“… the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.” 1 Peter 5:8
When our son Parker was stillborn, Kristen and I felt like Satan was trying to devour us. We felt the gravity of God’s warning in Revelation 12:12, “… the devil has come down to you in great wrath, because he knows that his time is short!”
These two verses anchor the beginning of our new song “You Answer,” from Parker’s Mercy Brigade, which you can hear below through our audio player, as well as the embedded “You Answer” lyric video from Kristen’s YouTube channel.
As the song says, we cried for strength to endure, knowing that God answers, that His “power reveals itself in time.” God did answer our cry in many ways, which gave us our second verse:
You answer through creation; You answer through Your Word,
You answer through Your Spirit, and the members of Your Church,
Giving out of their abundance or out of poverty,
As You fashion us together into Your family!
We can’t count the times God comforted us through scriptures that His Spirit brought to our minds, and through His creation — like the perfect day He gave us for Parker’s first birthday. Nor could we have guessed all the times and ways in which God’s people would reach out to us. One quick example:
Parker died on October 21, 2012. We returned from the hospital on October 23. From then until the Monday after Thanksgiving Day, over a month later, we never had to prepare a family dinner. That’s how many brothers and sisters in Christ brought meals to us, mostly from our church Sojourn but also churches like Sovereign Grace of Louisville and Restoration Christian in Indiana.
We experienced many other examples of the compassion, generosity and wisdom of God’s people locally and from around the world. We thank all of you, we thank our great God, and we humbly offer back this song. We hope it will bless others who are hurting from Satan’s attack, and waiting on God’s response. And we hope the message of “You Answer” will spur Christians everywhere to live up to her calling, as the song suggests. Listen in the player here:
And in the YouTube video here:
Finally, you can get links for preordering Parker’s Mercy Brigade on iTunes, Amazon and our CD store, plus all the chord charts, and other stories behind the songs, in our new Parker’s Mercy Brigade page here. Remember that half of all proceeds go to Nadus Films, who document social justice issues around the world, then partner with local organizations to provide humanitarian relief and Christian witness.