It all started a few weeks ago when I was sitting down at home doing some maths homework. As many of my fellow hikers of the ‘Year 11’ mountain may know, homework isn’t a walk in the park anymore. Persevering through the mountainous exercises and perilous questions due that night, I finally thought I was reaching the summit of polynomials and differentiation. But suddenly, out of the blue, my back neighbour starts blaring a song at max volume (or at least it feels like it) just when I thought I had ascended the mountain of all calculus.
Annoyed that my transient moment of genius had been intruded, I decided to take a break from my cordillera of mathematics and listen to what song they were beginning to sing.
Oh I wAnNa DaNcE wItH sOmEbOdY
I wAnNa FeEl ThE hEaT wItH sOmEbOdY
YeAh I wAnNa DaNcE wItH sOmEbOdY
WiTh SoMeBoDy WhO lOvEs Me
Marvelling at how all my windows were still intact from the siege of sound waves that had barraged my ears, I realised that this song paints a vivid story that I’ll explore in this article.
The song, if you haven’t figured it out already, is Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody”. Houston was born on August 9th, 1963. She grew up in a church and, in short, she was a very talented singer from the start. She debuted performing at her church with the hymn: “Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah” and her career only went up from there. Her second album’s first single, “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)” hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 17 countries and she even won a Grammy for it. Unfortunately, in the later years of her life, she became involved in drug abuse and sadly passed away on February 11th, 2012. The last song she performed in public was “Jesus, Loves Me”.
In this article, we’ll trek through this pinnacle of Houston’s music and shed a new light on its lyrics to understand ourselves better.
Verse 1:
Clock strikes upon the hour
And the sun begins to fade
Still enough time to figure out
How to chase my blues away
I’ve done alright up ’till now
It’s the light of day that shows me how
And when the night falls, loneliness calls
This story starts with us. We’re down and we’re sad because it seems like no one really loves us. We’re lonely and we have no idea what to do with this. What we need is for someone to love us!
We’ve tried looking, so long that it’s now the end of the day. In fact, this becomes our story everyday. We’ve looked for that love in games, in friends, in relationships – but nothing seems to fill that longing we have in our heart.
But what can we do? It’s fine, right? Maybe that’s how life is supposed to be… we’ll just stuff this desire away and figure it out later. We’re fine on our own – we don’t need other people!
Anyways, we still have time to figure it all out… right?
Chorus:
Oh, I wanna dance with somebody
I wanna feel the heat with somebody
Yeah, I wanna dance with somebody
With somebody who loves me
In reality, this love is all we want and need! We can’t rest without it! It’s out there somewhere – in someone, in something! We want to be with the people who love us. We want to meet that one person we can ‘dance with’. The person who really loves us. We want to find that thing that fills our heart’s deepest desire, something that we will want to spend all our time with, the thing.
Verse 2:
I’ve been in love and lost my senses
Spinning through the town
Sooner or later, the fever ends
And I wind up feeling down
I need a man who’ll take the chance
On a love that burns hot enough to last
So when the night falls
My lonely heart calls
YES! We’ve found that one person who loves us dearly! We’ve finally got that one object that fulfils our deepest desire. There’s nothing more that we want or need! Right?
But soon, we find that feeling of love fades away just as quickly…
It all happened so quickly, and we find that all it does is just make us feel worse than before.
From our dream crush to our dream ATAR – they’re all still there, but we still feel empty and lonely inside. The love we first experienced doesn’t feel the same anymore – the first joy we had has now disappeared.
We need someone who’ll take the chance for us, despite our many failures – someone who’s love will go on forever and never falter. But where can we find this?
Bridge:
Somebody who, somebody who
Somebody who loves me yeah
Somebody who, somebody who
To hold me in his arms oh
I need a man who’ll take the chance
On a love that burns hot enough to last
So when the night falls
Someone reaches out to us! He reaches out to us with a love that is like no other. It’s the fulfilling love that we’ve wanted from the start. He’s a man who took a chance even while we were still sinners, who even died to save us. His love burns hot enough to last for all eternity. But on His deathbed, when He reaches out His hand to finally hold us, all He asks is that we love Him back completely.
At this request, we clench our fists and turn our back. We say to his face: “What is your love for me? What is your sacrifice to me? I’m better off with all the other things that I have. Why would I ever love you?”
To our friends, we mock and scorn him. In front of them, we say, “All these other things that never gave me full pleasure are better than the eternal love that this man has for me.”
His eternal love is nothing to us; instead, we’d rather go back to our old loves that never truly satisfied us.
Outro:
To clarify, I am not sure whether Whitney Houston was a Christian when she wrote this song, and this whole ‘interpretation’ of this song is my own. It’s probably completely different to the meaning of the original song, but the whole purpose of this ‘comparison’ was not to compare human romantic love with Jesus’ love for us. It was to help us get a sense of how beyond our comprehension Jesus’ love for us is. In fact, it’s a different love altogether (see my article on Jesus love – https://regenerationz.org/do-you-really-love-jesus/).
We often try to find love in the things of this world – in relationships, games, academics, money etc. But none of these things truly satisfy us. In fact, they fade away and leave us worse than when we started. Still, we persist to trick ourselves into thinking we can fulfil our deepest desire with the things of the world.
Sometimes we do get the thing we want or the love that we desire. We finally feel satisfied and at peace. But in the end, as time goes on, we lose that initial love we had for them as they slowly fade away. People leave, temporarily and permanently. Things break and can never be used again.
But, withstanding the storms of time, stands the eternal love of Jesus. This love didn’t come cheap either. It was Jesus that ‘took a chance’ when he came to earth to live and die for us. Yet, when we see this eternal love, we turn our backs and prefer our temporary, unsatisfying loves of the world.
How long will you dwell content with the transient things of the world? How long will you keep thinking they can satisfy that hole in your heart?
Blaise Pascal once said:
“There is a God-shaped vacuum [hole] in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing but only by God the Creator, made known through Jesus Christ.”
Will you let God fill that hole today?
