I am not a musician but music has always played a really big role in my life. I’ve sometimes wondered how my life would have been different if I‘d ever been able to learn to play guitar. I got to where I knew a lot of chords but I just never could get the strumming part down. Oh well.
I’m thinking of sharing different times in my life when some song really spoke to me, lifted me or affected me. But then I’m realizing how very personal it all is. Each song I think about I hesitate from sharing because it’s such an opening into some of the most personal moments of my life.
For example, I wrote a blog post about “The Radio Miracle” how that, during an indescribable few weeks when I was 20, when so many things happened to bring me to the brink of death and hell, that at one point in the middle of the night when I was in desperate prayer, my radio came on without my touching it. And a song of that time was just then playing which said, “Lift up your fellow man, lend him a helping hand, put a little love in your heart.” The words of that song were the words of God to me for that moment, conveyed through music, by a complete miracle.
But just a week before that, I’d been listening to a completely different kind of music, by my favorite group at that time, The Rolling Stones. I’d listened for the first time to their most recent album back then, “Beggar’s Banquet”. The voice of darkness that so strongly came through that album very nearly claimed my life. That’s what I wrote about in “Lucifer and the White Moths”.
There are many other incidents where music has carried me through deep valleys of despair that I don’t think I would have survived if a song hadn’t been on my heart and on my lips, virtually non-stop in some cases for weeks and even months.
I’d like to share a song with you that perhaps many of you know but some don’t. It’s called “The Greatest Song of All.” I don’t know the history or background to it but I first heard it in the 90’s, during what seemed like a time of great defeat and loss. I guess for me this song is such a combination of an incredible heavenly concept, really good music and a perfect text to the song. But maybe in some ways it doesn’t do much good to talk about a song since it’s a thing of itself which goes beyond descriptive words. I’ll paste it in here and hope it will be blessing to you.
http://youtu.be/IWjbZhbRZAE
Loved the song Bro. Mark, thank you for posting it , and all your uplifting messages!
Very inspiring song…I LOVE music, for sure its the key to people’s hearts…<3