Why We Sing

Why We Sing

One thing that always mystified me growing up was the act of singing in church.  I grew up a Protestant and became a lapsed Protestant despite attending a private parochial college. 

Everywhere I looked, as youth was lousy with praise groups and worship leaders.  In fact, my university offered a degree in it.   A degree in picking out hymns and leading a choir stuffed full of middle-aged hypocrites in balloon-like robes.  If God was so powerful land so infinite, why did we need to sing songs about him?  Wasn’t that just another way of patting ourselves on the back?  Wasn’t that one more way to keep us from reaching out and helping in a world that needed every bit of help it could get?

I stumbled around with this and sneered at the likes of Carman and Michael W. Smith.  I decided they were fakes who made a good living selling Christians what they had already bought.  However, in the last few years,  I have faced problems much worse than I could ever have imagined and I have been blessed beyond deserving, it has become clear, as I have fasted, studied and read the Scriptures as well as the works of Francis Chan, Rick Warren, David Platt and John Eldredge, that we sing because it is the only thing we can do sometimes. 

If you accept the fact that there is a God, you accept that God is a being worthy of praise.  I do not expect that everyone believes that.  However, if you do, then, you must realize that every morning presents itself as a new testament to the wonder of the life that we have been given and that every moment is an amazing, unique moment.

So, I learned why we sing.  I learned that now beloved hymnal “Amazing Grace” was exactly how I felt as a  broken, fragile human.  I learned that by singing it aloud that I was offering, unashamedly, unabashedly my praise to a being that I could not fathom. A being that, I fully believe, took me aside and protected me when the world collapsed, and I had no idea what would happen next.

I am weak, I am fragile, but most of all I am grateful.

That is why I sing.