This was the twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, and our songs around the theme of healing. Below, you’ll find the list of the songs and artists. Clicking the song titles will take you to the lyrics. Below the songs, you can find recordings from Sunday morning of a few of them, and below the recordings, there is an example of one way you might think of these songs in light of this week's theme. If you want to talk about any of these, feel free to comment at the bottom of this page or email me at jamie@ubcwaco.org.
Songs:
Wandering by Jameson McGregor
Amazing Grace by Citizens & Saints
There's A Wideness in God's Mercy by Jameson McGregor (adapted from F. Faber)
Breathe For Me by Jameson McGregor
Lord, I Need You by Matt Maher
How They Fit In:
There are many ways to think about the significance of songs and the way they fit together–-this is simply one way you can look at these songs in light of this week’s theme.
Wandering: We sang this song to celebrate God's faithfulness to us, even though our faithfulness to God is inconsistent, at best. With the theme of healing in mind, we might think of God's relentless choice to be God-for-us as the method of God's healing us. God is actively healing us of our brokenness all the time, though this process is slow. And, because God has chosen to redeem what God has made, we can trust that God will be faithful to do exactly that.
Amazing Grace: This song is an exercise in looking back to look forward. The saving work that God has enacted in our lives is not a one-off event, but instead is indicative of the way God acts toward us in general. So, looking back at the glimmers of hope or healing in our stories, we move forward knowing that there will be more.
There's A Wideness in God's Mercy: This song confronts our tendency to try to talk ourselves out of any confidence in God's faithfulness to be God-for-us--as though we could disqualify ourselves. Instead, it reminds us that the love of God is not limited by our own sense of what kind or degree of mercy we deserve.
Breathe for Me: The healing we experience in our lives of faith tends to cycle--that is, we usually break again in one way or another. This song is a record of re-breaking, and a plea for healing: for God to start over with the dust and ash of what is left, form it clean, and breath into it again.
Lord, I Need You: We sang this song to look over our shoulder at last week's songs. This is what we said about Lord, I Need You Then: This song voices our need for God's help in all aspects of life, but particularly when it comes to doing the things that we should do. Left to our own devices, we have a tendency to disappoint--or, worse, harm--ourselves and those around us. Over time, we might find ourselves more permanently formed by the Spirit, but we never get to the point where we do not in fact need God's presence.
Doxology: We close our time together each week with this proclamation that God is worthy of praise from every inch of the cosmos.
-JM