Day 18

Welcome Back!

If this is your first time reading my blog, then I want to let you know that I am currently on a 30 day challenge to listen to nothing but Christian music. If you are wondering why I would want to do such a thing, or what I am hoping to get out of this, then I suggest that you go back and read my very first blog post. And if you are wondering as to whether this has had any impact on my life yet, then I suggest that you go and read any of the other blogs. Anyways, let’s get into the blog!

For today’s blog, I am going to be highlighting a very new song, so new in fact that it was just released a couple weeks ago. The song is a very catchy and fun song, but I am gonna be honest, the lyrics are a little confusing at first.. at least they were for me. But that is why I want to highlight it today! Because upon listening to it again, I think that I have stumbled upon a breakthrough! And I may have just cracked the code, and figured out what they are meaning when they say some of the words that they do in the song. Anyways, let’s get into the song.

The song is called “Lightning”, and it is the latest single from the band The Afters. The Afters is one of the biggest bands in the Christian music industry, and they have been one of the best bands at adapting their sound over the years to keep up with the way things have been moving. If you go back and listen to their first stuff, and then listen to this song or their last single, you are going to be surprised by what you hear. Anyways, this song is a very up-tempo, up-beat song, which makes it a prime candidate for being a song that I am going to like. In fact, I knew I was going to like the song almost immediately after it started playing because one of the first things you hear in the song is a “woooooooohoooooo” and anytime there is a “wooooooohooooo” in a song, I am basically guaranteed to love it! The song opens up with an infections clap track beat, and very up-tempo music, which is matched by the extremely catchy way they sing “Lightning, Lightning”. It is almost impossible for someone not to love this as soon as they hear it. The first verse of the song really sets the scene for where we are though when it says: “I haven’t always lived in freedom, I used to wear the chains of shame and doubt, inside my heart was like a desert, waiting for your rain to come down” As you can see, the band is setting the scene by letting you know that they have not always lived in the freedom that they are singing about, and something changed that allowed them to break free from their chains of shame and doubt. It is at this point that the music of the song starts to pick back up, and the pre-chorus verse starts with: “And like a freight train, your Holy Ghost came, shaking the ground underneath my feet, Your mercy rolled in, my chains were broken, And I’ve got joy ’cause you set me free.” This paints a beautiful picture of what it feels like when the Holy Ghost takes over you! It really is like a freight train that you feel like you have no power in stopping. And although I don’t feel like I am fully there yet, I can testify that that is exactly what it feels like!

Now we have reached the main chorus, and it wasn’t until recently that I have kind of gotten an idea as to what the song might be talking about when it says: “You came like Lightning and saved my soul, rolled in like thunder and shook my bones, Now I’m dancing in the rain since you called out my name, you came like lightning and saved my soul” Now of course I understood that what they were trying to say was that God came in and changed their lives and he saved their soul, but what confused me was why they would choose “lightning” as their metaphor. This was not something that I had ever heard of before, so it was confusing to me at first. But after thinking about it, I think that lightning is a wonderful metaphor for what it feels like when the Holy Spirit invades your life, because a lightning strike is something that happens quite unpredictably, leaves a HUGE impact on its impact, and injects a lot of electricity into whatever it strikes. And if you have every been struck by the Holy Spirit, then you can testify that that is kind of how it feels. Not every person in the world has the Holy Spirit living inside of them, and a lot of other people do have it living inside of them, but they just don’t realize it. That was how I was just recently in fact! But when the Holy Spirit invades your life, if is just like a Lightning strike because things will never be the same. It is something that happens in an instant, and you really can’t know when it is going to happen to be honest. Just like a lightning strike, you can’t do anything to make it happen. However, there are things that you can do to increase your odds of it happening, such as putting yourself in the right environment, and using the right tools. And once that lightning strike happens, you just feel invigorated with energy that you just want to direct at God! That is why I think that the use of lightning as their metaphor for what it feels like to experience God and the Holy Spirit is actually a perfect one. I am going to stop the blog here today because that is really all that I wanted to say, and the rest of the song continues in the same way. I personally would like to dare you to listen to this song once and not have that “Lightning, Lightning, wooooohoooo” part stuck in your head! And if you do give the song a listen, then I hope that you enjoy it as much as I did. Thank you for reading, and have a blessed rest of your day.