What Four Dustin Kensrue Songs Have Meant to My Marriage

Photo by Sandro Crepulja from Pexels

On a recent Saturday morning, my husband, one-year-old daughter, and three-year-old son, all of us pajama-clad, sat around our home together with sunlight, a gentle melody, and these lyrics from Dustin Kensrue’s song “What Beautiful Things” pouring through the room:

“We’re so surprised when we realize that we’re deftly skilled in 

The very vices we swear off violently. 

Still at the crux of the worst in us, the hope is hiding

I lift my gaze from my wicked ways and sing 

Oh what beautiful things I see.” 

My little boy sat in his child-size rocking chair, pretending his toy trumpet was a guitar and “strumming” along to the music which by now has become quite familiar to him. 

I don’t know how much of these words my little boy is able to take in yet, but I’m grateful they’re becoming part of the soundtrack of his life. He doesn’t yet understand what “the worst” of him is, but maybe one day he’ll return to these words in a time of need and they will help him “lift his gaze,” as they’ve helped me and my husband in many circumstances. 

About six years ago, when my husband and I were just dating, and not yet married, we had a conversation about despairing of the darkness in our own hearts and struggling to receive grace. He played another Dustin Kensrue song for us, maybe the first one I’d ever heard, called “There’s Something Dark.” 

“There’s something dark inside of me 

I need someone to set me free 

So I call out Your name 

But you seem so far away 

Anyway, who could save one like me?” 

The poetry in both of these songs gives expression to the desperately dark places I’ve recognized within myself, even since I was a child.

I’ve learned that, unless a soul can recognize his or her own darkness and receive grace and love, he or she will find it impossible to extend true grace and love to another. And without grace and love, what is a marriage? 

I didn’t know it that day I was listening to “There’s Something Dark” with my then boyfriend, now husband, in his car, but I was about to embark on a journey in which I would examine these dark places in myself— my sins, my fears— more closely than ever before. 

Authentic relationships have a way of illuminating our vices, casting light on the shadowy corners of our hearts that no one’s had to see before. That’s why the unconditional love these types of relationships can offer and model are so powerful. 

Several months into this difficult (but as I see it now, necessary) season of my life, I’d be introduced to another Dustin Kensrue song, “Of Crows and Crowns.” 

I found myself on a lushly green riverbank one April evening, sitting on a bench and surrounded by twinkle lights. My true love pulled out his guitar and sang these words to me: 

“I know you fear the wounds of time 

The wandering feet of crows 

But I am yours and you are mine 

And none but me could know 

How all of you enraptures me 

Till I can’t look away 

I pray that I would live to see 

You wear a crown of gray.

My love how beautiful you are 

My love is ever where you are.” 

And then he pulled out a ring. He had come to know both my loveliness and my unloveliness, and he had chosen to make me his. 

A couple of years into our marriage my husband played the song “Back to Back” for me. We were parked outside a brewery where we were about to enjoy a date while my mother-in-law babysat our little boy, who was at that point still an infant. 

Though I can’t remember the particulars of what had occurred that day, I do remember an overall atmosphere of stress. Looking back it was such a sweet time in our lives, but in the moment I remember feeling discouraged. Tears of peace and joy came to my eyes as I heard these words: 

“Let me rub your back when the children whine

Let me push your cart through the five and dime

Help you hobble down the hall with your IV line in tow. 

Let me be the one that’s walking with you through the night

When the morning comes with its brash and blinding light 

Let me be the one that’s crawling with you through the thorns 

Back to back we both were born to share this fight.” 

Now we’re almost five years into our marriage, with two small children and one on the way. Our days may not look as rosy as the April evening of our engagement or as full of moments in the car on the way to and from our dinner dates. Now they’re more characterized by the mundane and sometimes painful aspects of life as depicted in “Back to Back.”

But with the challenges and tests we’ve been brought, our love has grown far deeper and more satisfying. Still just in our early thirties, I know there’s much we have to learn and walk through yet.

But I’m so glad we have the gift of walking through the valleys to come with a far richer appreciation for the beauty and grace to be found in those low and dark places, beauty and grace that these songs have helped us to see and articulate and that we now get to share with our children. 

There’s a verse in the Bible which tells us that God “makes his sun shine on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45). The image of my golden, bed-headed little boy sitting in his rocking chair and playing his trumpet-guitar along to “What Beautiful Things” will always make me think of this.

We are, none of us, truly good. But we have all been children; we are, all of us vulnerable, small, vessels of such deep wells of capacity for beauty and goodness, beholders of and dependent on the same glorious sunrises and sunsets and gentle rainfalls and storms. 

No matter what kind of season you are walking through in your relationships right now, I pray that you will be encouraged by these songs, or find other melodies and lyrics that will bring nourishing truth, healing, and beauty to all of your broken and hungry places and help you delight more humbly and gratefully in the places that are already rich and full.