For more years than I can now remember, or even work out, I have had the privilege of writing a column for Premier Youth and Children’s work about music. (Check one out here.) When I first began, this would often involve trawling the shelves of the local records store, reading the titles of the tracks on the back of each album cover and try to work out if it was worth me spending my £10 to check if that song that looked like it might have some faith references, actually did! Of course, finding the songs has in many ways become a lot easier over the years, although titles can still be deceptive!
I love music, listen to a lot of music and yet despite this being a staple part of my writing month, every month for the last umpteen years, I do not have the right brain to remember the names of tracks, artists or years of release. I do, however, feel music. It moves me. And it moves many of our young people too. This cannot surprise us, this is something God has put inside of us. The Psalms tell of the song God has put in our hearts to sing, and Zephaniah 3:17 tells us that God rejoices over us with singing. Having spent so long studying the lyrics to songs I have both loved and barely tolerated, I believe God has put his song in each of us, every single person he has made, whether or not we fully understand or recognise that.
So many of the songs we find in any week’s given charts will have references which either point to God, which celebrate God, or which seek to point away from him. As I write this, the track occupying the top slot is Calvin Harris and Ellie Goulding’s ‘Miracle,’ Fatboy Slim’s classic ‘Praise you,’ has been resurrected as ‘Praising you,’ by Rita Ora, and who can forget the impact of Stormzy’s Blinded by Your Grace, for example. I believe this can only be true because of the way creator God has created us both to be creative and to praise Him. And the songs of others often enable us to voice what is deep within us and finds away to express how we feel and what we may think. So how do we help our children and young people to experience, to talk about or explore questions of God through music?
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