Before I even get to the Diamond Rio part, I should admit something: I have always felt that Sarah Condon is a kindred spirit. Maybe it is because I grew up in a family only one step removed from the hills of West Virginia, where country music was not just background noise but cultural oxygen. The drawl, the humor, the plainspoken honesty — it is what I listened to riding in my grandfather’s pickup truck. So, when Sarah starts weaving theology through the soundtrack of my childhood, I cannot help but lean in.
I sat there in the sanctuary of Christ Episcopal in Charlottesville listening to Sarah Condon do what Sarah does best: take a pop culture artifact, baptize it in snark, and somehow walk away with a word of gospel truth. This time her chosen artifact was Diamond Rio’s “Meet in the Middle,” a song that, in her words, is the absolute opposite of how God’s grace works. Love that requires fifty percent plus fifty percent, meeting at halfway points and fence posts? It might work for a high school romance, but that is not grace.
Sarah was right.
Completely right.
Grace does not meet anyone in the middle; grace finds us face down in the ditch. (Don’t believe me? Check out the parable about a Samaritan.) Grace scoops us up off the gravel, throws us over God’s shoulder like a stubborn sheep, and marches us home while we are still arguing about whose fault it is that we are lost. Grace is not fifty-fifty. Grace is one hundred zero. And to be clear, the zero is us.
But I have to admit that as much as I appreciated the theological clarity, I was distracted and borderline offended by how few heads nodded in recognition when she mentioned Diamond Rio. Are we really at a Mockingbird conference in the South and nobody is willing to acknowledge the greatness of ’90s country music publicly? Did we all collectively forget that this was the decade that gave us Garth in a headset mic, Mary Chapin Carpenter lamenting her own damn party, and Alan Jackson teaching us more eschatology than half our seminary classes? I was honored that Sarah acknowledged me as the bearded man nodding his head before she led the congregation in singing the chorus. My mom would have been proud.
Mockingbird folks love to talk about law and gospel, but apparently not enough to confess that ’90s country is the greatest musical era in American history. I expected better. If we can nitpick Luther’s prepositions, surely we can give Diamond Rio the reverence they deserve.
And here is where I diverged slightly from Sarah’s point. “Meet in the Middle” is indeed a terrible metaphor for grace. It is a fine song. It is a classic. But theologically, the song is a train wreck. Grace is not a fence post negotiation. Grace is not mutual effort. Grace is not a romantic compromise. Grace is God doing for us what we will not, cannot, and frankly refuse to do for ourselves. If anything, “Meet in the Middle” is the soundtrack of the Law itself. It hums along with that old tune that says God will meet you, bless you, or save you just as soon as you have moved your good half of the distance. It is the kind of song we love because it strokes our illusion of control.
But Diamond Rio actually has a song that captures the feeling of grace, even if it does not explain the mechanics of it. Not how grace works, but how grace lands in a human heart.
The chorus of “How Your Love Makes Me Feel” gets closer to the truth than half the systematic theologies that sit unread on our shelves:
It’s like just before dark
Jump in the car
Buy an ice cream
And see how far we can drive before it melts kind of feelin’
There’s a cow in the road
And you swerve to the left
Fate skips a beat and it scares you to death
And you laugh until you cry
That’s how your love makes me feel inside
Nobody is suggesting that Diamond Rio was secretly trying to articulate prevenient, justifying, and sanctifying grace in three-part harmony. But that chorus names what happens when grace, real grace, God’s one-way love that comes without conditions or prerequisites, actually registers in a person’s life.
It feels like being swept up in something bigger than you. It feels like motion you did not initiate. It feels like joy that sneaks up on you and refuses to let go. It feels like being carried, not negotiating terms.
If “Meet in the Middle” is the myth of mutuality, “How Your Love Makes Me Feel” is the testimony of someone who got ambushed by love and lived to tell about it. One song describes a contract. The other offers a confession. The song is not about how love works. It is about what love does.
And that is grace. Grace works entirely apart from our effort, but it produces in us a response: surprise, delight, gratitude, astonishment, a sense that something true and beautiful and beyond us has cracked open our lives. You do not meet grace halfway. Grace meets you all the way, and once it hits you, your reaction sounds a lot like Diamond Rio’s chorus. Breathless, bewildered, relieved, grateful.
Maybe next year at Mockingbird, we can get Sarah to cue the band and give ’90s country the theological respect it deserves. Until then, the record stands. She is right about “Meet in the Middle,” and I am right that the room should have shown more reverence for the icons. In the end, one song is the soundtrack of the Law and the other is the soundtrack of Grace. And only one of those can save you.
Dude! I’m honored!
Nice one Teer! So which Alan Jackson songs are going to school me on eschatology?
Probably “I Want to Stroll Over Heaven with You.” That essay is in the works.