Matt Maher - All The People Said AmenÖrnek

Alive Again

The writing of "Alive Again" started 2 years before it was finished. I actually started writing it the same day that I wrote "Empty & Beautiful." For some reason as I was writing that song, the chorus of "Alive Again" was born. About 2 years later I was driving from McAllen, Texas to San Antonio, Texas to catch a flight. The band and I left our hotel around 4:30 in the morning. As we were driving north I realized, at one point, that the sky had changed colors. It started as a dark, dark indigo and it was slowly getting lighter. The sun hadn't broken the horizon yet and immediately the lyric came to me, "I can see the light, before I see the sunrise," so after all that time, I finally had a chorus and an idea for a verse.

Another inspiration was St. Augustine's "Confessions" Book Ten, Chapter 27 that reads:

“Late have I loved you,
Beauty so ancient and so new,
late have I loved you!

Lo, you were within,
but I outside, seeking there for you,
and upon the shapely things you have made
I rushed headlong,
I, misshapen.
You were with me but I was not with you.
They held me back far from you,
those things which would have no being
were they not in you.

You called, shouted, broke through my deafness;
you flared, blazed, banished my blindness;
you lavished your fragrance,
I gasped, and now I pant for you;
I tasted you, and I hunger and thirst;
you touched me, and I burned for your peace.”

A couple of weeks later I found myself writing with Jason Ingram and he helped me put those two things together and "Alive Again" was born.

Colossians 1:18 says, "And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence."

If He is preeminent in all things, then he's even active in the hearts of an unbeliever before they come to know Him. So in essence a person sees the light before they see the sun.

Get 'Alive Again’ at TheOverflow.com