N.B. As always, there is one main song for the week, but there are many other classics dotted throughout the blog.
Just click the links and enjoy!
There is also a significantly bigger backstory than normal before we get to the song this week, as I seem to have gone into nostalgia mode!
Back in the day, I would often pay double the price for albums by artists virtually unknown in the UK. This will seem like an alien concept to many as with one click on Spotify you can listen to whatever you like these days.
In the early 90s, this was not the case!
If it wasn’t released in the UK you had to order it at a special desk in HMV, something I regularly did! This should have made me a ‘cool’ teenager, but while everyone else was listening to Blur, I was waiting for my Boyz II Men debut album to arrive from the USA. On top of this, the kind of Christian music I liked to listen to wasn’t readily available here in the UK. Occasionally you could find some gems in the CLC Bookshop in their teeny Christian music section. Hidden between the Amy Grant (Find a Way) and Michael W Smith (Breathe in Me) cassettes I found CeCe Winans.
At the start of her career, CeCe sang with her big brother BeBe and I loved their album ‘Different Lifestyles’. It’s playing as I type this (one click on Spotify) and it would appear that I still know all the words to ‘Addictive Love’. Fans were devastated (but quickly moved on) when BeBe and CeCe pursued their solo careers and she produced one of my favourite songs, ‘Alone in the Presence’. If you need a moment of tranquility and a reminder of the true meaning of worship, then this is the song for you. In 1998 she sang how “faith is the only key” in times of trouble in her song ‘Well, Alright’ and in 2005 she encouraged me to ‘Pray’ even when I’m frustrated at the state of the world.
Like many, I have recently been loop listening to the ‘Goodness of God’ (only CeCe’s version will do for me)! After it had played several times, Spotify shifted to the live album, where I heard 'Believe For It' for the first time.
Finally, the song for this week they all cry!
It grabbed my attention as soon as the music started.
I turned up the volume and I was immediately challenged by these words…
“They say this mountain can’t be moved,
They say these chains will never break,
But they don’t know You like we do,
There is power in your name.”
CeCe Winans/ Dwan Hill/ Kyle Lee/ Mitch Wong
They say…
They don’t know you like we do…
All I could think was…am I a ‘they’ or a ‘we’?
When I see images of war and conflict on the news am I a ‘they’ or a ‘we’?
When I see division in our society and hear words filled with hate, am I a ‘they’ or a ‘we’?
When I look to the future and imagine how God can use me as a force for good in the world, am I a ‘they’ or a ‘we’?
When I think about the future world my kids will live in, am I a ‘they’ or a ‘we’?
Am I a hopeless ‘they’ looking at the world and seeing no way through, no hope, no possibility, no future peace…
or am I a ‘we’ secure in the faith-filled knowledge that there is power in the name of Jesus?
In all honesty, I think I’m both at different moments in different circumstances, but the challenge of the song remains.
“Move the immovable,
Break the unbreakable,
God, we believe,
God, we believe for it,
From the impossible
We’ll see a miracle,
God, we believe,
God, we believe for it.”
CeCe Winans/ Dwan Hill/ Kyle Lee/ Mitch Wong
Do we?
This week as you reflect on the words of this challenging song, I pray that God will renew and strengthen your faith and through his power that we will all believe for a hope-filled future.
I pray that God, the source of hope, will fill you completely with joy and peace because you trust in him. Then you will overflow with confident hope through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Romans 15:13 (NLT)
Kay Moorby
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