by David Dodd

Shaun Groves dove into The Word for reflection on his current CD, White Flag.  The dive was aimed directly in two areas – The Beatitudes, and the Psalms.  While most of the songs on White Flag are centered within the Beatitudes, one of his best tunes, Amen, was focused primarily on David’s writings in the Psalms.  Shaun explains: 

“Someone had email me.  He was a fan that I’d gotten to know a little bit, he’s a pastor, a very wise guy.  He sent an email telling me he’s praying for me.  We were talking about something on the message board on my website and he thought I was dwelling on unhappy things.  Some people wrote in who were depressed and we were talking about our own experiences with depression, and the solutions.  I was

talking about how I would like to write about more of those things, I feel that a lot of people are hurting and no one will sing about them.  He emailed me stating that David never wrote a song that was sad.  I started thinking and for a minute, because I respect the guy, I thought, gosh, he’s right, but I looked it up and he wasn’t right.  

The Psalms are full of songs that aren’t on the surface, all that happy.  It’s not that they’re totally hopeless, they have hope because they’re eventually directed to God, but you don’t always get to the end and everything’s tied up in a bow either.  I mean, it’s hey, I’ve got these enemies and these horrible problems, God, how long are you going to let me suffer? I mean God’s mentioned, God is still believed in, David

knows God is there, but by the end of the song, God hasn’t intervened yet. 

That’s a beautiful thing, to be able to say this is where I really am.  I started thinking about just a few of the Psalms where I found the phrase, Lord have mercy, and it was always attached to his suffering of some kind, and it seemed like they all were either physical suffering, you know my body’s not working right, things aren’t going well, or sickness, or it was enemies.  David was often writing about his enemies, he was surrounded apparently all  the  time by enemies, or

his own heart betraying him, his own heart was tripping him up and beating him up.  I can identify with all those.  And the beautiful thing with talking about, or praying about, or seeing the struggles in life is that every one of them can be matched up with the truth about God’s provision in that struggle. 

So when I sing about my sickness, I don’t leave it there, when I sing about my sickness it really helps me savor and be thankful for God’s strength and healing.  When I talk about my enemies and I’m lamenting the fact that it feels like the whole world is against me, it really does drive home the fact that I have a friend, a brother named Jesus who will never leave me.   

When I talk about my heart being depraved or turning on me or tripping me up, it helps me notice that I have a God who loves me anyway, who’s forgiven me, who saved me from that.  But if we never talk about the hard moments in life, we never talk about our frailty or our failings, then what are we saved from?   It makes you get to the point where you don’t notice God’s strength because you don’t notice your own weakness.  You don’t notice He can heal because you don’t talk about your sickness.  You don’t really feel the weight of grace because you never will admit you’ve sinned.  And so I sat down and wrote Amen and tried to modernize those Psalms.”