Stephen and I were excited to see one of our favorite bands play live in Lake Oswego this October. The Gray Havens are a husband/wife duo, Dave and Licia Radford, who write and perform narrative pop folk music, drawing heavily on themes from C.S. Lewis and Tolkien. In fact, their band name is taken from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

Their song, The Shadows of the Dawn, always evokes emotion, though we’ve listened to it dozens of times. 

A world away and still not far
Like fabric woven into ours…

This song artfully explains reality–that there is more to life than what we see. The unseen reality of God, faith, and eternity is close, but veiled. Scripture tells us, “As we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18 ESV). Though we cannot see God, there are signs of Him woven into the very fabric of our beings and into the fabric of creation.

It’s veiled and stands behind the shroud
The final day when trumpets sound
Sometimes I glimpse into the fog
And listen for the song
Til then I’m waiting for the day
In the shadows of the dawn

This is Stephen’s favorite stanza. That idea {of straining our eyes to look through the fog of this temporal world and to see the evidences of the future world to come where Christ restores creation} is painfully beautiful.

But I won’t wait, resting my bones
I’ll take these foolishness roads of grace
And run toward the dawn
And when I rise and dawn turns to day
I’ll shine as bright as the sun
And these roads that I’ve run, will be wise

Even though we can’t see the unseen, it is so very real that we shouldn’t wait for it to be revealed. We choose to live our lives with those unseen realities as our priorities. That, of course, will appear foolish to the watching world, but one day it will be revealed as wise since life is best lived according to reality.