WorshipCentral

Here's the story behind June's song...

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I love this little throwaway line that Gabriel drops into the conversation with Mary. It’s one of those brilliant world changing promises: you're going to give birth to Jesus, the Saviour of the world, and it's going to happen because nothing is impossible for God.

Over the past few months this has been a key verse for us as a church: we're on a pretty big adventure, and like all adventures it has its mountain-top moments when the view is amazing, and its valley troughs, when all seems lost. This verse has kept popping up: in prayers, in sermons, in closing blessings, in encouraging emails.

Then my wife and I have also been praying about starting a family, and we’ve come back to this promise about birth time and time again. I’ve found myself mumbling it in the shower when I’m half awake; we’ve been reminding each other casually in conversation that with God, nothing is impossible.

I found myself singing a rough version of the chorus last year during a ministry time. I parked it for a bit, and then started working on it with a good friend called Hanif. Hanif pushed the tempo and feel a lot faster and we worked on loads of different verse ideas and pre-choruses.

Then one day Hanif and I were sitting the tiny office I share with Tim. We ran the song past Tim to get some feedback, and Tim suggested a couple of changes to the structure that made things work a lot better, and a simpler tag.

By this stage the song was about 90% finished, but the last 10% took probably about as much work as the previous 90%! We agonized over the words, swapping the word ‘uncontainable’ for ‘inexhaustible’ and then when we finally ran out of all ideas, the cop-out ‘indescribable’.

All the way through, we’d been chatting with some theologian friends who had been pushing us to get the virgin birth in there, stay true to the whole Philippians thing of power made present in weakness, and bouncing it off the guys at Survivor who publish the songs. Seriously frustrating, but worth the work in the end to get lyrics that feel more complete.

Then the next step was to try it out in a smaller group, work an arrangement with one of our bands, and then gradually release it into the church. The whole process has taken about six months, but has felt like ten years.

Anyway, hopefully that’s a little insight into the joys and frustrations of writing a song for the congregation. Now to find out if it actually works…