waves of grace

There are times in worship when you can feel the music. I don't mean "feel" in the emotional sense. I don't mean it in the sense that you can really relate to the lyrics. I mean you can physically feel the music.

This used to happen to me a lot when I was in Waco and The Dave Crowder Band was leading worship at UBC. There were times in that place when each sound from the band would come at me like a wave in the ocean. It would start out as a normal sunday worship. But somewhere along the way the sound waves became thick.

It was as if the base drum and base guitar became the heartbeat of God. Kind of like when parents hear through a sonogram their baby's heartbeat for the first time. Or how it must feel for an infant to place his head against his mothers chest and hear her beating heart. This heartbeat keeps everything else in time.

Then as all the other instruments join together, the waves started crashing. The snair, the electric guitar, the acoustic, the electric violin, and finally the vocals all blended together in harmony. Wave after wave of sound came at me and I couldn't seem to sing anymore.

Somewhere in the music, not just in the lyrics but in the sounds, was the presence of God. Wave after wave of sound would hit my chest and my face. It was consuming. I felt like a little kid at the beach waiting for the next wave to crash on him. Only these waves of sound didn't quite knock me over. They seemed to just envelop me.

I heard the heartbeat of God against my chest. I heard the cries of the angels piercing through. I got a glimpse of the eternal chorus. Pouring out from the stage through these waves of sound and onto the congregation was the Spirit of God. And for a moment we were all caught up in Him.

As the song ended I was brought back to reality. The tide went out again. But I knew something special had just happened. And God in that moment became present not just in the poetry of lyric but in the power of music.