David sang to the LORD the words of this song when the LORD delivered him from the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul. – 2 Samuel 22:1

Today's Scripture Reading (September 29, 2022): 2 Samuel 22

Freddy Mercury said in a 1981 interview that he wrote "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" while he was in the bathtub, apparently with a guitar, but it is probably safer not to ask how he got the instrument into the tub, in about ten minutes. The song just seemed to come to him. "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" was a tribute to Mercury's musical heroes, Elvis Presley and Sir Cliff Richard. Sometimes songs are like that; they just seem to emerge from our imaginations. We give birth to the creative elements fully formed, and all we seem to have to do is listen to our muse and write down what we hear. (Sometimes blog posts can come the same way, although admittedly, I wish they came that way a little more often.) It can be an amazing process.

But songs don't always come to us that way. Sometimes, the creations of our imaginations can take a long time to be brought to life in our world. Mercury may have written "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" in just a few minutes, but it took him more than six years to write "Bohemian Rhapsody." Mercury began writing "Rhapsody" in the late 1960s, but it wasn't recorded until August 24, 1975. And even in 1975, as the band prepared to record the song, there was still a mystery surrounding the piece; even as the recording date approached, the song remained largely in Freddy Mercury's imagination. After years of imagining the song, it was finally recorded and became one of Queen's greatest hits.

Admittedly, "Bohemian Rhapsody" is a much more complex song than "Crazy Little Thing Called Love," but that doesn't completely explain why one was written in ten minutes while the other took years to be made into a reality. And, for a while during the in-between phase, parts of Bohemian Rhapsody became known to the band as "The Cowboy Song."

David sang a song to the Lord that had apparently been composed during the early days of his reign. It was a song that emerged from his youthful battles and struggles against Saul. These events were now almost forty years in the past. The song appears here out of both time and place. But the song is also an excellent summation of David's life and all the struggles God had brought him through.

Or, maybe, it is a song that David began to write in his youth; it reflected his struggle with Saul and other struggles of his youth. But it is also a song that could not have been finished until he was older; until time brought the maturity and experience that allowed David to sum up his life. At that moment, David finished a song he had sung in a different form during the days of his youth, but that now he had been able to complete in its fullness.

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: 2 Samuel 23