Day 26

Welcome Back!

I am currently in the midst of a challenge to listen to nothing but Christian music for 30 days. I have been doing a good job of this, and I am almost done with the challenge. However, I may continue the challenge after it ends because of the positive effects that I have been seeing from it. If you are curious as to why I decided to take this challenge, then I would like to suggest that you go and read my very first blog from this series. And if you want to see if this challenge has had any impact on my life yet, then I suggest that you read any other blog that I have written. Now, Let’s get into the blog.

For today’s blog, we are going to spotlighting a song and artist that I have always loved, but that I am falling even more in love with recently. The artist’s name is Tauren Wells, and he is an artist who has been taking the Christian radio waves by storm over the course of the last few years. I believe that I have written about this guy before, which goes to show just how much I enjoy him! The song that I am going to be spotlighting today is called “When We Pray”, and I think that you will see why I find it so important to write about as we get going.

Before we get into the lyrics, I do want to say that this is a very up-tempo song, as are many of Tauren’s songs, and it is a great song to workout or run to. So if you are trying to make a Christian workout/running playlist, then this song needs to be on it! The song opens with a very catchy electronic open, and it is really easy to feel the beat in your soul. This is one of those songs that you will find your foot tapping along to when you didn’t even realize it was doing that! The lyrics open with: “People hurting, people broken, beaten down and feeling hopeless, wonder if it’s gonna always be this way. Who will speak up for the captive? Show some love and heal a past that binds the wounds we think will never go away. But what if we could be a people on our knees, as one before the king, ’cause we believe” The picture that these lyrics are painting is a picture of a world that is broken, with lots of lost people struggling to find a place in the world. There are people who are hurting and broken, there are people who are beaten down and feeling hopeless, and they are wondering if this is how it is always going to be for them. Tauren doesn’t leave this picture without a chance for resolution though, because he offers up an option for the believers in the world to take. The option that Tauren offers is for believers everywhere to get down on their knees and PRAY. That is the message of the song, and that is the message that gets further expounded upon in the main chorus.

The lyrics for the main chorus go like this: “All the world starts changing, when the church starts praying, strongholds start to break, oh when we pray. Prison walls start shaking, at the sound of praising, nothing stays the same, oh when we pray, oh, when we pray.” Tauren’s whole point is that the world changes when the church starts praying! There are countless stories in the Bible of things happening immediately, and things happening over time when people pray for them. But nothing will happen if you don’t pray. Prayer is how we communicate with God, and if we don’t pray, nothing will happen in our lives. We need to be a people who are dedicated to prayer, and that is something that starts with me! I need to become a better prayer person, and that is something that I am working on right now. I try to pray at least once a day, but it is not about the amount of times that you are praying. It is about your heart behind it, and that is what I am learning. I have always struggled with trying to figure out how to pray, because I always felt as though I was just coming to God asking for things. And that is not how it should be. So I am trying to get to a point where I am just having a conversation with God, and that has felt much more natural, and helped me grow in my faith substantially. I always loved the lyric in the song “Watching You” by Rodney Atkins that talks about how the artist’s son was watching his dad pray, and then later that night he prayed to God just like he was talking to a friend. That is how we should try to be, because there is true power in prayer, and that is the biggest point of “When We Pray”. Tauren has gone on record saying that this song is a call to the church to start praying more, because a broken world needs a praying church. He says that this song speaks to the idea that we actually have the power to change the realities that we live in through prayer! And it is something that we need to harness and exert in our lives if we are to ever see the change in the world that we so desperately need to see. It is literally impossible for the world to stay the same when the entire church starts praying, and it is literally impossible for your life to stay the same when you start heartfully, and faithfully praying. So MY prayer is that you will hear this song and become inspired to take prayer more seriously, and that you will then turn around and pray for others to have the same realization. And then maybe we all can pray to see the world become a better place, a place that looks a little bit more like what Jesus envisioned for it. Thank you for reading, and God bless you.