I had just returned from a very exhausting humanitarian aid mission to a country that had recently suffered a debilitating war. I felt depleted emotionally. Songwriting was the furthest thing from my mind as I tried to deal with the images that still haunted me. Perhaps the most difficult were the images from the hospitals we had visited: the sunken eyes of emaciated children looking blankly into mine; the wistful, sometimes tear-laced smiles of their mothers. The hardness of heart that had caused this suffering rankled within me.

How would Jesus have been with those children, I wondered. How would He have held them, blessed them, healed them? An impression began to form in my mind. There was melody, too, in that silence--one that I could sense rather than hear. I sat down at my keyboard and began to play the music I felt welling up inside. The words began to flow, and I sensed a broken, loving heart that had been healed by the tender touch of the Master's hands nearly 2,000 years earlier.

In about 20 minutes the song was there, almost in its entirety. Tears rolled down my face. Contained in the song was the healing my spirit had been longing for. The pain of those broken lives was still with me, but there was new hope that they could be changed and redeemed by the power of a love that was stronger than all the hatred anyone could contrive and bring against another.

* * *

The Light of Your Love
(Song of Mary Magdalene)
By Michael Dooley

I saw how You stooped to lift a child,
Watched how You gently, kindly smiled.
That's when I knew how much I wanted
To be part of You.

I saw how You mended broken lives,
Felt how You cared and sympathized,
Saw how their heartaches made You cry,
And I loved the heart of You.

And all of my hopes, my dreams, my fears,
Seem to dissolve within Your tears,
And I longed to hold You near
And tell You I loved You.

And all of life's cruel and stinging trials
Vanished before Your gentle smile.
That's when I knew my heart's desire
Was to spend my life walking in the light of Your love.

And when You held my upturned face,
Tenderly dried my tears away,
All of my past Your love erased,
And I was born anew.

Then I saw what it cost You to be free;
I wept as I watched You die for me.
That's when I knew that I would be
Forever in love with You.

And when You rose again and came to me,
I knew Your love was for all eternity,
And You would come one day and take me
To be with You.

And in that land of no more tears,
And in that time beyond all years,
You would embrace me, hold me near,
And tell me You loved me.

Where all of life's cruel and stinging trials
Vanish beneath Your radiant smile,
And You fulfill my heart's desire,
And I'll be there forever living in the light of Your love.

Michael Dooley is a full-time volunteer with The Family in the Middle East.