8. All of My Life

(Psalm 27.4)

This song is a meditation on the single-minded prayer of 27.4: “May I live in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to behold God’s beauty and to inquire in God’s temple.” (my paraphrase)

I think it’s brave to make a life-long prayer like this. Takes trust. To pray anything for all the days of our lives involves a commitment to years and seasons unknown.

Hey, here’s something. If you claimed one prayer for your whole lifetime, something to center you, lead you and challenge you, what would it be?

“To see Your holiness”, offering the double meaning: May God be in my life, and may I train my eyes to see God in every moment of my life.

VERSE 1
All of my life, one thing I long for
All of my life, one thing I live for:

CHORUS
To see Your Holiness in all of my life
To see Your Holiness in all of my life
To see Your Holiness in all of my life
All of my life

VERSE 2
In every breath, in every shadow
For my own eyes, one thing I pray for:

VERSE 3
Teach me your ways, O God our Savior
I give my heart, I give my eyes, Lord

Verse uno frames the prayer.

Verse zwei names breath and shadow to describe the fact that the spiritual life is integrated into all of life, the prayer to notice God’s omnipresence.

Verse three invokes the Torah (think: Way) of God, naming God as Savior as in 27.1 (“The LORD is my light and my salvation”). It ends with a prayer of surrender.

This part of the Psalm connects us with a prayer for our eyes, as Jesus says that if our eyes are clear, then the whole body is full of light (Matt 6.22).

Behind the song For the longest time, the refrain went: To see the Holy One in all of my life.” Then I thought it would be more true to the Psalm to sing it as a prayer to God, rather than a meditation about God.

When I described the feel of the song to Producer John Hermanson, I just told him to think Neil Young and Green Day.