Crowder Shines

I don’t know if David Crowder can even fathom the amazing impact he has had on worship in the 21st century. He’s not only filled arenas with jumping young people lifting their hands to God and rocked churches across the continent… he’s given believers a tune to hum throughout the day. He’s provided ‘ammo’ for worship.

I can remember the first time my wife heard the words to Everything Glorious and came in to me, “Jonathan, have you heard this?”… I think I teared up. A bunch of us were dialoguing about lyrics of today’s music in the comment section of my blog about pop music earlier this week, and I mentioned, in a world where young girls constantly look in the mirror and think, “I’m ugly,” Crowder provides a song that says:

You make everything glorious
And I am Yours
What does that make me?

So powerful.

Yesterday I was working on my parenting book in progress (5 chapters due today… I’m done with 6. Yeah!!!) and I was finishing up a chapter on “creating guidelines” in our homes. I listed some of my guidelines, one of which had to do with starting and ending the day with Christian music.

This has been an interesting experience in my house. We, like most people, enjoy secular music (The Fray, John Mayer, Five for Fighting…). And we allow secular music in our house that doesn’t distract us from our relationship with God (The Fray and Five for Fighting are great… Mayer is an interesting one…). But we’ve also added this guideline of only allowing Christian music the first hour in the morning and the last hour at night. My kids were really whiney about it when we first discussed it years ago. But we discussed it and agreed on it as a family… and it’s been powerful.

There’s nothing like starting and ending your day with God’s truth in your ears. If you haven’t tried it… I encourage you to.

That said, Crowder is often in my ears. Call me picky or whiney… but I don’t like a lot of Christian music. I’m constantly on the lookout for the good stuff. But Crowder, Dutton, Tomlin… and yes, even a few Toby Mac songs have been a huge help.

Yesterday Crowder blogged about a new video they made with a Lite Brite (hilarious description of trying to make the video with over 80 friends all “pegging” to make it happen). I love Crowder’s videos. I’ll never forget in the last year when I popped on iTunes to look at the Top 10 (something I regularly do) and saw his HOW HE LOVES video at #6 (amazing song and video). I thought, “Rock it Crowder!” So proud of him for making something so quality and so praiseworthy. Well… Crowder’s at it again, this time to his song, Shine.

Other people are already blogging about it this morning… I won’t repeat. But I encourage you to check out his blog, and check out this video. You’ll be humming the song later… I promise. (I downloaded the whole album- I couldn’t resist)