by Ginny Owens
David wanted one thing: to be with God, the author and lover of his soul. Not merely to receive the good things His hand could offer, but to know Him. To experience His presence. When we praise God, our belief grows that we can find all we need in Him, no matter our circumstances.
For me, it means I feel the weight of my deep desire to belong fall away. And when I hear what He says about Himself and about me, my praise becomes an empowering, life-giving song of freedom and deep contentment. It is with real hope that I can happily say, “I am seen, known, and so loved by the God of all.” And that is the only “one thing” I really need.
Your Song of Praise
In every chapter of this book, there will be a place for you to write your own song. Now, don’t freak out. There are no rules to follow in this process, and you don’t have to share with anyone if you don’t want to. The point here is to pour out your heart to the Lord. Sing to God with the passion and enthusiasm with which you’d sing your favorite songs. These songs are your declarations of praise, thanksgiving, lament, or request. They can take the form of a literal song or a prayer, letter, poem, or journal entry. The key is to write out words that express how your heart is responding to what we’ve explored.
Consider where Leah’s story intersects with yours. Just as Leah learned to praise God for being God, despite her dark circumstances, I encourage you to praise Him. Start by thinking of some of God’s qualities. Describe how God has helped you, impressed you, or stirred you. Jot down words and phrases you think of when you think about God. Pray over those words, and then write your song of praise below. I’ll share one of my songs to spur your creativity:
You alone came to free us.
You alone can redeem us.
You are faithful to complete us.
God, You alone.
For Your goodness, we thank You.
For Your greatness, we praise You.3
Singing God’s Song
Though Leah’s song of praise is simple, I think it is useful to memorize it. That way, when we reflect back, we can remember what she was missing and how God gave her peace in spite of it: “She conceived again, gave birth to a son, and said, ‘This time I will praise the LORD’” (Gen. 29:35).
King David, Leah’s distant grandson, proclaimed his desire to know the Lord in Psalm 27. Let’s memorize these words too: “I have asked one thing from the LORD; it is what I desire: to dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, gazing on the beauty of the LORD and seeking him in his temple” (v. 4).
Listen, you heavens, and I will speak; hear, you earth, the words of my mouth.
Let my teaching fall like rain and my words descend like dew, like showers on new grass, like abundant rain on tender plants.
I will proclaim the name of the LORD. Oh, praise the greatness of our God!
He is the Rock, his works are perfect, and all his ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is he.…
Is this the way you repay the LORD, you foolish and unwise people? Is he not your Father, your Creator, who made you and formed you?…
For the LORD’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted inheritance.…
He shielded him and cared for him; he guarded him as the apple of his eye.…
The LORD alone led him; no foreign god was with him.…
You deserted the Rock, who fathered you; you forgot the God who gave you birth.…
“See now that I myself am he! There is no god besides me. I put to death and I bring to life, I have wounded and I will heal, and no one can deliver out of my hand.”
Deuteronomy 32:1–4, 6, 9–10, 12, 18, 39 NIV
Chapter 2
A Song for the Plodding Path
The Long, Hard Slog to Nowhere
A few months before I lost my eyesight, a piano came to live at our house. A beaten-up, old, out-of-tune, reddish-oak upright piano. It no longer played well enough to be of use at our church, so instead of ending up on the trash heap, it became my greatest treasure. I quickly discovered I could plunk out my favorite melodies on its ancient keys. I would spend hours finding the notes of familiar songs until I’d play myself to sleep, my three-year-old face squashed against the ivories.
A couple of years into my incessant repetition of the songs I knew from preschool and Sunday school, my mom decided it was time I began piano lessons. I could hardly wait. But sometime during the first lesson, I realized studying piano was not going to be easy. I didn’t have the patience to sit still and straight for a half hour of learning scales and proper fingering and memorizing intricate pieces of music. I still don’t.
Because I couldn’t master every skill immediately, I spent many of my early lessons thinking, I can see no point in all this monotonous toil. But because God has a sense of humor, I muddled through a piano lesson nearly every week of my existence until I graduated from college. I came to respect the process, but getting better at piano was—and still is—tedious, grueling work. But God is creatively working behind the scenes, even when we don’t see it. As a kid laboring through my practice sessions, I began to experiment with making my own melodies. Soon enough, instead of rehearsing Minuet in G, I was composing full songs.
Since then, writing songs has been my way of journaling—whether as a girl declaring the woes of school life or as a grown-up contemplating the great mysteries. But what I’ve learned is that songwriting is a slog. Trying to find just the right lyrics and melody to express an idea can take days, months, sometimes years. And once the song is finished and I share it, there is always a chance it will fall flat. And then it’s back to the drawing board.
The instrument-learning and songwriting processes are not unlike life. When our efforts pay off, we revel in the results. But what about when they don’t? What about when we feel stuck, going through the motions but never moving forward? How can we be satisfied with our lives when they seem to be going nowhere? What do you do when life feels like a never-ending plod?
The Power of the Plod
Perhaps you’ve found yourself in a season where the work is tedious and monotonous. Perhaps, even though you know in theory that you must be in a time of preparation, you’re not quite sure for what or why you’re seemingly stuck in your current moment. You’re aching for the future to hurry up and get here already.
No matter where we are in life, there is likely some aspect where we feel we’re slogging through. Maybe it’s a job that isn’t fulfilling, a relationship that always feels like work, or simply the pervasive longing for more that never lets up.
Most of us have tried to get unstuck by doing what we can to shake things up—changing jobs, changing relationships, changing our hair.
We try talking to God about our struggles. And if we’re honest, it doesn’t help. We often feel like our time with Him is itself stuck in a rut. We go through the motions, but they don’t change us. So our lives remain tedious or just plain ordinary.
But what if there is true magnificence to be found in the mundane? What if it is on our plodding paths that we find our purpose? What if the God of the universe desires to meet us on the road seemingly headed nowhere, to empower us with strength and dazzle our hearts and eyes with Himself?
The Scriptures are packed with people on plodding paths—called to slog through tedious or difficult circumstances day after day, year after year. Moses is an exceptional example and a wonderful guide on such a journey. He traded one dull phase of his life—a forty-year career of plodding after sheep—for a more difficult season of plodding: leading hundreds of thousands of cranky, clamoring Israelites on a forty-year journey to God’s promised place for them.
The Israelites, the people over whom God had given Moses charge, were on their own plodding journey. They had been slaves in Egypt for four hundred years. Then they were wanderers in the desert for another forty.
The story of Moses’s transformation as God guided him in the long game is truly riveting. As the Lord led him one slow, plodding step at a t
ime, his dependence on God grew. He came to see things more as God sees them. His patience deepened. He became infinitely wiser and extraordinarily compassionate and loving.
Moses learned quickly how to trust God on his plodding path; the Israelites were more like me—they had moments of finding their strength in the One who had ordained their journey, but they typically forgot God. At the end of his life, the shepherd Moses (who had once been afraid to speak) sang to the Israelites a song for their plodding path—their new national anthem (see Deut. 32). If it became the song they loved to sing, its truths would guide them in all the terrain ahead, long after he had gone.1
If we summarized the song of Moses into a song we could remember, it might go like this:
Rehearse God’s greatness.
Remember His faithfulness.
Return from darkness.
(Repeat)
In my mind, this summary song sounds like Moses’s rhythm of walking with God—plodding along, one foot after the other. He insisted Israel adopt the same walk.
Let’s explore Moses’s song together to discover what he knew about singing on every step of the journey—whether delightful or dull, an easy walk or a laborious crawl. I will also share some of the miraculous ways God has taught me to sing of hope in the most mundane moments of my journey.
Rehearse God’s Greatness
Moses began his song by calling on the heavens and earth to pay attention, then launched into praising God for His greatness, insisting Israel do the same: “I will proclaim the name of the LORD. Oh, praise the greatness of our God! He is the Rock, his works are perfect, and all his ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is he” (Deut. 32:3–4 NIV).
Moses knew firsthand of what he sang, as did his people. They’d witnessed God’s greatness as He brought plagues, which disproved the existence of all the Egyptian gods, leaving Pharaoh and his people helpless and Yahweh and His enslaved people victorious (Ex. 7–12). They’d seen God’s greatness as He split the Red Sea for them to cross but closed it again over their Egyptian pursuers (Ex. 14). While in the desert, they’d witnessed God’s greatness as He led them with a pillar of fire and a cloud and protected them from the attack of surrounding nations, who could have instantly wiped them out (Num. 14:14). God’s great power and strength had also come against them when they had ignored His instruction and chosen their own path—railing against Him and worshipping idols (Ex. 32; Num. 11:1–3).
Moses was teaching the Israelites to drill God’s greatness into their minds until they believed it. And why? It wasn’t another ritual to add to their religious practices; it was to inspire their love, wonder, and confidence in who He is. It was to convince them that God is God and they were not. It was so that whenever they faced circumstances they did not understand—whether uncertain, adverse, or monotonous—they would run to their great God. Moses knew that if Israel sang to their own hearts and to one another of God’s greatness, it would change them into people who centered their lives on Him.
The Practice of Singing God’s Greatness
As we discovered in the last chapter, when our hearts are not tuned to sing God’s praise, our sense of His awesomeness and power fades away. We get overwhelmed by the cares of the world, the holding pattern we’re in, and the fact that life is not going according to plan. We try to take on the role of God, believing that the steps ahead are up to us. But eventually our inability to do what God can do frustrates and angers us and leaves us feeling more stuck than ever.
Singing of God’s greatness empowers and renews us in the truth that there is a perfect, holy One worthy of all our love and worship—One who loves us so much He would come to save us and walk with us through every moment.
I remember a season when I began to learn of God’s greatness firsthand. My playing and songwriting had led me to Belmont University, a school in Nashville known for its outstanding music program. I loved the idea of making music for a living, but I also knew that was not necessarily practical, so I spent three years in a double major of commercial vocal performance and music education. But at the end of my junior year, when I auditioned for the hundredth time for one of the music school’s elite ensembles and, for the hundredth time, failed to get in, my professor said something that changed everything.
“Ginny, your voice is just weak,” she bluntly explained. “It’s unrealistic to think you’ll be able to make a career out of using it.”
I was hurt by her words, but I knew they weren’t meant to be hurtful. So I cut the cord of the dangling dream to write and sing. I dropped my performance major and threw myself headlong into finishing my music ed degree. This meant I spent my next semester taking all the general education classes I’d been putting off while focusing on my music coursework.
I thought I was going to die from the workload, to say nothing of sheer boredom. I went to class, came home, did exorbitant amounts of homework for subjects I would never use again, fell into bed in the middle of the night, and did it all again the next day. Most concerning, I could not see the road ahead, and I could only hope against hope that somehow the work would pay off.
But during that semester, I also found myself involved in a college group at a new church I was attending. Our leader was a kind, soft-spoken, middle-aged family man who adored the Lord and taught us what it meant to rehearse His greatness. Each Sunday we would show up to learn about who God is and talk about what it meant to respond to His goodness with our lives. We would then share all our concerns, doubts, and fears, and together we would pray. As our teacher led us in prayer, he modeled what it was to pray with hope and confidence. With God’s greatness in focus, we knew He heard us, longed to draw us closer, and would powerfully work in our circumstances.
Moved by all I was learning, I experienced something delightfully unexpected during this desert semester: while sitting in those mundane general ed classes, I wrote more songs than I had during my entire college career, perhaps even my life up to that point. The premise of many of them was the same: I don’t know what You’re doing, but I know You are God, and I know You are good. And that is enough.
I had no idea at the time that this collage of songs would eventually make up much of my first album.
Remember: God’s Faithfulness in Uncertainty
In the song Moses taught Israel, nine consecutive verses encourage meditation on God’s faithfulness. “Is not [God] your father, who created you, who made you and established you?” (Deut. 32:6 ESV). Moses went on to sing that if the Hebrews asked their fathers, they would tell them of God’s history of faithfulness. From His promise to give Abraham and Sarah a son, to protecting Abraham’s grandson Jacob from being undone by his foolish mistakes, to preserving Jacob’s family through his son, Joseph, who became second-in-command in Egypt despite his brothers’ desire to murder him and his unjust imprisonment, God had been faithful. With God’s guidance, Joseph anticipated a severe famine, stored up food for the entire nation of Egypt, and moved his family to live there with him. And then, after the Egyptians had enslaved Jacob’s family for four hundred years, God had sent Moses to the rescue.
Moses left quite a legacy. In the New Testament, he is referenced by Jesus (Mark 12:26), the apostles (Acts 3:22; 13:39), and the author of Hebrews (11:23–28). Even in modern culture, elements of his story are figures of speech: “parting the Red Sea” and “mass exodus,” for example.
But what I love about Moses’s story is that he had no idea he was preparing for a life that would leave a legacy. It was in the dullness, in the plodding, that he became “the man of God” (Deut. 33:1). His story encourages us all that plodding down a path that feels mundane might be the most glorious choice we can make.
Moses, you might remember, was rescued at three months old from the genocide that Pharaoh, the Egyptian king, was perpetrating against Israelite baby boys. One of Pharaoh’s daughters found him in a basket in the Nile River and took him to live in the royal palace, adopting him as her son (Ex. 2:1–10).
Instead of laboring in the hot sun, making bricks with the rest of his people, Moses was a “silver spoon” kid, receiving everything an Egyptian prince got, including a first-class education (Acts 7:22). Moses came of age destined for greatness. But his heart was stirred as he realized that beyond his ornate palace walls, his people were being abused.
One day, around the ripe young age of forty, Moses saw one of his fellow Jews being wronged, and “he defended the oppressed man and avenged him by striking down the Egyptian” (vv. 23–24 ESV). Again, we hear the Bible speaking the truth as it was. In Moses’s time, avenging someone with murder would have been more culturally acceptable than it is now, though not acceptable in God’s sight.
Moses thought “his brothers would understand that God was giving them salvation by his hand” (v. 25 ESV), but after the murder, his people openly rejected him (vv. 27–28), and Pharaoh set out to kill him (Ex. 2:15).
Moses escaped to the desert of Midian (in the west of what is modern-day Saudi Arabia), where he married a priest’s daughter. Then he began tending his father-in-law’s sheep, a job he held for roughly forty years (Ex. 2:15–21; Acts 7:30).
Can you imagine the utter dullness? The man prepared for power as a prince presided not over people or governmental matters, but over sheep. Yet God had protected him from death twice, and little did Moses know, God had an elaborate plan prepared for his future.
Remember: God’s Faithfulness in Every Detail
I’ve often wondered what it must have been like for Moses, that prince, scholar, and bold proponent of justice turned outlaw turned shepherd. He was probably resigned to the idea that he would spend the rest of his life sheep-tending in the desert. But at eighty, at the point when most folks are slowing down, God came to Moses, singing of the detour that would become his new road.
