THE POWER OF A SIMPLE SONG

I sighed, patted my jacket pocket to make sure I had my security pass with me and then pushed open the glass door that leads to the outside world.

The outside world was raining. The car park was glistening and puddles were popping with raindrops. It summed everything up. I shook open the umbrella and set off into the murky twilight.

It had been a pretty low day, to be fair. Messing up the quote had had a sort of domino effect, rippling around the department, email by email. I think we got it sorted by the end of the day but for a while I didn't know whether I was about to get blasted with accusations of incompetence, peppered with big questions from the big cheeses (and I do mean the big cheeses) or just quietly rescued by managers who talk in hushed voices out of earshot. Rain pattered onto my umbrella, reminding me of what I'd said earlier.

It was then that I remembered something. I believe that sometimes God just nudges us to remember things at perfect moments, and out of the randomness of the air, I suddenly found myself thinking about an old song we used to sing at church. It's really simple - so simple in fact that it seems quite boring compared to the latest Hillsong epics or the polished sound of Bethel Music. It bounced straight out of the 1990s, skipped through the intervening decades and landed full square in my head on a rainy walk home from work. So, I started to sing it.

To be in Your Presence
To sit at Your feet

It's in D this, said my brain, mentally thinking through the notes.

Where Your love surrounds me
And makes me complete

There are people at the bus stop looking at you, you lunatic.

This is my desire, O Lord
This is my desire
This is my desire, O Lord
This is my desire

It's such a simple song. It's got six notes in it. By the time I got home I was feeling much better about myself; it was as though a light had suddenly switched on - a light that helped me see everything much more clearly than the stress of work had allowed. That's what worship does - it moves the focus away from you, like a magnifying glass; it re-images what you can see so that the only thing that matters, the only person that's in focus, is Jesus. When that happens, everything seems much better. His strength looks better than my weakness, his beauty obscures my failures and his authority eclipses anyone I could choose to fear. I got home laughing at my work-based worries, knowing that however it turns out, it will be OK.

Sometimes as worship musicians you know, we get a bit tired of playing the same old chord progressions and the same old songs. If it were all about music I'd have given up a long time ago. Thank the heavens it isn't.

As I reached the front door, squelching happily in my shoes and collapsing the famous gentleman's-umbrella, I chuckled at the irony - it had taken a boring old song from the 1990s to teach me that lesson.