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A lot of music is catchy. I get it. When I became a Christian, I was 17 years old and up to that point, I listened to some very secular music…like music not good at all and the reason I did wasn’t because I liked what the lyrics said, I like the way that they sounded. Honestly, I didn’t really think I was even paying attention to the lyrics. I mean, I never actually sat back and said, what does this song say…what does it mean? No, I just sang them and listened to them. 

 

The problem with that was, Proverbs 18:21 tells us that death and life are in the power of the tongue, whatever we speak (or sing), even if we’re not paying attention to them, we will eventually see. And if we really watch the things we say or think about, we’ll find that a lot of what we’re singing about is what we’re thinking about. 

 

I remember being at a high school/college conference in the beautiful Rocky Mountains of Colorado and the pastor was talking about this very thing…why the music we listen to was important. Many of my friends at the time, me included at first rebelled at the thought…how dare they tell me what music to listen to. It’s not that bad…and then, God got ahold of my heart. I began thinking about the lyrics that I was singing or listening to, and they really started to bother me. These songs weren’t great songs at all. It's not that they had language, because they didn’t. I didn’t care for that even when I wasn’t a Christian, but what they were singing about was all about was the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life: depression-how heartbroken they were, anger, how good looking men were, rebellion.  

 

It wasn’t until I started really paying attention to the lyrics that I was singing and listening to that I realized that those were the exact things that I was dealing with as well. I fought off feelings of depression…not thinking that I was good enough for anyone, thinking that everyone who loved me would leave me. I was fighting off anger…anger that I had to fight through life on my own (I hadn’t totally realized that I could rely on God to walk through the fire with me). I had to fight the feeling of if I didn’t have a boyfriend, I was nothing. Then, when I had boyfriends, they were not good at all. I had a couple who were abusive, but always leaving me more broken than before I dated them. 

 

After this realization, I wish I could say that I just got rid of all my secular music at that time, but I didn’t. It wasn’t easy for me. I did get rid of some of the ones who I thought were the worst, but I still held on to some of them, because music was something that was a part of who I was. I couldn’t just cut off music and listen to old school hymns all the time—no offense to you who listen to old school hymns. My teenage self, coming from the world, wasn’t into that. Then, I discovered this whole new genre of music that did glorify God and was something I could

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