All my favourite people are broken

"Orphaned believers, skeptical dreamers

You're welcome
Yeah, you're safe right here
You don't have to go

Cause all my favourite people are broken." 

We, part saints and part sinners, were welcomed in, as orphaned believers and skeptical dreamers, at Cecil Sharp House tonight by Linford Detweiler and Karen Bergquist, the husband and wife duo who are Over The Rhine and who: 

"try to write music that in little ways helps to heal the wounds that life has dealt us or the wounds we’ve dealt ourselves. We try to write songs that can hum joyfully at the stars when something good goes down. We try to write tunes capable of whispering to a sleeping child that in spite of everything, somehow, all is well. We try to write words that help us learn to tell the truth to ourselves and others."

The holy interpenetrates our world and affects it but often we are not looking all that close and cannot see, so we need artists like Over The Rhine to create little epiphanies that reveal Christ for us in the ordinary experiences of life; their favourite times of light!

Tonight they sang my all-time favourite Over The Rhine song Jesus in New Orleans which notes that you never know just what on earth you'll find in the face of a stranger or in the dark and weary corners of a mind because, here and there, when you least expect it, you can see the Saviour's face. In their story of meeting a stranger in a bar in New Orleans in whose face and words they see something of Christ the holy is interpenetrating their world, and ours, and affecting it. "Ain't it crazy, they suggest, "what's revealed when you’re not looking all that close."

Among their favourite broken people is Christ, who's still their "favourite loser / Falling for the entire human race." "Ain't it crazy / How we put to death the ones we need the most."

An evening full of highlights - you can't have too many - but what I'll remember most is the question they pose in Earthbound Love Song:

"Is heaven a place you fly off to
When the day is done?
Or do you work right here
On an earthbound love song?"

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Over The Rhine - Earthbound Love Song.