Cord Dragging Behind Me

Track six is the barest song on the album - one guitar, one voice, no drums - a confession this close to home cannot have anything to hide behind. I came home from a meeting better than twenty years ago. A preacher I admired had preached the evil of the television. And I came through my own door with a fire and a houseful of the world to set in order.

What happened next, the song tells plainly. My wife was watching a sitcom. I told her it was sin. She looked at me and she said plainly, no, it is not. I told her she would have to stop, and she said no again. So I bent down and I pulled the cord out of the wall, and I carried that television through the middle of my house, with the cord dragging behind me along the floor - and my wife just standing there, her eyes filling up. I was not in a rage. That is the hard part. I believed with my whole heart that I was keeping her from harm. And I could not see her tears for all my holiness.

The bridge is where the seeing came, a year or two later. The danger in that house had never been the television. The danger was a man too sure of God to hear his own wife. The song does not tie a bow on it. It ends owned. I set that television down a long, long time ago, but I have dragged that cord behind me every year since. Some wrongs you carry not as a wound but as a warning. I am still the man who carried it, and she is still the one who cried.