Tori Kelly - Help Us To Love Lyrics

Video

Tori Kelly - Help Us To Love ft. The HamilTones (Live) ft. The HamilTones

Meaning & Inspiration

My hands aren't as steady as they once were, and the ink in my old hymnals has begun to fade into the yellowing pages, but there is a particular ache in Tori Kelly’s voice here that sits right in the marrow of my bones. She’s singing about a love so high you cannot get over it, a love so wide it takes forever to circle. I’ve spent four decades trying to measure that breadth, only to find that every time I think I’ve reached the edge, I’ve only just started.

"It don’t come cheap, it takes everything."

That line caught me off guard at three in the morning. When you’re young, you talk about love like it’s a feeling that washes over you, a sudden warmth. But after you’ve buried friends, after you’ve seen the bitter edges of humanity on the evening news—just like Tori mentions—you realize love isn't a warmth. It’s a transaction of the soul. It costs your pride. It costs your demand for justice on your own terms. It costs the illusion that you are the center of the story.

Paul wrote to the Ephesians about being rooted and grounded in love, about knowing the breadth and length and depth and height. He didn't say it was easy. He spoke of it as a mystery that requires the strength of the Spirit in the inner man. When my back is aching and the silence of the house feels heavy, I don’t need a song that tells me everything is fine. I need to be reminded that the cross wasn't a piece of jewelry or a slogan, but a place where a life was actually laid down. If love is supposed to be the "cure," as she sings, then why does it feel so much like a blade that cuts away everything I want to keep?

There’s a tension in this song that keeps me listening. She’s looking at a world that is "weeping, hurting, broken," and she’s honest enough to admit that our marches and our prayers often feel like they’re shouting into a void. I’ve been there. I’ve sat in the back pew wondering if the prayers were actually going past the ceiling. But then she pulls it back, moving from the big, noisy world to the quiet, desperate plea: "God help me to love, the way that you love me."

That’s the only place where the lights don’t go out. It’s not about fixing the country or winning an argument on the television screen. It’s about the terrifying, costly work of looking at someone I find difficult and asking the Almighty to move through me. It’s not a young person’s idealistic dream; it’s the only way to survive the wreckage of being human.

I don’t know if we’ll ever see the peace she’s asking for in my lifetime. Some days, it feels like we’re just running in place. But when she sings about that love that takes everything, I find I have a little bit left to offer, even if it’s just a tired, shaky prayer for my neighbor. And perhaps, at the end of the day, that’s exactly what the "cure" looks like—a life finally emptied out, not by grand gestures, but by the slow, painful, beautiful act of holding nothing back.