CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT: God’s great song helps us live the life we were made for

Outside of Time is a song written and sung by our daughter Beth. It was released on Spotify last Friday. In it, Beth sings about her reliance on God in difficult times: “When I’m overwhelmed, he says ‘Be still’.”

Almost every day, Beth told me when she was visiting Lorna and me, she spends time at the piano, thinking deeply, and conjuring melodies from the keys. She has over 2000 fragments of song in her voice memos, the fruit of these daily sessions at the keyboard. I told her this regular practice sounded to me like a form of prayer – of meditating and listening.

Beth spoke about the sense of ‘givenness’ which all creative people experience, when ideas at times flow so freely and so fluently that they seem drawn from some deep well within us. Christians regard these creative prompts, if they are good and life-affirming, as gifts from God.

Outside of Time alerts us not to limit our thinking as Christians. God stands outside time, and is not limited by time. God is bigger than any problem or challenge we face. Beth reminds us that God is ‘working in everything’; God has ‘seen the finish line and he will carry me through it’.

Therefore, as she sings ‘I need to stop worrying’. No matter what happens to us inside of time – even death itself – we are utterly secure because we are held by a great outside-of-time love.

It was lovely, and very encouraging to spend time with Beth, not simply as my daughter, but as a fellow-traveller on the Christian journey. What encourages us in this is the belief that God stepped into the time-zone as Jesus Christ, who showed us that the secret of living life to the full within time is to draw strength and wisdom from outside of time.

This Jesus taught that if God is concerned for the lovely things of nature (specifically mentioning birds and field-lilies) God has infinitely more concern for human beings. Sings Beth ‘I know you see me as much more valuable’, ‘I know you know my every need. So why do I worry?’

And yet we lose our hold on this; we do worry. We all carry fragments within us, voice memos from the past. Some are bad memories which insistently clamour to dominate our present. Others, however are memories of times when we have caught a brief snatch of God’s great song. It is these we need to play repeatedly if we are to live the life we were made for.

Beth trusts that, through her songs, people will come to realise that the outside-of-time God is lovingly and compassionately present in every nanosecond of time.

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