The Story -

I was reading Scripture one day and came to Matthew 22 where the Sadducees try to trick Jesus with a very unlikely scenario. They did not believe in the resurrection and so they asked Jesus, if a woman was remarried six times, who would be married to her after the resurrection of the dead? First, Jesus answered that there is no marriage in the resurrection. They were wrong to assume any of the men had a claim to the woman in the afterlife. But beyond that, He replied: “Have you not read what was said to you by God: ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living.” This was a reference back to when God appeared to Moses in the burning bush.

For some reason, those words, which I’d read a thousand times before, struck me in a new way and my eyes were opened to its fuller meaning. I had always assumed Jesus meant something like we will still be alive in the memories of our loved ones. But I realized that what He really was saying is that death isn’t the end at all. If we die in Christ, death is only a transition from this life to the next. That stuck with me and I pondered how I could write a new song based on that. My own grandmother was in her twilight years and so I wanted to write something that could be encouraging for her and for family - a song meant not just for a funeral, but a funeral celebration.

After a year, I had a couple partial verses written but still no tune. Inspiration was not coming for some reason. One day I sat at the table with my laptop praying for some kind of melody idea. Soon, loud and clear a sparrow outside my window began singing a tune I’d never heard a sparrow sing before. I grabbed my phone, recorded it and that birdsong became the core melody for this hymn! I purposefully wrote it to have an element of joy, because death is, truly, not the end. God is the God of the Living!

-Peter Schlaybach