The Reason I Love "10,000 Reasons"
There are some songs intended for worship that I simply can’t sing. They are the best ones. When they are played my throat just won’t function properly and I am just overwhelmed with the thoughts of who God is and what He has done for us. I suppose in those moments I am worshiping more in spirit than in the moments where I am able to sing properly. (Does that fact that the Hebrew language used the word for throat as interchangeable for soul have anything to do with this same phenomenon?)
Sometimes these songs have a greater impact than merely the ideas they are communicating with words. It has to do with a moment in time. Take “10,000 Reasons” for example. The words are great. They express this idea of worshiping in one’s soul very well. Worship is about every moment of life and about a relationship with God and very little with songs or music. This is a similar idea to what Redman was expressing with “Heart of Worship” only better because you can sing “10,000 Reasons” without being drowned in a sea of irony.
For me “10,000 Reasons” will always be associated more with the moment when I first heard the song. It was in a large gathering of believers and we were almost all hearing it for the very first time. As the worship leaders sang the song, we were invited to join in even though we had supposedly never heard it. (Thus is the nature of worship music, you know where the melody is going almost before you hear it.) However, someone behind me had heard and loved this song and she sang it out with gusto… and no tune whatsoever. She didn’t hit a single note right, but she sang it out as loud as she could. It was a terrible bit of singing in this “auto-tuned” world that we live in; but it was beautiful. You see, that sister behind me singing her tone-deaf heart out had just been through a year with cancer on her spinal cord and had come through healed. She knows better than most what that song is all about and it is all the more beautiful in my mind as a result.
Sometimes these songs have a greater impact than merely the ideas they are communicating with words. It has to do with a moment in time. Take “10,000 Reasons” for example. The words are great. They express this idea of worshiping in one’s soul very well. Worship is about every moment of life and about a relationship with God and very little with songs or music. This is a similar idea to what Redman was expressing with “Heart of Worship” only better because you can sing “10,000 Reasons” without being drowned in a sea of irony.
For me “10,000 Reasons” will always be associated more with the moment when I first heard the song. It was in a large gathering of believers and we were almost all hearing it for the very first time. As the worship leaders sang the song, we were invited to join in even though we had supposedly never heard it. (Thus is the nature of worship music, you know where the melody is going almost before you hear it.) However, someone behind me had heard and loved this song and she sang it out with gusto… and no tune whatsoever. She didn’t hit a single note right, but she sang it out as loud as she could. It was a terrible bit of singing in this “auto-tuned” world that we live in; but it was beautiful. You see, that sister behind me singing her tone-deaf heart out had just been through a year with cancer on her spinal cord and had come through healed. She knows better than most what that song is all about and it is all the more beautiful in my mind as a result.
For me, it was also the first time I heard/sang it...at in-service for the teachers. One of the teachers, who leads us in worship, played the guitar (always very well) and he was accompanied by a student playing the cello so beautifully it was so hard to sing because of the emotion welling up in MY throat.
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