"Cuz My heart is damaged...damaged..."

After hearing this song on the radio this morning, with a van full of college-bound high schoolers, I shot my mouth off like I often do:

"Oh...my gosh--this song is ridiculous! Trust me ladies, no guy wants to hear you gab on about how epic your baggage is. It is the quickest way to make them run for the hills!"

Despite the passion of that soapbox moment, I should have offered a more rational clarification--it's not that guys are insensitive and can't deal with the fact that you've been hurt in the past. I guess what irks me about the song is that it glorifies the sort of jaded mentality that permeates so much of the dating world I've seen and experienced. Not only that, but the girl specifically demands that her guy be the one to "fix it." Heresy, if I've ever heard it.

By this point in my life, nearly everyone I meet seems to have their own version of the scorned lover story. Courtship is a dead horse we revive every now and then, just so we can shoot it in the face. It's no secret that our modern system of mate-matching has its flaws. With little guidance coming from our family or the church, a lot of us end up with a blemish or two on the ol' dating record. Be it a brightly patterned Vera Bradley or something we picked up from a street vendor downtown for ten bucks, a lot of us are toting some serious luggage.

Tonight I was reading a post on Stuff Christians Like that compared unforgiveness to carrying around a dead body. I think relational baggage works the same way. It's not that men (or women for that matter) are insensitive to the hurts of our past relationships--it's just that after a while, the stench starts to really ruin things. All that dead weight (ha) makes it difficult to frolic through the daisy fields of a new love. And despite my notorious pessimism about all things romance-related, I like that word, frolic. It makes me think of another word I like: joy.

At Bible Study this week we talked about finding our joy in Christ. If I were to live my life underscored by this poppy, top-40 number, no amount of synthesizers could drown out the hollow cry for salvation: "How ya gonna fix it...fix it...fix it?" We live in a fallen world, where pain is an inevitable part of life. It shouldn't shock me at all when people turn to one thing or another for a salve, some aspirin...a tranquilizer.

But as for me, I can sing a different tune, because through Christ, God already fixed all of it, allowing me to drop the cadaver already...and leaving me free to frolic.