"Some Miracles Only Come Slowly": On Andy Squyres's 'Praise Songs'

As both a Christian and a medical doctor, I have spent decades wrestling daily with questions of brokenness and suffering. I have also spent decades leading worship. And Andy Squyres’ four song collection “Praise Songs” has landed in the middle of both of these arenas with a startling amount of light.

For seventeen years, I’ve been working as a doctor in rural African hospitals, face to face with the inevitability of pain and struggle in this life. It just doesn’t go away. As I write this, I’m pausing to text colleagues about a man whose stomach cancer is no longer possible to operate on because he got lost in a poor health care system for a year. It can be so hard. 

Yet surprisingly, all these same experiences have taught me so much about the irreducible glory of God in the life around us. The problem is not so much “where is God in all this?” Instead, the truest (though rarest) moments carry the conviction that the real question is “why is the glory so invisible most of the time?” It’s difficult to find art that articulates this, but Squyres does.

My off-hours as a worship leader have found me in a wide variety of venues. I grew up with the sort of Nashville session musicians who prefer a live metronome in their in-ear monitors, but I have also played on a Romanian cattle-cart-turned-stage where I couldn’t hear the singer next to me. These days I’m usually leading worship on my own, and if accompanied at all, it’s most likely to be by an old 50-gallon drum with a cow hide stretched over the top. I’ve seen the entire rise of the modern worship music movement, and I always love serving others by leading them. 

But whatever the venue and whatever the style, I find it increasingly hard for a song to cause praise to rise from my own heart. More and more, moments of praise for me are associated with silence and reflection and maybe a glimpse of wind in the trees overhead. There are a lot of good, current worship songs, but it often feels like the water level in the well of my own heart is quite low, and the ropes of those songs just aren’t long enough to draw praise from me. But the songs of Squyres do.

Musically the songs are straightforward. The production is sufficient to create depth without distracting from the songwriting. Squyres’ voice has enough grit to make you think that his lines about cigarettes aren’t just poetic imagination, but it’s a voice with solid pathos.

Andy Squyres himself has the distinction of committing himself full-time to music only two years ago, at the age of forty-eight. I don’t know what those younger decades of not doing music full-time were like for him, but I’m convinced that the wait is a gift for those who listen now. Music is usually such a young person’s game, but among the diversity of voices that we need is someone who has lived a bit longer. “Some miracles only come slowly” he sings in the first track, along with “I’ve learned how to live without a breakthrough.” He knows how to sing about long waits and unresolved stories, in which he has hung around long enough to learn that the mysterious result of all that limbo is, surprisingly, praise.

Squyres majors in the glory of the ordinary, reminiscent especially of Frederick Buechner. This seems to be the primary point of the song “Mount of Transfiguration”, which carries the conviction that, if God’s glory is what we proclaim it is, then we should be “looking for a miracle in a Dollar General” or in a “sunset in a parking lot.” And even when he goes a little ridiculous (“Beer o’clock inside the strip mall of my soul”), the redemption is the feeling that even cheesy song lyrics reflect something of God’s glory as well. Everything from the taco truck to the unpaid rent are “God’s exact location / Mountain of Transfiguration”. Then when the outro comes with “Praise the Lord! / Lord my heart cries out to you,” I find that my own heart has somehow tracked a bit from the germane of my own life to praising God for his everyday glory in it.

Yet the most profound observation comes most clearly in the last track, “I Praise You God”. The second verse sings “It is a privilege to love you without being able to see / it is a gift that you gave us to trust you and only believe / I cherish that someday we’ll look back on all of these difficult days / as the moment when heartbreak became an altar of beautiful praise.” The truth that God can and does redeem “difficult days” has been said many times and is worth saying many times. This is foundational to the Christian story, from the redemption of the whole creation to the resurrection of Jesus, God redeems the evil to make something even better than if the evil had never come. 

The part that stopped me in my tracks is rather that Squyres is naming that redeemed result as “praise.” He is saying that the result which is such a joy that it makes rejoicing now possible is nothing other than praise. The difficult days are good because later we will praise God more. Then this future praise works backward into our hearts even now. And so the strain of faith becomes a privilege, and he cherishes it. For my part, I might consider a heart that grows in praise as a good product of hardship, but more like a consolation prize. Not something I would cherish.

This gave me a lot of pause. This is an interesting idea, but does it make sense? My conclusion is that it only makes sense if you put praising God at the center of human existence. Jack Miller wrote that “praise is a form of sanity…lifting up God as the center.” We live our lives drifting towards any other center, praising any other thing, and thus drifting out of sanity. Squyres says, in effect, that what is good and beautiful and desirable is that which leads us to praise. It’s a view of the world that seems upside down. Or maybe, in a world that is upside down, it’s the view that is right side up.

“After I die I will have no more chances / to love you from impossible circumstances / so even if all of my prayers go unanswered / thank you for all of these days.”

Amen.