Look Up!

There are seasons in life when waiting can make you question everything. You pray about something long enough, and eventually the silence starts getting louder than the prayer. You look around and see other people moving forward while you feel like you are standing still. You start counting the days, the years, the disappointments, the things that have not happened yet, and somewhere in all that counting, it becomes easy to wonder:

Did God forget about me?

That is really where Count the Stars begins.

I wrote this song as a conversation between a younger man who is struggling with that question and an older man who has lived long enough to understand that life rarely unfolds on our schedule.

The younger man finds him sitting on the porch with an old Bible across his knee. He is not some preacher with every answer. He is just somebody who has been through enough seasons of his own to know that sometimes wisdom is not knowing exactly what God is doing.

Sometimes wisdom is learning how to wait without assuming He has stopped working.

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            Found him sittin’ on the front porch
           Worn out Bible on his knee
            I said, “I’ve been waitin’ on an answer
           Feels like God forgot ’bout me”

I love the idea of that old man because the older I have gotten, the more I have realized how much wisdom can be sitting right in front of us if we are willing to listen. When we are younger, we tend to believe that everything needs to happen now. We measure our lives by what we can see happening today. If the relationship has not appeared, if the opportunity has not opened, if the prayer has not been answered, if the dream has not happened yet, we start believing nothing is happening.

Age changes that perspective.

You begin looking backward and realizing there were things taking shape in your life long before you understood what they were becoming. That is why the old man in this song does not immediately give the younger man some complicated answer.

He simply says:

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                  Come on, son... take a walk with me...

                  Some answers need a little room to breathe.

That is where this song connects directly to Abraham.

 Look Up

In Genesis 15, Abram was struggling with a promise that did not seem to be happening.

God had already told him that He would make a great nation from him, but Abram was getting older and still had no child through whom that promise could continue.

From Abram's perspective, the evidence did not match the promise. That part matters to me.

Abram was not standing there full of certainty pretending that waiting was easy. He questioned God. He looked at what he could see and could not understand how what God had promised could possibly happen, and God did something beautiful. He took Abram outside.

         “Look up at the sky and count the stars, if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to            him, “So shall your offspring be.” Genesis 15:5

God changed what Abram was looking at. Abram had been looking at what was missing.

God told him to look up. That image became the heart of this song. What Are You Counting?

I think we spend a lot of our lives counting the wrong things.

We count how many years we have waited.

We count how many prayers seem unanswered.

We count how many opportunities passed us by.

We count what somebody else has that we do not.

We count our failures.

We count our mistakes.

We count everything we can physically see and then try to decide from that whether God is working in our lives, but sometimes you need to stop counting the days and count the stars instead.

That does not mean every prayer will be answered exactly the way we imagined it.

It does not mean every dream we have is automatically a promise from God, and it certainly does not mean that waiting is easy. It means that what we can see right now may not be the whole story.

That is what the old man is trying to teach.

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            God ain’t forgot about you
            You’re just countin’ what you see

The older I get, the more that line means to me. There have been things in my own life that I once thought absolutely had to happen a certain way. Looking back now, some of those things changed completely. Some took longer than I wanted. Some never happened the way I expected, and some became something entirely different.

That is part of growing in faith.

You start realizing that faith is not always getting the answer you wanted. Sometimes faith is continuing to walk when you do not have an answer yet.

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There is another reason I wanted the older man in this song. He has waited too.

He is not speaking from a life untouched by disappointment. By the time we reach the bridge, we see the old sheep dog beside him, gray showing around his eyes, and this man standing underneath a sky he has probably looked at hundreds of times before.

He has asked his own questions.

He has waited on his own prayers.

He has wondered why things took so long.

That is why his words carry weight. He is not telling the younger man, Everything you want is about to happen. He is telling him something much more valuable:

Do not mistake waiting for abandonment. There is a difference.

Psalm 27 puts it this way:

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             “Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.”
              Psalm 27:14

Waiting in Scripture is rarely presented as doing nothing. It is continuing to trust while you cannot yet see, and sometimes the people who teach us that best are the ones who have been waiting longer than we have.

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There is another layer to Count the Stars that became important as the song developed.

God's promise to Abraham was bigger than Abraham himself. When God told him to count the stars, Abraham could not possibly comprehend how far his life would reach. Generations would come after him. People he would never meet would be affected by the faithfulness of one man who chose to believe God.

That is why the chorus says:

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                  What you pour into one life
                 Can outlive your memory

                 You may never know how far
                 One faithful heart can reach

We usually measure impact by what we get to witness, but some of the most important things we do may happen quietly. Something you teach your child could shape how they eventually raise theirs. A kindness you show somebody during the worst season of their life may become something they carry for decades. A word of encouragement may reach somebody at exactly the moment they were ready to quit. You may never even know.

Abraham could not count the stars. That was part of the point. The promise was bigger than what he could calculate and sometimes our lives are too.

Waiting on something can consume you if you let it. You can stare at the same problem every morning, checking to see whether anything has changed.

Did the prayer get answered yet?

Did the door open?

Did the relationship change?

Did the opportunity come?

Did God hear me?

It becomes like watching paint dry. The harder you stare at it, the slower everything seems to move. Maybe sometimes God is simply telling us:

Go outside.

Look up.

Live your life.

Love the people around you.

Pour into somebody else.

Keep praying.

Keep walking.

Keep becoming who you are supposed to become while the answer is still forming. You do not have to understand everything happening behind the scenes in order to keep living faithfully in front of them.

That is what Count the Stars means to me.

It is not a promise that everything we ask for will eventually appear. It is a reminder that when life gets dark enough that we cannot see where God is working, darkness is also when the stars become visible, and maybe that is why the old man never gives the younger man the answer he came looking for. He gives him something better.

Perspective.

At the end of the song, the old man walks back toward the porch. His old dog follows him through the yard. The conversation is over. Nothing in the younger man's circumstances has changed.

His prayer has not suddenly been answered.

There is no miracle waiting in the driveway.

But something inside him has changed.

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           I stood there with that old man’s wisdom...

           And looked up at the stars.

Sometimes that is enough for tonight. Tomorrow can come when it comes.

For now...

Look up and count the stars.