The overarching collective grief shared across generations and cultures during our current international crisis is truly something I haven’t experienced in my lifetime.
Having been saved almost 12 years ago, I consider myself someone who lives each day with a great deal of hope – however, even I have had moments these last few months where I find myself sinking into despair, wondering what next month or even next week will look like for my family and loved ones. As someone who has struggled with addiction, and still wrestles through daily thoughts of relapse, it is a curious thing to look around and realize that perhaps the rest of the world has finally caught up to the craziness in my head.
Like most songwriters, I often find myself responding to what I see and feel about the world with a guitar, a piano, and a pencil. So as I began to walk through the early days of the pandemic, I knew in my heart that my response to it all needed to be a song. So I took some old melodies I had been working on in years past and began penning what became our new single OUT OF MY GRAVE. Thematically, it certainly isn’t much of a departure from some similar themes that we often explore through our musical project The War Within. Light in the darkness; hope against despair; beauty within brokenness; love for the hurting; grace for the furthest. Singing about the valleys and the mountaintops; the joy and the pain of living here in this broken world waiting for our Saviour to come is sort of the lifeblood of our whole project. But I knew with this song, we wanted to take it even one step further and really explore the desperation of feeling like all hope is truly gone, to the point where we are “barely surviving, sinking beneath the waves”, setting the stage for God’s promise to come roaring back into our lives, our hearts, and our headspace.
On the surface, it is kind of crazy to see my testimony of addiction and grace as sort of a metaphor for what the entire world is experiencing; but doing so unlocked probably the most honest lyrics I’ve ever penned. But I think the most important part of this song (like any The War Within song) is the Jesus moments. The moments where we know that even in light of every hurt, every addiction, every sin, every heartbreak and every deep soul craving, Jesus Christ is still waiting to take our hand and bring us back into a vibrant life with Him. A life of hope and grace. A life where we can take our brokenness, our pain, and even our pandemics and put them in their correct place: beneath God.
My favourite line in the song is in the chorus. “When I was in my grave, You raised me up to sing and dance upon the promises You made.” When Jesus comes back, THAT is where I want Him to find me: singing and dancing upon His promises. I hope and pray that this song helps you enter that place of trust and celebration in His promises as well.
-John Harter