This song is a call to worship which reminds us that though we come from diverse circumstances, we join together to worship as the family of God. The song is designed to make room for us to name our individual circumstances in extemporary prayer, and then call on God together with the refrain.
Sing the refrain to start. The leader then invites people to pray extemporary prayers that begin "Lord, I come…" to name their circumstances. The whole group joins to repeat the refrain after each set of prayers.
I was reflecting on the Doxecology project and also thinking about the word ‘Resound’ - and the basic song came pretty quickly while I was driving on a long journey. It started off as my attempt to write a modern ‘How great Thou art’ with all of creation singing praise to the God who brings salvation and restoration to all of creation. However it quickly became clear that the subject matter was too big for this song, so after numerous Resound writing sessions I finally came to the conclusion it needed to be more to the point - that then released me to focus on the song as a call to worship. The verses went through many lyrical re-writes and the bridge was added at some point, using Revelation 4 which I hope gives a sense of call to eternal, everlasting praise.
This song seeks to echo the words of Jesus who called for a new sacrifical life from his disciples. I've tried to keep it as simple as possible, so that we can consider the call and respond with a repeated "I will follow", hoping that each time we sing those three words our commitment becomes a little bit more real in our hearts.
This song draws its origins from the time of the illness and death of my Dad. Singing and making music before the Lord became a particularly important expression of worship for me at a time when I was largely unable to process exactly how I was feeling. And yet there were very few songs that resounded with how I was feeling; often it wasn’t the lyrics that were the problem, but the tone or mood of the song that just didn’t resonate.
While sitting at the piano with these kinds of thoughts in mind one day, this song began to emerge. It sought to express a confidence in God, albeit a confidence expressed in brokenness rather than in triumph; yet a confidence determinedly holding on to the promises of God - not least the ultimate promise that, one day, God will make all things new.
The second, third and fourth verses were written first, and came together relatively straightforwardly - though with lots of tinkering on the way. The first verse was the struggle, and the writing of it encapsulated the move I had to make from seeing it as ‘my song’, coming out of my particular experience, to one that, hopefully, can be sung by others within their own contexts of brokenness - past, present or future.