Two Lovers

Mary Esther Wells (May 13, 1943 – July 26, 1992) was an American singer. Wells used singing as her comfort from her pain. Her mother worked as a domestic, and she had an absentee father. One of three children, she contracted spinal meningitis at the age of two and struggled with partial blindness, deafness in one ear and temporary paralysis. At age 10, Wells contracted tuberculosis. During her early years, Wells lived in Black Bottom, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Detroit Michigan and struggled with poverty. By age 12, she was helping her mother with house cleaning work. She described the ordeal years later:

Daywork they called it, and it was damn cold on hallway linoleum. Misery is Detroit linoleum in January—with a half-froze bucket of Spic-and-Span.

— Mary Wells

By age 10, Mary had graduated from church choirs to performing at local nightclubs in the Detroit area.

I am consistently amazed at the number of well known celebrity icons who got their start in church and are seemingly recruited by Satan’s demonic forces to sing songs that do not glorify the Lord. I heard the song “Two Lovers” when I was a teenager and always thought it strange that a woman could love two men exactly the same. Perhaps it was the beat of the music that made me concentrate only on the title and not the words. Perhaps it was my immaturity that did not allow me to understand the full import of having two lovers. Perhaps I was not looking at it through the lens of the Bible where it says in Matthew 6:24 No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

How can a woman not just love, but serve two men equally? Well! I already stated that I did not hear the entire song, but when I read the lyrics I found that the two lovers were one and the same person. Sometimes “her man” was sweet and kind and treated her like a lover should be treated. However there were other times when he treated her bad and made her sad and also made her cry. I can relate as I struggle with my relationship with God and the Devil. How can I truly love the Lord, and I do, and at the same time love the evil that the Devil uses to entice me? Paul in the book of Romans helps me when he said in Romans 7:18-19, For I am conscious that in me, that is, in my flesh, there is nothing good: I have the mind but not the power to do what is right. For the good which I have a mind to do, I do not: but the evil which I have no mind to do, that I do.

Alas, I determined that unlike Mary Well’s man who was one and the same, I needed to only have one Man and His name is Jesus Christ. Also unlike Mary Well’s man, My Man always treats me kind even when I don’t always think what He does is kind. The other man, the one I used to love, still tries to entice me, but I immediately turn to my real Lover. Do you have two lovers? Is one of them Jesus Christ? Selah