ChristianDance

Who were you before Jesus found you?  Drew Parker spent a decade chasing a country music dream. He got the record deal, the Opry stage, the number 1 songs written for other artists. Then Jesus interrupted the plan. Drew realized that he’d spent years asking God to bless his ambitions instead of surrendering to God’s. So he decided to walk away from something that was working, not something that was failing. Walking away like this requires a special kind of courage.  In the song “Blame Jesus”, Drew Parker and Steven Curtis Chapman share Drew’s story in plain terms. The song speaks about burning bridges, chasing a “lost highway,” being “a prodigal, a rebel on a losing streak.” Sound familiar? Most of us may have seen a comparable variation of that story in our lives. When God is working in our lives, things change! Drew sings about that change: “these days if you look at me, and what you see ain’t what you used to see.” He doesn’t credit it to willpower or self-improvement. H...

What happens when your mind becomes the battlefield? Night & valleys bring their own kind of noise. Fear whispers, doubt shouts, and a hundred voices compete for space in your head. That noise also manages to spread its way into other parts of our lives. That struggle is the theme of Gresha Schuilling's song “Be Strong in the Lord.” The lyrics describe a battle that starts long before our circumstances change: “The battle first was won within // Before the light broke through.” Real victory begins in the mind, not in the moment things finally look better. The song names a shift that most of us are familiar with. While our mind is often capable of balancing external data and placing it in a healthier context, our own thoughts seem to easily bypass that balancing mechanism. Our thoughts grow loud, our fears grow louder, and we need something powerful to interrupt that cycle. We ask God to guide us and bless us with truth. “Your Word grew stronger than our thoughts // As truth to...

Can honest sorrow and steady faith coexist?  Jordan West and Red Letter Society released “Psalm 13 (So Good)” as part of their Psalms Project, a project aimed at working through all 150 psalms, one song at a time. Psalm 13 doesn’t waste words. It opens with a question David asks four times: “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?” That’s not a form of polite prayer language. In this moment, David is a man in pain, staring at silence, wondering if God even remembers his name.  The song holds that tension. “How long will you hide?” the lyrics ask, and then, “sorrow in my eyes.” No performance. No pretending. Just raw honesty directed straight to heaven through prayer. Have you ever prayed like that? Most of us will have felt something similar at certain points in our lives, even if we never shared that with others… or tried to hide it from God… There’s a turning point in this psalm. David moves from questioning to trusting: “But I have trusted in your steadfast love; m...

Can you surrender what you can’t control?  Prayers don’t need clear, beautiful, or powerful words to reach God. They need honesty. HOMECOMING wrote “yours.” from a place of complete surrender, and you can hear that throughout the song. The song moves through the waiting rooms filled with worries, our valleys of weakness, and the mountaintops of life alike, refusing to feed any misunderstandings that faith only shows up when life feels good. “In my weakness, I will know Your strength”  — that’s more than words on a page… It’s a way of thinking, a decision made in real time, often through gritted teeth.  Here’s the tension that the song points out: we make plans, and God has better ones. The chorus emphasizes the mindset: “Lord, when my words fall short, I want nothing more than to sing ‘I am Yours.’” Have you ever noticed how the deepest and most powerful prayers are sometimes the shortest ones? “I am Yours,” three words, plain and clear, words that carry more weight than an ...

Looking back builds the courage to keep moving forward.  Samuel once set up a stone after a battle and named it Ebenezer, saying, “Till now the Lord has helped us.” That single stone became a marker, a physical reminder planted in the ground so nobody could walk past it and forget what God had done. “Ebenezer” by David Dowdell borrows that same idea. “Here I raise my Ebenezer, only by your help I’ve come,” the lyrics declare, and that line carries generations of gratitude.  Think about your own life for a moment. Where have you seen God show up? Maybe it was a financial provision you can’t fully explain, or a battle against sin you thought you’d never win. The song declares: “You’ve brought me victory in the battle against sin and self-defeat.” That’s a testimony, the kind worth remembering on your hardest days. Your Ebenezer.  Here’s why remembering matters so much. Psalm 77:11 says, “I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes, I will remember your wonders of old.” Y...