It's Time to Look Up

A few days ago I wrote a post about the origin of my blog URL, hungry4justice. This post is about the origin of my blog title, "It's Time to Look Up." Just as I owe my URL to Katie, I also owe my blog title to those who introduced this song to me.

This line is from a song called "Come On, My Soul" by Rend Collective Experiment. I first heard it at Wesley Woods this summer when I was a counselor at the high school camp. I had once upon a time found another song that I thought was paired with this one, but at this point it is lost to me. (Because the opening lines "sing my soul" are not in the official song by Rend Collective Experiment.)`

Sing my soul, sing my soul
Sing my soul, sing my soul

Come on, my soul
Come on, my soul
Let down the walls
And sing, my soul
Come on, come on, come on, come on
It's time to look up 

Heather Humm prefaced the song by talking about the line, "It's time to look up." What she said (as I understood it), was that sometimes in our lives we become caught up in all the things going on around us. We are overwhelmed by our obligations and preoccupied with tasks to be completed. She said that sometimes when she is at Wesley Woods, she takes a moment to pause and look up through the treetops into the light, into the sky. To look up to God and remember that He is good and He is love and He is more than these obligations, these problems, these tasks, these things.

As a person who is frequently tempted to measure self worth in terms of action and performance, this was such an important song for me. To me the line "It's time to look up" is what reminds me to look up to God in every circumstance, no matter how hopeless I might feel.

In the broader sense of injustice and human suffering, it is a line that says to me, Now is the time to look up to God. It is the time to let down the walls of fear, of anger, of hate in our hearts. Now is the time to believe in God--in His power, in His justice, in His mercy, in His love. Now is the time to look up and trust God and to know that He will give us the strength to move forward in the face of incredible adversity. Now is the time to look up--to believe, to trust, to hope.

Here is the official video of the song.

Thank you to Heather for the words that have stayed with me to influence my future (forgive me for any misrepresentations/misunderstandings/false memories.) Thanks to Miah and the others who lead the song in a way that spoke to my heart and stuck with me through the summer months. (I prefer your version, but sadly I do not have a video of it.) And thanks to anyone else who was involved in bringing the song to camp this summer.