I Will Be Your Home

About six weeks before my little sister got married last month, I was talking with her and her fiancé about the music for the wedding. My sister liked a song that a friend of hers had written for a mutual friend, and was thinking about having that song in her wedding. The couple it was written for had met at a children’s ministry training institute, where my sister was at the time, and so the song came out of that, and had lines like “together we can better serve eternity.” Nothing wrong with the sentiments there, but I read it, and then said to my sister, “But this isn’t a love song, a song for a wedding. This is a business contract.” She and her (now) husband are planning on going to Africa in the near future to work with children in some capacity, so it is true that there are things they will be able to accomplish together that they wouldn’t be able to separately. But that is not why they were getting married.

When we returned to my house after lunch, I pulled out my laptop, opened iTunes, and said, “This is my idea of a love song.” I selected Andrew Peterson’s song Don’t Give Up on Me, from his new album Resurrection Letters, Volume II that he had sent me a couple weeks earlier and that I had been listening to nonstop, and hit play. Andrew sings, “I walked beside you in the canyon flames / Deep as an ocean and hot as a thousand suns / We barely survived… // Don’t give up on me / Don’t give up on me / Don’t give up on me / I won’t give up on you // Don’t give up on me / I’m begging you, please / Don’t give up on me / I won’t give up on you.”

That song wouldn’t work for the wedding, though, because it is more of a 14th anniversary kind of song, a song from the middle of the journey, not the beginning. My sister and her fiancé both liked it, so they asked me to write something that was built around the same idea. I tried several times over the next couple weeks to write something, but was only able to come up with a bridge; I couldn’t find anything I liked for the verses and chorus. The week before the wedding, I was down in Atlanta with Matthew Paul Turner, and after I had called my sister to tell her I didn’t know if I would be able to finish anything, I pulled out my notebook to try one more time. Matthew asked what I had so far, I read him the bridge, he tossed out the line “maybe when we’re older,” and we went from there, finishing two verses that night. The next day, I wrote the chorus and then started writing out the melody so I could send a leadsheet to my friend in Chattanooga who would be singing it. On Friday, five minutes before I was supposed to leave my mom’s house and head over to the wedding rehearsal, I finished writing a violin obbligato for it, and we were able to practice a couple times that night (I was playing piano). And the next day, the performance went off without a hitch. I’ll try to post the video from the ceremony so you can hear the song when I get a copy of it, but for now, here are the lyrics.

Be Your Home

Words and Music by Stephen Lamb and Matthew Paul Turner

Written for Sarah and Daniel Roberts

Verse 1:
Maybe when we’re older,
maybe when we’re wise,
We’ll look back on our story
and see what God designed.

There might be a thread of sorrow,
there might be a thread of pain.
But the beauty and the mercy
will be our sweet refrain.

Chorus:
We know that God has brought us together
and He has made us one.
Our love, for Him and each other,
will be our anchor in the storm.

Verse 2:
Maybe when we’re older,
maybe when we’re wise,
We’ll see how Jesus touched our story,
and how His truth gave us light.

And when we look around us
at the faces that we see,
We’ll see how we changed their stories,
how their stories changed you and me.

Chorus:
We know that God has brought us together
and He has made us one.
Our love, for Him and each other,
will be our anchor in the storm.

Bridge:
And when the storm clouds descend
and hope disappears,
I promise to stay by your side.
I will not turn away,
in the dark of the night.
I will be your home.

Chorus:
God has brought us together
and He has made us one.
Our love, for Him and each other,
will be our anchor in the storm,
our anchor in the storm.

Ooh, ooh.
I will be your home.

Copyright 2008 Stephen Lamb and Matthew Paul Turner

Update: Here’s a video of the performance from the ceremony.