Casting Crowns - The Very Next ThingSample

O MY SOUL

The God You Know

The night I discovered I had cancer, I sat down at the piano. That’s how songwriters bleed. We bleed songs. I started writing out my feelings, and a song called “O My Soul” began to emerge. It portrays my inner turmoil and battle with myself, reminiscent of some of David’s verses in the book of Psalms. One of the coolest lines ever is when David says, “Why so downcast, O my soul? Put your hope in God.” He’s talking to himself and asking, “What’s your problem, dude? Shake it off. Trust in God. He’s going to walk you through this.”

The theme of much of my ministry is “Thrive.” It’s the name of my student ministry’s Wednesday night worship service and also the name of one of our albums and a book. It has nothing to do with prosperity in a material sense. It has everything to do with thriving in our relationship with Jesus.

To thrive, we must consistently dig into Scripture to establish our roots because storms are going to come. Life is going to happen. When cancer came, my storm reeled me for a minute. Yet I noticed that as crazy and out of control as life felt, all of my feelings kept slamming into something solid in me that wouldn’t move. And that was my roots and my faith and what I knew to be true.

That’s the origin of a special line in the song I wrote that night: “There’s a place where fear has to face the God you know.” There’s a difference between how you feel and whom you know, and in those moments, I had to pull away from what I was feeling and remember the Jesus I know.

Someday, perhaps soon, you’ll hear peals of thunder on the horizon. Trouble will come. Be encouraged in this: Just remember the God you know. And be challenged in this: What are you doing to build your root system and get to know him more?