It was great to be in the Gathering to share in worship this past Sunday. One of the songs that Josh and the band played was a song I’ve been hearing on the radio a lot these days. Andrew’s fiancé Ally sang it so beautifully and so poignantly on Sunday.
It’s a song that started out on the Christian radio stations and then crossed over to mainstream radio. I can hardly get in the car without hearing it come on the radio. I’ve even had the experience once of hearing it on two different radio stations at the same time! Maybe you’ve heard this song, too. It’s by a young woman named Lauren Daigle, and it’s called “You Say.”
Here’s a link to the official music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIaT8Jl2zpI
A few weeks ago, I heard it again, and I began to wonder how it is that this song has become so popular, has crossed over from Christian to mainstream radio so successfully, and has gathered so much attention that Daigle was invited to perform her song on the stage of this year’s Billboard Music Awards.
And then I realized: it’s her lyrics. It’s the transparency, the vulnerability with which she shares her struggles to come to know who she is, to claim her worth, her identity:
I keep fighting voices in my mind that say I’m not enough
Every single lie that tells me I will never measure up
Am I more than just the sum of every high and every low?
Remind me once again just who I am, because I need to know
And that’s the moment when she unleashes the first “ooh-oh” of many in this song. These days, as soon as I start to hear the meandering piano part at the beginning of this song on the radio, I just go ahead and blurt out a big old hefty “OOH-OH!” much to the annoyance of my family members who happen to be in the car with me.
But who among us cannot relate to those voices in our own minds that try to tell us we’re not enough, that we’ll never measure up to somebody else’s (or even, or especially, our own) expectations of us? Who doesn’t wonder if our lives only amount to the grand total of the difference between the highs and the lows, the good days and the bad? As I shared with the youth at the conference youth assembly a couple of weeks ago, I’m 45 years old and I still fight those voices and wonder those same things.
Who among us doesn’t need to be reminded from time to time who we really, truly and most deeply are?
Then she kicks into the chorus:
You say I am loved when I can’t feel a thing
You say I am strong when I think I am weak
You say I am held when I am falling short
When I don’t belong, oh You say that I am Yours
And I believe, oh I believe
What You say of me
I believe
What powerful words! Read them again if you need to. Absorb them. Let them find their way into your heart so that you can believe them and trust them, too. Let yourself be the “I” who is loved even when you can’t feel it, who is strong even you’re weak, who is upheld when you’re falling down and beheld when you don’t belong.
And if you’re the “I,” then who’s the “You”? Who’s the “You” she’s singing to here in this song? Who’s the “You” who gets to say who you and I are? Do you see? It’s God! She’s singing this song to God. That means this song is a prayer. It’s a prayer to God. This song that has crossed over to mainstream radio and has won all these awards and was featured on the Billboard Music Awards program is a prayer. And whenever we sing it in the car, or in church, or in the shower or wherever, it’s a prayer then, too.
It’s a prayer for God to remind us who we are, especially when we are so prone to forget it.
The only thing that matters now is everything You think of me
In You I find my worth, in You I find my identity.
So, who is the only one who can tell us who we are? Is it all these voices in our minds? Is it all those voices out there in the world? Who gets to say who we are? The only one who gets to tell us who we are is the one who made us, the one who created us, the one who loves us, the one who saves us.
OOH-OH!!!
The Keith Church Blog 