Living on...

when I was a kid around eight or nine our neighbor, Virgil, fell in love with the song, As We Lay by Shirley Murdock. For like two months, he played that song seemingly day and night. He played it so much, my mom and I both knew the song by heart and mistakenly thought it was titled It’s Morning because that was a phrase she sang over and over again.

I was feeling nostalgic this morning and decided to play it on youtube. I discovered Kelly Price did a remake of the song, so with the baby in my arms we listened and watched. At some point, I thought the baby and I are creating new memories with this song, Virgil lives on. Then the other part of me was like should I be rocking my baby to a song about a woman realizing that her one night with a married was a mistake? Granted, there could be worse songs.

After listening to Kelly’s version which was pretty faithful to the original, I saw a video for a version with Kelly and Shirley. Kelly was singing at a sorority event, then half-way through the song Shirley comes out as a surprise. It was a nice surprise, then a bigger surprise when Shirley took the song to church. She started quoting scripture and how we are fearfully and wonderfully made. Of course, I was taken aback and was like uh, how did we just go from “You belong to me/Just one night/As we slept the night away” to talking about God. It was cool and all, but wow.

Later at work, I shared my experience with a co-worker and she told me Shirley became a Christian and since As We Lay is the song she’s most known for, she still sings it and uses it as a teaching tool. A tool to say the woman in the song made a mistake by sleeping with a married man and that’s not what God wants for His daughters; that we are fearfully and wonderfully made and God doesn’t want you to settle for someone else’s husband, He only wants the best for us; and that this woman was more than her sin, more than this one mistake at that moment, that God would forgive her of her sin and the woman could move on. Pretty deep. What a way to turn your hit song and into a learning opportunity. And maybe one day, Layla will be rocking her baby girl in her arms while the song is playing and share with her baby the story behind the song.