How can I sing these songs? (website only)

1. How can I sing these songs
   when inside my heart is torn?
   How can I praise your name
   and lift my worship to you?
   
2. How can I see you here,
   how can I know you're near?
   How can I see your face
   when all I feel is despair?
   
   Refrain
   (But) You’re God in the darkness,
   you’re God when I’m found in the desert.
   You’re God when I’ve lost my faith,
   and I lift my heart to you,
   put my trust in you alone.
   
3. When the scars don’t heal,
   and the pain is all too real,
   when I feel all alone
   and life is getting my down:
   
   Refrain
   
4. When the tears have run out
   and my mind is full of doubt,
   when my future seems bleak
   and I don’t know my way:
   
   Refrain

Words and music: © Richard Graham Download as a PDF

Ideas for use

This is very much a worship band piece, and perhaps best used (at least on a first outing) with a soloist or small group singing the verses and the congregation joining in with the refrain. There’s some irregularity in the verses that takes a little getting used to, but this is offset by the short, repeated musical phrases, both in the verses and the refrain, that act as anchor points for the singers.

Though the words of this song read in a very personal way, they will find their place in shared worship at times of reflection on our shortcomings as people of God. In Lent (on Ash Wednesday, for example), and maybe in preparation for a service of Holy Communion. In the end, however, this is a song of praise, for the God who is God even in the darkness.

More information

There is a psalm-like quality to this song, expressing highly personal, deep emotional pain while at the same time asserting God’s insistent, continuing presence even in our own darkness.

As Richard says, “How many of the psalms start with the writer complaining at God about something or another, yet end with the psalmist praising God with a phrase like ‘Yet I will praise you’?” He also speaks of the book of Job, and the book of Lamentations – an entire book of the Bible written as a record of the low point of life, yet containing the words: “This I call to mind, therefore I have hope” (Lamentations 3:21).

There are echoes here of Psalm 130, for example, which begins “Out of the depths I cried to thee, O Lord”. (See Martin Luther’s famous metrical translation, StF 433, and also David Lee’s paraphrase on this website. Also cf. Gareth Hill's Aberfan hymn, God who knows our darkest moments.)

That psalm of penitence has been interpreted as a prayer by the worshipper preparing to enter the Temple, and in this song too the end goal is to “lift my worship to you” (v1). At the beginning it seems like an impossible task. As the “prayer of humble access” put it in the traditional service of Holy Communion, “we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table”. The abyss between how we feel and how God is for all eternity appears too great to cross.

However, the song’s refrain underlines the hope beyond all hope that we can and will lift our hearts to God, because we can trust in God to stay by our side.

Richard writes about how this hymn came about, at a time in his life when “things were getting a bit strained” and he realised he was living with depression. “My faith was wavering slightly”, and I was simply ‘going through the motions’. I felt that I was losing my religion, but I knew that I wasn’t. It was shaky ground.” When asked to lead a worship song one Sunday, he wondered whether this wasn’t hypocritical of him – to lead others in worship “when I wasn’t really feeling it myself”.

It was at this time that the words of this hymn came to him – “How can I sing these songs when inside my heart is torn? How can I praise your name, and lift my worship to you?” – complete with melody and chord structure.

Richard sings his determination to praise God at all times – in the words of Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady, “through all the changing scenes of life, in trouble and in joy” (StF 638). (Their hymn is itself a paraphrase of Psalm 34.)

It is unusual for any of us never to experience a time when “my future seems bleak and I don’t know the way” (v4). At such a time, it may be to Richard’s words that we wish to turn.

Richard Graham works in the media industry and is a Local Preacher in the Wimbledon Methodist Circuit.