When I Look Into Your Holiness -- Wayne and Cathy Perrin

If you have trouble sleeping, with your mind going into overdrive in the graveyard hours of the night, you should take note of how Cathy Perrin managed her insomnia – in a productive, positive way. It makes me reconsider what to do the next time the dark ceiling stares back at me from a prone position on my queen sleeper. Do crickets speak to you from the dark, prompted by God? How about dreams…are divine messages slipped into one’s consciousness this way? What if the light was suddenly snapped on in the middle of the night, bright as the sun (see picture)? Would that be Him trying to get your attention? Listen to the story the Perrins (Cathy and Wayne) tell about the song “When I Look Into Your Holiness” that they wrote beginning in the wee hours one night.

Cathy and Wayne Perrin say the song’s story actually began six years before it was written, in 1974, and continued well past its 1980 advent.  A minister on a singing tour the Perrins took in 1974 predicted the couple would compose a song that would one day travel across the globe. In 1980, Cathy’s insomnia pushed her to write many of the words to “When I Look Into Your Holiness” at 3 AM. Though it was dark, perhaps a pitch black or moonless environment, Perrin evidently saw a light. It was God’s presence, His very nature that had her rapt attention. It might as well have been a prayer in isolation, in her own closet, as Cathy composed solitarily.  Little did she or Wayne know that this was the song the minister six years earlier had foreseen would travel so far. It took 10 years from that minister’s forecast, until 1984, for the Perrins to comprehend the song’s destiny. Through word of mouth, literally, the song had been in transit for many years, and was taking on broader wings to South Africa and Singapore by the mid-1980’s (albeit, with the words “…my will becomes enthroned\enthralled in Your love, versus “…my heart is enthroned in Your love” as the Perrins originally composed the second verse). Amazing, but not incredible when God gets involved.

With no other soul between herself and Him, we can be thankful that Cathy Perrin responded that night in 1980 with something other than a sleeping pill. How would you or I have reacted ? The song she began, and which Wayne helped finish later, captures a moment. Cathy says that the song puts in a nutshell for the believer a basic truth – I’m here to worship, and it starts with really looking at Him closely, not sleeping or trying to ignore Him.  The negative form of this kind of attention is labeled ‘obsession’. It’s a habit, an irresistible desire, an addiction. That’s how strong it is, when\if I really see Him, and then let it grow. He wants me to see Him in whatever place I am, to compare the creation to the Creator. Try it on, and see where it takes you …from a dark closet to the fantastic beyond.   

   

The Perrins’ song story link is here:

http://www.crosswalk.com/church/worship/song-story-when-i-look-into-your-holiness-1286092.html    (article written by Melissa Hambrick [contributing writer], 21 September 2004)