Someone cares - Do you?

This is taken from my devotion time I wrote and told during a Band Practice:

I don’t know about you, but when I play a piece in the band, I like to look at the words I am playing, and the reason for that is that I find when playing the words (using what’s written) but when playing the words it gives the song some further meaning and gives the song some spirit more than just “playing music”.

We would all agree that the songs of Gowans & Larsson are deeply secured in the fabric of The Salvation Army’s history. Their work, together with having written ten musicals, remains quite an achievement by anyone’s measure.

There’s a song from their first venture together in the musical Take Over Bid, which has been on my heart for a bit, and I found it to be a challenge as well as a wonderful piece. The piece is Someone Cares.

John Larsson, in an interview, was asked You are a writer. Did you ever collaborate on the song lyrics? To which he said, “No. John and I would discuss the themes and plot development, but I was never gifted with lyrics. Sometimes we created songs from simply a phrase. When writing Take-Over Bid, we were talking about the need for a song that showed how God works through people. The phrase ‘someone cares’ came up. From those three syllables, I wrote the tune there and then left John to fill in the rest of the words”.

Those words came out to be:

Do you sometimes feel that no one truly knows you,
And that no one understands or really cares?
Through his people, God himself is close beside you,
And through them he plans to answer all your prayers.

Someone cares, someone cares
Someone knows your deepest need, your burden shares;
Someone cares, someone cares,
God himself will hear the whisper of your prayers.

And finally, the words of the second verse.

Ours is not a distant God, remote, unfeeling,
Who is careless of our loneliness and pain,
Through the ministry of men he gives his healing,
In their dedicated hands brings hope again.
Someone cares.

So, I guess the challenge for me, from what I learnt looking into this song, is that I want to be that person, the hands and feet that God can use to speak into people’s lives and show them that someone cares!

Amen.
Andrew