When Love Learns to Sing Again

In 1829, Felix Mendelssohn was just twenty years old when he did something audacious. He revived Johann Sebastian Bach's St. Matthew Passion, a masterwork that had sat silent and forgotten for nearly a century. Bach had poured his deepest devotion into that piece — two choirs, two orchestras, soloists weaving through the story of Christ's suffering and death — and the world had simply moved on.

But Mendelssohn heard something in those yellowed pages that he could not keep to himself. He gathered musicians, rehearsed for months, and performed it in Berlin to a packed hall. People wept. They had never heard anything like it. That single concert sparked a Bach revival that continues to this day.

Think about what happened. Love composed something magnificent. Then love forgot it. And then love remembered.

This is the story the Almighty keeps telling. He pours out His love in creation, in covenant, in the life of His Son. We forget. We move on. We fill our lives with smaller songs. And then, through some unexpected grace — a crisis, a kindness, a moment of stillness — we hear it again, and it undoes us.

The Apostle John wrote, "We love because He first loved us." God's love is not waiting to be composed. It has already been written. The question is whether we will be like Mendelssohn — willing to dust off what was always there and let it sing again.