ll send someone soon—someone to turn you back into a little woman again.”
…
I took all these words as wind brushing past my ears. Because to me, they were impossible—at least something I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, let myself imagine at the time. I had imagined having a family someday, but never that I’d have love. Love was something I always skipped over completely.
Until one day, a hand rested gently on my back, stopping my slouched, swaying posture. I held my breath and stilled myself, quietly listening as he prayed for me.
Lord, if Your nail-pierced hand once touched me before I was even formed in the womb, then has this soul of mine, which belongs to eternity, spent its fleeting lifetime responding to the will You laid out before time began?
Was it just that I was stirred by a glance and a smile that resembled old memories?
Or have I, all along, been drawn toward the future You had already written?
A month later, Tina and I were walking on the beach again, and I asked her:
“When you developed feelings for someone, do you ever feel a kind of sadness whenever you see them?”
No passion. No craving. No curiosity. No desire to possess. Just… sorrow.
And it wasn’t because anything had happened between us—it was simply sorrow that rose from deep within my soul.
It was the sorrow that surfaces when your soul’s longing for true love has been exhausted by counterfeits—when meeting someone you like again only awakens your brokenness.
It was a mourning of myself. A silent grief: “When I finally meet someone better… I’ve already used up the best parts of me.”
Tina said she couldn’t understand that kind of sorrow, but she suggested I try talking to the Lord about it.
I’d never really brought this past before God.
Maybe He brought that person into my life at that time so I would have to face it.
But Lord, I truly don’t know how to gather the shattered pieces of my heart and hand them to You for healing.
If my eternal soul had still been responding to You even during the years I had forgotten You—did she leave behind any clues I can now follow?
These past few days, I’ve been soaking in the song The Call, listening to the Holy Spirit speak to me through its lyrics. By chance, I opened a feature in my music app that shows my all-time most-played tracks. Browsing through those songs that had accompanied me in my twenties, I found some I had listened to since childhood—classical choir hymns and a good number of modern gospel tracks.
But more than anything, they were various kinds of modern ballads—songs steeped in sorrow and despair, trapped and longing, searching and unmet—they were like Narcissus gazing endlessly into his reflection.
Of course, the art of sinners is saturated with the temperament of sin. And yet, I have to admit—they are still beautiful. Perhaps all the sorrowful artworks about love that humanity has ever created are, in truth, the Holy Spirit’s sigh from deep within our souls, when we waste all the tenderness and sensitivity God gave us on emptiness.
I prayed to God, asking Him for the courage to face my past. Then I noticed six particular songs—six stones, forming the outline of a map.
Tears of Heaven — Max Richter, “Written on the Sky”
This is the most-played piece of music in my entire listening history. Second place is When a Knight Won His Spurs, a children’s hymn I listened to growing up. If On the Nature of Daylight is the sound of the Holy Spirit weeping in heaven, then Written on the Sky is a single tear falling from heaven—landing softly, breaking apart across my body.
At that time, I had already driven the Holy Spirit away for nearly three years, and had gone through one episode of dissociation. My childhood memories were fading, I was floating alone, having already forgotten my Heavenly Father. By then, I had entered my master’s program as the top student, enduring deep disgust toward scientific research, the university, the professors, and my male classmates in a national key laboratory.
I would often sit alone beside a machine, waiting for data to come out, scribbling down all sorts of imagined scenes of death in my notebook—like a soldier trudging through the quiet of a battlefield, slumping down just to feel his own steady breath for a moment. That was when I played Written on the Sky on repeat, almost constantly.
Then came the decision of whether to pursue a PhD after the master’s. I rejected it without hesitation.
Life had to go on. I began pulling myself together again—on the surface complying with research tasks, while secretly doing internships at companies and attending events outside campus, like a little beast expending its excess energy. I was barely in my twenties then, a heart full of weeds, but still brimming with fire.
It was at a boxing gym that I met a refined-looking man. I knew he noticed me at first glance. And I, for my part, found the whole thing amusing and curious.
Written on the Sky remained in my daily playlist. It felt like I was standing at the gate of destiny, sensing—somewhere deep within—that something was about to break, though I had no idea how to avoid it.
Fearless Offering — Gabrielle Aplin, “The Power of Love”
Even before he showed up, I had a strong intuition that I was about to experience a relationship.
Driven by curiosity and amusement, I agreed to go out with him. Unlike the boys my age on campus who always imposed their assumptions onto me, he actually listened to me—I could speak freely around him. He was nine years older than me, but he looked young, even handsome. He worked in government, but showed none of the usual sleazy bureaucratic air.
Still, he acted boldly. On our second date at the movies, he leaned in close to me. Maybe it was the dim lighting, or maybe I just wanted so badly in that moment to let down my guard and feel a kind of tenderness that didn’t require resistance—so I leaned into his embrace.
What I didn’t expect was for him to kiss me when the movie ended. And when he held me outside the theater, I froze. I had no idea how I had suddenly arrived at the point of “being in a relationship.”
Everything seemed so natural—so natural that I didn’t even have time to tell what was really going on. I just felt like I couldn’t go back anymore, couldn’t stop—only stumble forward, step by step.
At first, he was very enthusiastic. I remained cautious. Even when the girls in my dorm were squealing over our relationship, spinning pink fantasies on my behalf, I still kept my distance.
I honestly don’t remember at what point I closed my eyes and decided to leap.
Maybe it was when I heard The Power of Love, and something inside me chose to trust in love again. In that moment, I truly wanted to believe that love could be “a force from above.” I wanted to believe that I was special.
So even if the world around me was full of gossip and shadows, I would use love to turn it into a secret garden.