The Healing Power of Music

The song "Thank you for the Music," sung by ABBA in the 70's and 80's has a great line, "Thank you for the Music, the song their singing, thanks for all the joy they're bringing, who could live without it?  I ask in all honesty, Where would I be?  Without a song or a dance what are we?"  That pretty much sums up the power that music has over me.  I can be transformed by one musical note.  For National Health Blog Post Month, our assignment today is Top Three Tuesdays: Name three songs that can get you out of a low point. 

It's brutal trying to scale down my list of favorite songs.  Music makes my world go around, and there is always a song that seems to rise up from the others and become my anthem for different seasons of my life.  During Evie's chemo, for example, it was Held by Natalie Grant.  Songs seem to surface amidst the stormy waters of life and carry us through until we might find some still waters. 

Currently, my songs that inspire me, and transform my day are Go Glow by the Newsboys, American Noise by Skillet, and, and song that always seems appropriate to me is Martyrs and Thieves by Jennifer Knapp. 

I sing at the top of my voice when I listen to any of these songs, and they are usually the ones I'll sing in the shower.  Go Glow reminds me to shine~everyday.  People watch me and know that I'm a Christian~but I'm still also a sinner, here in a body of the earth, not of heaven.  So, I need songs like this to lift me back up when I let this world get to me.  This song also makes me think of Evie and how she glows.  Her worship of God is what God wants all of ours to look like, but she doesn't have that "social filter" the rest of us do which makes us hold back.  When we go to concerts people will say, "Can I photograph your daughter?"  They want to capture what she has in her spirit.  I'm sure the pictures don't do it justice, however.

American Noise is so perfectly timed for today's society.  There really is a lot of noise out there; horrible things that are happening.  The typhoon in the Philippines, murders in rural Wisconsin, families falling apart, drugs taking lives and dragging them straight to hell in the meantime.  Being a mom of a daughter with WAGR, I find the noise is often in my head.  I try to sort out appointments, medications, and priorities.  I try to turn off the voices of fear and doubt in my head.  There is so much NOISE, NOISE, NOISE, NOISE (to quote the Grinch who stole Christmas.)  But, in American Noise we are encouraged to "lift up our voice, take all the noise and make it into music."  Well, now~how lovely is that?  My blogging here is a form of me transforming noise into music. 

Last, but not least by any means is Martyrs and Thieves.  That song goes straight to the core and gives me peace.  It's a song about the redemption we have through Christ.  It's a song about our sinfulness, the inability we have to flee from sin because we have a sin nature, and how Christ can make us Kings and Queens someday if we ask him to be our Savior today.  I mess up all the time.  I know what God wants me to do, but I am stubborn and selfish.  And this song takes my resistance and shows me how much I am loved and that my life is worth more than throwing it away for selfish desires of the flesh.  As long as I'm here, I'll be a sinner, but hopefully that will just show others how great our God is.  "Like a lamp on a hill, Lord I pray in your will, to reveal all of you that I can."