Events of late have grieved my soul in ways I am not formed against. They have numbed me, torn me away from even my worship — and I mean that holistically. The songs I once turned to for comfort now sound distant, as if they belong to someone else’s faith. I am supposed to be a person of hope, yet lately I move through the days flat, irritable, quick to judge, and strangely far from the love I know I’m called to. I’m supposed to love my enemies, yet I can barely love my own brothers and sisters in Christ. I’m not writing this from restoration. I’m writing from the middle of the ache.
One song, though, has been like an anchor dragging me back toward solid ground, even when I don’t want to be moved. “Belly of the Deepest Love” by Tow’rs is not the polished shine of Contemporary Christian Music I grew up with. It doesn’t attempt to fix me or rush me out of the dirt. It is American folk — gritty, rooted, unpolished — and in that soil it meets me where I actually am.
It begins not with words but with a single trumpet: a pause, a herald cutting through the silence. In Scripture, the shofar announced the presence of God, summoned repentance, and proclaimed kingship. Here, that ancient brass cry is transplanted into American earth, bowing low before the mystery it’s about to unfold. For me, that opening note doesn’t feel ornamental. It feels like a summons I’ve been too numb to hear anywhere else. A quiet insistence that the King is still near, even when my heart is quiet.
Then comes the pre-chorus, and something in me cracks open.
The song likens the piercing of His hands, the beats of hammers, to the sound of war. Because of what I’ve carried from my own experience with war. The pressure in the chest, the rhythm of violence that never quite leaves the body, it lands differently. I don’t remember fear from those moments so much as an almost otherworldly calm, as if peace itself stood guard while rockets fell. When the song names the hammers as sounding like war, it awakens that same stillness in me again. The sound of violence becomes, impossibly, the sound of mercy. In the belly of the deepest love, sacrifice and suffering are not opposites. They are held together in the same pierced hands.
That recognition pulls me deeper into the lyrics, where the song reveals its hidden theme, drawn from the old American Dogwood Legend. In Southern and Appalachian folklore, the dogwood was once tall and strong, its wood used for Christ’s cross. Grieving its role, the tree was blessed and “cursed”: never to grow tall again, its blossoms forever marked with the stains of the crucifixion. Four petals in the shape of a cross, each tipped with what looks like blood. It’s not theology. It’s our way of saying that creation itself is groaning and remembering what we so easily forget.
The song makes this legend its own: “Like the flowers on the dogwood tree / Blush with blame you took for me.” Those blushing petals become a quiet witness to the cost paid by the One who chose the cross. For me right now, that image lands like grace in the grit. My own heaviness — global suffering I can’t fix, national fractures that grieve me, the state of the church that sometimes feels like it’s tearing at the seams, and the quiet, relentless pain inside my walk — has left me flattened. I feel marked by it, irritable and judgmental, far from love. Yet the dogwood in the song doesn’t hide the scars. It wears them openly, beautifully, as a reminder that the deepest love has a belly: dark, costly, pierced. The blossoms blush not in shame alone, but in testimony.
That is what keeps drawing me back. The song doesn’t resolve my numbness or preach me out of the ache. It simply sits with me in the dirt and says: the cross was never clean. Love this deep bears the blame, and somehow, in the middle of my own unraveling, that is the only thing that still feels true enough to hold me.
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