It happened in a very musical city -- Nashville, Tennessee; so, you have to wonder whether the venue where these two songwriters had an epiphany had a history with lyrics scrawled on napkins, or maybe conversations that moved from tables to exit doors and back to studios, as happened one day in the early 1980s. Phill McHugh and Greg Nelson had tried all morning, but they seemed to be pushing all the wrong buttons as they sat in Greg’s office trying to produce some new music. Was it only hunger that drove them to a local restaurant, a needed sustenance break to feed their physical selves? Phill and Greg found other hunger at the eatery they chose that day, but it wasn’t their own. It was a perception they could have picked up in probably almost any public gathering, but perhaps it was the fusion of something they were trying to find and their own otherwise ordinary purpose for going to this place that sparked what happened next.
She could have probably been almost any waitress, who served Phill and Greg that day in a restaurant where they went after a fruitless morning of song creation. The Nashville restaurant is also not named, but it would not be surprising if both the server and the location were actually familiar, at least in a distant kind of way. The two men both remembered seeing her face, and thinking that even with a smiling expression, this woman had a vacant look in her eyes. That’s when they spontaneously thought ‘she needs the Lord’, a not uncommon impression they gathered when observing the other lunchtime guests in the place. Was it just a bad day, when everyone was a bit overwhelmed by their schedules and tasks – maybe just a feeling of tedium that often pervades urban life? Phill and Greg imply that they recognized this place and these people, maybe not by names and details of their lives, but that this emptiness was sadly very normal for millions of people around the world. It was impossible for the two songwriters to actually look into all those countless faces, as they sat in one restaurant, but what they saw in that place in the space of one hour convinced them that a solution, a divine one, would resonate for people all over the globe. ‘Every day…filled with care…private pain’ (v.1) were the insights that Phill and Greg could see permeating these people, even if they never had had a conversation with them. Perhaps the two men had often felt as these restaurant workers’ and its customers’ faces suggested that day – that life lacked something, and furthermore, that the ‘… world where wrong seems right’ (v.2) was in control of events. How do people escape a situation that seems to violate standards of right and wrong? It’s a ‘lost’ world, McHugh and Nelson concluded, but that’s not the end of the matter. Meet God, and He will be to all of these distressed people an ‘open door’ (song’s refrain) to a new reality, one where He redeems all of us and life itself.
Phill McHugh and Greg Nelson were actually thinking of themselves a bit as they sat in that Nashville restaurant, too. After all, they went there to be served food. They were hungry. The morning’s efforts must have left them feeling somewhat frustrated, so perhaps the change of scenery was one thing they sought in order to approach their objective – song-making – from a new angle. As they looked about themselves at the other people, they arrived at kind of a self-judgement in the last line of their new song: ‘When will we realize…’, and joined that thought with the song’s title words. Greg and Phill were admitting their own responsibility – and, yours and mine too – in helping a lost civilization find its way back to the Creator. I’m made in His image. And, so are you. Walk toward Him and toward those who know Him best, and see if things don’t look brighter.
The song story is found in the following books: I Could Sing of Your Love Forever, by Lindsay Terry, Thomas Nelson publishers, 2008; Stories Behind Popular Songs and Hymns, by Lindsay Terry, Baker Book House Company, 1992; and The Complete Book of Hymns – Inspiring Stories About 600 Hymns and Praise Songs by William J. Petersen and Ardythe Petersen, Tyndale House Publishers, 2006.
