The Light Is Still Here

 Why goodness keeps showing up, even after everything.

What do flower beds, summer reading, survival stories, Pentecost, and a worship song have in common?

For Mac and Rhoni this week, they all pointed back to the same reminder:

Goodness is still here.

In this episode of The Weekend Joyride, the conversation moves from the ordinary rhythms of summer into a bigger reflection on why people keep helping, rebuilding, forgiving, and carrying hope through dark seasons.

Mac and Rhoni talk about the kind of goodness that shows up after tragedy, the quiet courage found in history, the compassion people showed during COVID, and the local helpers who become living proof that light still has a presence in the world.

They also spend time talking about Pentecost and the Holy Spirit — not as a distant church topic, but as the reason believers are equipped to carry light into everyday life.

The episode closes with Rhoni’s music breakdown of Chandler Moore and Elevation Worship’s “God, I’m Just Grateful,” a song that lands this conversation in worship, gratitude, and the steady faithfulness of God.

Links for this episode:

Featured song: “God I’m Just Grateful” — Elevation Worship & Chandler Moore
Watch: Official live video for “God I’m Just Grateful” 
https://youtu.be/YbGFYaA0SbY?si=JQuv0s4jZ1LPUdpn 

Local ministry mentioned: Ark of Highland Lakes
https://arkofhighlandlakes.org/

Resource mentioned: Sparkling Gems From the Greek, Volume 2 by Rick Renner
https://renner.org/product/sparkling-gems-from-the-greek-volume-2/ 

Book mentioned: The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera
https://www.amazon.com/clp/1646140893?lv=shuf

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Transcript

Intro: The Light Is Still Here

Mac 0:07

Welcome to the Weekend Joyride! This week's episode starts in a pretty normal place for us. Summer, flowerbeds, books, one of those TV shows you start watching casually and then suddenly realize you're several episodes in and emotionally invested. But that conversation led us somewhere deeper. Why are we so drawn to stories about survival, disaster, and the end of the world? Maybe it's because even in the darkest stories, we keep looking for the same thing: goodness. Somebody helps, somebody sacrifices, somebody rebuilds, somebody carries hope when everyone else is tired. And that raised the bigger question for us: why does goodness keep surviving? This episode is about that. It's about hope, history, compassion, Pentecost, the Holy Spirit, and the reminder that darkness is not proof God is absent. Goodness is proof that He is still here. And later in the episode, Ronnie breaks down Chandler Moore and Elevation Worships the song God I'm Just Grateful, which turns out to be the perfect worship landing place for this conversation. Here's this week's weekend joyride. The light is still here. Thanks for coming along.

Summer, Flower Beds, and Books

Rhoni 1:24

Thanks for landing on the weekend joyride. I'm Ronnie.

Mac 1:27

I'm back.

Rhoni 1:28

Summertime.

Mac 1:29

You're excited about summer, aren't you?

Rhoni 1:31

I'm excited. It gives me room to think, to dream. Well, like I think Shakespeare said to think perchance to dream.

Mac 1:41

Perchance to dream. And you're dreaming about full flower beds.

Rhoni 1:45

I sure am. I feel every muscle in my body today. Parts I didn't know I had muscles.

Mac 1:50

Yeah. That happens every beginning of the summer. I know. Ronnie goes and gets all the flowers that she wants to fill up. And the flower flower beds look beautiful. I mean, they went from being overgrown and weird looking to uh really nice today. So in one day. So kudos to that baby. Let's just see how long, you know, how long I talked to the to the guy that does our sprinklers today, and I said, Hey, could you possibly uh you know come by the house here in the next couple of weeks and fix our sprinklers? Why you get some, yeah. I need I need everything to be watered, okay? All right.

Rhoni 2:22

So he doesn't think I'm gonna do it.

Mac 2:24

Well, it's history. I'm just looking back at history.

Rhoni 2:27

I get inspired. I get really inspired. I'm a fair weather gardener. I like it when it's fun, and and then you like pulling weeds.

Mac 2:39

Uh excuse me. You had there are so many wrong perceptions. Uh you know, when you find out that your wife, after 20 years, has wrong perceptions. And like she'll tell me sometimes, she'll say, Well, you don't like that at all. I'm like, what? I do. I do like that. She thinks I like pulling weeds. I think that's wrong, honey.

Rhoni 2:56

Well, it looks nice. Just let it there. But it is it is nice to be able to have the time to do the things that you actually really love to do.

Mac 3:06

That's true. And don't think that she doesn't think about school during the summer. First of all, you don't have three months off. You've still got some training to do this month. Yeah. And then you're gonna be back in school in August, aren't you?

Rhoni 3:19

Yeah, but teachers, we spend a lot of time preparing. So I'll I'll prepare. But it's time for rest and crafting and learning to do things that I didn't know how to do and just doing some things you love. That's what it's time for right now.

Mac 3:35

Yeah, kind of fun today. In fact, today at lunch, somebody came up with the idea of hey, come on down, we're gonna be down at the beach, and uh you can come down on Friday and meet us and and all that. And uh Ronnie said, Well, he has to work. So we can But I'm free. That's what I said.

Rhoni 3:53

I'm free.

Mac 3:55

So that's the way our life goes at the beginning of every summer. So we're just kind of used to it.

Rhoni 4:00

And so But it

Books, Binge TV, and Survival Stories

Rhoni 4:01

is summer and it's fun, and um, you know, we I'm reading books, and you asked me last week what was on my reading list. So I really wanted to find a couple of young adult books, and I picked up one called The Last Cuentista, and I grabbed it for a couple of reasons. Number one, I don't like science fiction, and a lot of the kids are reading science fiction. So I'm very growth mindset. So I thought, well, okay, I'll stretch a little bit and I'll read something that seems to be science fiction. And it's actually kind of good so far. And it's about uh these people who I've just discovered in the book are are about to leave the earth because the earth is going to be destroyed. So they're gonna go colonize someplace. And as I'm reading it, I'm thinking, hmm, we've got Elon talking about colonizing Mars. It's kind of starting to get real, right? It's like it's kind of creepy.

Mac 5:01

It's something you can really um think of that could happen.

Rhoni 5:05

Yeah, it's like not so science fiction, yeah.

Mac 5:07

But then we start watching this show on uh on TV, and it was one of those shows where we it's like, well, you want to see about this? Somebody said this was good, and we watched it, and we always know that we have to watch three episodes before we get into it. But this one, after episode one or two, we may have been deep into it, and we we ended up binging on it.

Rhoni 5:32

We were just intrigued by it. And first, people should know that we don't watch a lot of TV. No, we don't, we really don't, but then we'll find a series or somebody will say something, and that'll just be our thing on you know, Sunday nights. We watch an episode or two before we go to sleep. Yeah, this one got weird. This one caught us, yeah. And it too has something to do with a natural disaster, which I kind of thrill to that for some reason. I natural disaster movies, and I don't know why I feel a little guilty about it because I think natural disasters are terrible and horrific. But that is my horror, you know. That's I don't watch horror movies or anything like that, but I will watch, I will watch movies about natural disasters or Jaws or something like that.

Mac 6:20

The Poseidon Adventure. She watched that as a child.

Rhoni 6:22

I watched that, you know. So, but this is kind of the same concept where the world is ending due to a natural disaster and people are getting together and surviving in this other way. And so, all of that to say, it's almost a little creepy because from very different avenues, the same message is coming up. And I'm like, hmm.

Mac 6:52

Well, we talked about that a little today in the car about how end of the world things have long been a subject of literary works, whether it be a movie or a film or a book or whatever. I mean, from from time immemorial, they've been, you know, this is how the world's gonna end thing. Even some of those old Greek classic paintings that we see are all about end of the world and things like that. So it's not a new subject, but it's I don't know, maybe it's newer to us because we haven't really paid attention to that kind of stuff.

Rhoni 7:25

We don't we don't draw into the negative a lot.

Mac 7:28

No.

Rhoni 7:29

But this is the thing that that I think we should center up on.

Why Does Goodness Keep Surviving?

Rhoni 7:33

And it's that what we notice in this show that we're watching is that a theme that keeps running through it is that in spite of all of the bad that's happening, goodness is still around and it keeps surviving. Goodness keeps overshadowing the dark.

Mac 7:56

Yeah.

Rhoni 7:56

And I think that's where we want to center up.

Mac 7:59

And that's where where we watch. We watch for that. We know that that's gonna happen. But but as we've watched these shows and talked about this thing there, our question has been why? Why does it keep showing

Hope That Outshines the Dark

Mac 8:13

up?

Rhoni 8:13

I think people are hungry for hope right now. And even in that show, they were gonna name a baby hope because the people needed hope to hang on to. And I think that's a relative discussion for today. With you turn on the news and there's just something bad every single day. And I think if you're not careful, it's easy to focus on the bad, it's easy to focus on the terror or the concern about everything in the world.

Mac 8:40

Yeah, the horror of what could be happening. Yeah.

Rhoni 8:43

Yeah. But if you're a Christian, we're believers, we have to calibrate ourselves and be the hope. We have to be the source of goodness and realize that the light is always going to overshadow the darkness. The good is always going to win out if you look for it.

Mac 9:06

I I remember hearing many, many uh sermons in church talking about how the light will always overtake the dark, but the dark it can't overtake the light. It can never, that's biblical. It can never get too dark to extinguish a light. You think of a candle, you think of a star that's a billion some odd miles away. That light from that star goes through all that space and still in that darkness reaches us here on earth. It's wild.

Quiet Courage in Dark Times

Rhoni 9:37

It's just that goodness keeps surviving, and that's what I'm seeing in in the show that we watched, and possibly, hopefully, that's what's gonna manifest in this book that I'm reading. But it also brings me back to Holocaust literature. I taught that for years. We read If I Never Saw Another Butterfly, that's poetry from children who were victims of the Holocaust. We read Anne Frank, and one of her most famous quotes associated with Anne Frank, who, for those who don't know, was a Jewish girl whose family was persecuted by the Nazis during World War II. And she was quite the survivor. But she has a famous quote: In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. And if you read her story and you study that time in history, it was so dark. It was 12 million people were murdered. Six million were Jews, but six million were were others.

Mac 10:40

They didn't fit.

Rhoni 10:41

They didn't fit. And she still held on to this belief that people were generally good, with the exception of a few bad people making bad decisions.

Mac 10:55

So it brings about a thought to me about why why these shows catch us like they do. I mean, this one got emotional for us. It was it was an interesting thought that we I don't know, something happened in it and we both looked at each other and both had like tears in our eyes.

Rhoni 11:14

Yeah, it was gripping.

Mac 11:16

Yeah. Gripping, that's a good word to put it there. It's like, I don't want that to end, you know. Yes, we're gonna watch another episode of it because it may be, you know, 10 30 at night.

Rhoni 11:25

Hopefully it gets better. Yeah. But here's the here's the part of it. It you know, just like in the literature of the Holocaust era, what you found were families hiding strangers. You saw just ordinary people risking everything to save somebody and people sharing their food, it was just examples of quiet courage. And I think that's where we as believers need to stand strong. And in our every day, when you hear all the bad, it's just important um to to focus on the good.

Mac 12:07

Yeah. Because I mean, even though there's unimaginable darkness that happens to people and in situations throughout history, yeah, goodness still kept appearing.

Rhoni 12:22

And maybe Anne Frank wasn't the exception either. Maybe she was just noticing a pattern throughout history.

Mac 12:30

What, like wars and famines, and floods, and hurricanes, and pandemics, and fires. Think of that. We've lived through all this stuff, honey.

Rhoni 12:38

We have lived through that.

Mac 12:40

Yeah.

Rhoni 12:40

Yeah. And yet goodness keeps showing up. I think about during COVID, how it was horrific. Uh, we at times we looked at each other. I don't know that you've said it, but I know I said it more than once. I would just say, are we gonna die in this? Like, are we gonna go down? Like, and I don't want to sound like I had a lack of faith, but there were numerous moments when we were sitting in the house all by ourselves and the whole world was locked down and we never got sick from it. Just to clarify, we never got sick from it. We didn't lose anyone in our family to COVID. No, we didn't. But there were just these uncertain moments that were so surreal. And more than once, I just thought, is this how we're going out?

Mac 13:26

Yeah.

Rhoni 13:28

But here's what I was saying about thinking about that is how much good you saw. You saw so many people helping each other and how everyone rallied around each other. They got carry out and curbside, and all these ways that people began to help each other.

Mac 13:45

To adapt, yeah.

Rhoni 13:46

And people just kept showing compassion.

Mac 13:48

Yep. People keep volunteering, people open their homes for other people. People still do these things today. Strangers help strangers, it doesn't matter. And then you wonder why do people keep choosing compassion?

Rhoni 14:03

I know the lessons that we taught children out of that Holocaust literature unit is that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. And so what we see in that show, what I think I'm seeing in this book already that I'm reading, and what we see from just the past events that we've lived through, is that people would step up and be courageous and do things that others wouldn't do. And that's the force of goodness in the earth. Yeah.

Mac 14:38

And it's really the story of humanity, isn't that darkness keeps appearing because uh we're told darkness will keep appearing. And it's and it's remarkable uh that in humanity that it isn't darkness that keeps appearing, it's the light that keeps appearing too.

Rhoni 14:56

Yeah. When we talk about light, what does that really look like? Well, it's not passive when people are hurting.

Mac 15:01

It's that the light keeps appearing too. But what does it mean when we say something like the light keeps appearing? It means that goodness acts. Goodness isn't passive, goodness works, uh compassion acts, mercy acts, love acts.

Rhoni 15:18

Here's the thing about evil that we learned through that horrific era, and and we're learning through some of the things happening now, is that when nobody responds, evil advances. I could bring up any number of news stories, which I won't, because it we don't want this to be a political show. But you can look at some news stories that are tragic. But what we keep seeing is that when people show up, when people who are good show up to an event or a tragedy, things change. And goodness really isn't something that we can admire from a distance. Goodness is something that we participate in. So all of this conversation just kind of made us begin thinking about how again goodness keeps surviving. And why is that? These you know, these end of the world stories make us think about our own end of the world. And we've had people that have questioned the world is so dark now. I mean, why is it so dark? But at the same time, what we could say, we could answer that by saying, Yes, but it's still so light. Like there's still so many good people. And why are there so many good people? Because God is still here and we are carrying him. Yeah. And as long as we are here with the DNA and the life force of God Himself, goodness is still in the earth.

Mac 16:58

Yeah, and I think if you're looking for proof that goodness is still here, you don't start with the news. You don't look at those headlines, you look around at what goes on in your area. We have we have a group of people, an organization that has put 300 or more churches on the same mailing list. Or, you know, they've gotten these churches together. And if you think it's easy to round up 300 churches to do anything in in one accord, it's wrong. I mean, it's it's hard to do. But we have a group called the Ark of Highland Lakes. They're they're a group that you think of them, well, they're gonna show up after a flood and they're gonna help you then. But how are they gonna help? They're not simply relief, they're not simply gonna bring you a bag of groceries and say, Thank you. Um, you know, we'll bring you some ice tomorrow, things like that. This is a group of people that yeah, it's not simply relief, it's not simply charity. It's actual transformation or restoration of not only just people helping people get back on their feet, but entire families with homes and support systems and relationships. And there's that word hope again.

Rhoni 18:12

Mm-hmm. They actually really are all about transforming families and putting them back to work, back on their feet, taking care of children. It is a beautiful, beautiful organization. And the thing is, is that nobody really has to volunteer. There are enough people that want to volunteer that just show up. It's a very big organization. They rarely have to ask for people to give because people just support it.

Mac 18:43

Do you remember back in the floods we had in July of last year and all the supplies that showed up at their warehouse here where we live? It was just an amazing thing. I mean, lines of cars coming by to drop off, whether it be food or or water or furniture or things that people need after their homes have been wiped out.

Rhoni 19:07

Right. Goodness is not just simply a force. Goodness has a name. And, you know, it's Mr. So-and-so, or it's it's Kevin Noman. It's it's the people that make these kinds of organizations move. Yeah. And so it's not just a name, it has faces and it has addresses. Goodness shows up. And again, why? Because God is still here. The Holy Spirit is still in the earth. Yeah. And that's the face of goodness, those of us who carry him.

Mac 19:42

June is is the month where we call it Pentecost in the church, and that may sound like a churchy name, but it's really the day that the Holy Spirit was poured out on uh on the early church, the disciples. So in that month that we celebrate the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, we like to look at things and I don't know, just consider the facts about how it works in life and specifically in the life of Jesus and his ministry.

Rhoni 20:13

Right. Because the ministry of Jesus was completely dependent upon the Holy Spirit. Think about this from his birth, nothing happened to him, and nothing he did was apart from the power of the Holy Spirit. That's big. When he sat down at the Father's right hand in heaven, the first thing he did was send the Holy Spirit to the church on the day of Pentecost. That's what we celebrate. But when he spoke of the Holy Spirit's future ministry to his church, he was actually describing the Holy Spirit's present ministry through him during his earthly ministry. He mentioned while he was here that out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. And he was talking about the Holy Spirit. It's how he described his own relationship with the Holy Spirit as he walked the earth. And it's also how he told about the nature of the relationship of those who believed on him, what we would experience. He spoke of it that way. He spoke about us being at one with the Holy Spirit after his death and resurrection. The Bible tells us that in 1 John, as he is, so are we to be in this world. So as a believer, what we understand is that just like Jesus, we too carry the Spirit with us. So if you take that a little bit further and you think about the work of the Holy Spirit and the life and the ministry of Jesus, it it all started with him being conceived by the Holy Spirit in Mary's womb.

Mac 22:02

And that just that just leads to that nobody has ever known the Holy Spirit better than Jesus. So if we look to see what Jesus says about the Holy Spirit, I think that's pretty much stuff you can take as truth.

Rhoni 22:16

Yeah. When he was dedicated in the temple, he was accompanied by even a supernatural manifestation of the Holy Spirit when Simeon, who was a priest at the time, and Anna, they prophesied over him at that time. So you we could just go on and on. There are several examples. His public ministry was announced by John, who was under the anointing of the Holy Spirit, and he declared Jesus was actually the one who would baptize in the Holy Spirit and with fire. So we could look that up. So many examples of how the Holy Spirit and Jesus were at one in the earth.

Mac 22:54

And there's no limit to that. Jesus was given the full spirit in John 3, 34, the full spirit without any limitations.

Rhoni 23:05

He stated that his public ministry was absolutely the result of the power of the Holy Spirit in Luke 4.

Mac 23:12

And then he says that we must be born again by the Holy Spirit. So there's the answer to that question. Yes. Yes, you have to be born again.

Rhoni 23:22

So many scriptures we could name about his work and ministry that included the Holy Spirit, but he also offered himself on the cross through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Mac 23:35

He endured that, yeah.

Rhoni 23:36

Yielded to the Holy Spirit. He was working at one.

Mac 23:39

Yeah.

Rhoni 23:40

And it says that he breathed the Holy Spirit into the disciples after his resurrection in John 20. Yeah.

Mac 23:47

Jesus instructed the disciples through the power and the ministry of the Holy Spirit.

Rhoni 23:54

So we could say that Jesus and the Holy Spirit were always together when he was on earth. If he needed this kind of ongoing partnership with the Holy Spirit in order to accomplish his divine role in the earth, then you and I need to have that same partnership with the Spirit of God to fulfill what God has asked us to do, which back to what we've been talking about is be the force of good in the earth. It is because we are carrying the Holy Spirit with us that keeps light in the earth.

Mac 24:28

Yeah. And with with him at your side, we are equipped for every situation we could ever face in life.

Rhoni 24:35

Yeah. No one has ever known the Holy Spirit better than Jesus. And so those of us who are his disciples, his children, at one with him, those of us who carry him with us, we are that force of goodness in the earth. So when we're tempted to throw the towel in because evil has just seems to be winning. Who we are in him. And Pastor Trey said something that uh really turned the light on for me too. That not just about us in him, but he needs more access to us. See, we carry him on the inside of us.

Mac 25:22

Oh, yeah.

Rhoni 25:24

But we have to yield to what the Holy Spirit is asking us to do, to say, to do, places to go. It's about our willingness to accomplish all that he wants us to do, even on a daily basis. And so I loved it when he said it's really more about giving him more access rather than us accessing the Holy Spirit. Does that make sense?

Mac 25:51

Yeah. It's that was powerful. And I wrote that down too. My notes say being filled is not getting more of him, it is him getting more of us. Allowing that access to him to come in us. Yeah.

Rhoni 26:05

Yeah. So I think we could pause if if uh we want to say a short prayer today about that. That's good. Um, so I like to read from Rick Renner's Sparkling Gems of the Greek, where he's talking about the Holy Spirit in this passage. Yeah. And so here's a prayer that we could say. Father God, our heart yearns to know the person of the Holy Spirit even more deeply and to experience his personal power and to experience his power personally. So we ask that you would reveal truths and grant to us understanding so that we can cooperate with and respond to the Holy Spirit's ministry in our life. And Father, we desire to walk in spiritual depth and fullness, that same spiritual depth and fullness that Jesus made available to us when he prayed in John 14 that you would send the helper, the Holy Spirit, to indwell us. So we ask that you open the door for us and our listeners to embark on a spiritual path that we have never been on before. And we know this is your will for us. So today we come before your throne boldly and confidently, and we receive more of you. We receive a deeper indwelling and infilling of the Holy Spirit with gratitude and joy in Jesus' name.

Mac 27:34

In Jesus' name. And you know, it's I've I've mentioned the peeling back of layers of onions. It's kind of what scripture is to me. You can read the same thing over and over and over again. Well, if you think, well, I've already been filled with the Holy Spirit, there are layers of the Holy Spirit that you know peel back one and you can understand even more. You can understand on a deeper level. And once again, a lot of what we have just talked about has come from Rick Renner's book, Sparkling Gems from the Greek, volume two. Volume one is wonderful, volume two is wonderful. Uh they're great, even like study books, but just to give you something every day to read. So pick one up.

Rhoni 28:16

Yeah, so uh goodness isn't just simply human effort, goodness flourishes where God is welcomed. And honestly, the reason goodness keeps appearing and showing up is that God never abandoned his creation. Darkness is not proof that God is absent.

Mac 28:41

Goodness is proof that he is here with us.

Rhoni 28:45

Amen. That's good.

Mac 28:46

Yeah.

Rhoni 28:57

And that led me to the song that's on replay for me this week. And it's by an artist named Chandlermore, and he sings it with Elevation Worship. This is a really fun song to explore. Because as you know for me, I hear layers. Songs that bend my ear typically have a layer or two or five of something that not everybody's hearing, right?

Mac 29:42

And this song seems to start very intimately, naming the grace of God. It repeats a simple gratitude response over and over again.

Rhoni 29:53

It appeals to me, first of all, in the same way that I love that Teddy Swim song that it crosses genre. So if you love Motown, which I do, or big worship, grand, powerful, deep worship, it gets it gets that. Yeah. And of course, it's got a little 80-90. It has some of that. So the sound of it, I love the sound of it. Yeah. But it's a lot of how the instruments widen and build. So I hear in that song, I hear the piano, I hear layered background vocals, especially when I'm looking at the live version. You hear the audience, you hear the masses of people uh chime in. You hear the masses of people begin to praise with Chandler and Elevation Worship. I love that. It's like an expanding room feeling. And so that song begins to build on the inside of me too. I swell in my spirit when I'm when I'm hearing it. But it's it's also the instruments, like the drums. Like you love drums.

Mac 31:07

Yeah, I do. Uh-huh.

Rhoni 31:08

So what do you notice about the drums in that?

Mac 31:10

They're gradual. And that and the bass, you know, they kind of go together. It's the it's a gradual thing. They don't just keep time, but they create a lift in the in the in the song. And I think that's what they're meant to do. They start start low, slow, and up we go.

Rhoni 31:26

Yeah, and I I did a little background on this song when I started noticing that. And one of the things they say about it is the kick drum. What's a kick drum?

Mac 31:34

It's the big bass drum, the big round one at the bottom.

Rhoni 31:37

It said that that drum starts getting more present as the song builds. But then what are the toms?

Mac 31:44

The toms are the smaller ones over, usually to the drummer's right. If he's a right-handed drummer, it'll be over to the right. They're bigger drums.

Rhoni 31:50

Yeah. But they're, you know, and there's two on the top, too, and they just kind of roll down and hear those drums become like almost cinematic. So instead of it feeling just like the band playing the song, it actually really feels like the crowd is moving together to build the worship and the music at the same time.

Mac 32:15

I love this line about the song. It's basically a slow burn Thanksgiving altar call. Oh, it's awesome. And it works its way up to that. That's real cool.

Rhoni 32:46

And something that I think he does really, really well is that he uses background vocals almost like another instrument.

Mac 32:53

Uh-huh. Yeah.

Rhoni 32:55

So you hear him at first, but then you hear him plus these voices that that flow with him.

Mac 33:01

It's like a vocal stack or it's a you know, a response. Yes. Yeah.

Rhoni 33:05

And you hear then this whole community of worshipers. And the song really does move from I'm so grateful to all of us in the room are so grateful.

Mac 33:15

Yeah. You know, that's one thing I think I love about songs that do this well is they give room for both real personal, intimate worship. Yeah. And then real big corporate worship. Where everybody in the room is doing the same thing. I will never forget watching, was it Jeremy Camp on stage? Yes. At Spirit Fest, which was a concert we used to do in Austin every year. Jeremy Camp led the led the audience, 16,000 people in Del Diamond led them through this song. And towards the end of the song, he's standing in the middle of a stage. We have the picture somewhere. He's standing in the middle of the stage with his arms outstretched. The audience is also standing outstretched back to him, and he begins to just fade into the background.

Rhoni 34:08

You don't even notice it because you're worshiping everybody in the audience or at the concert has been led into high worship. Yeah. And he fades out, and what's left is the music and the voices. It's beautiful. Yeah. There's another part of this song that I actually remember when one of the 25 times I made you play it in the car. I said, listen to those horns. Uh-huh. Now I don't know if they're horns. I don't know if they're organ. I don't know what they are, but play a little bit of that. Okay. Because that to me, that sustained tone of what sounded like horns, which could have been a one article I read said it could have been an organ, like a Hammond organ that has the synth brass and that sort of thing in it. But I heard that and I that pulled on me. I actually really love that. But I also realized that that also is maybe a Motown 90s sound, also. So that might have pulled on my my inner inner musical. Yeah.

Mac 35:16

It does.

Rhoni 35:16

Whether there's a horn section present or not, that creates an emotional effect in this song. And again, it just keeps stacking layers, but it doesn't sound busy. It just builds. And so I love when a song like this builds. I even got a little bit emotional because it took me up and I was worshiping God toward the very end. And I realize you're not so big on songs that repeat quite as much. Yeah. Right. I am because that helps me. I don't have to learn words. I'm just listening to the words and closing my eyes and worshiping the Lord through that. But it's like layer after layer, it's the voices, it's the harmony, it's the the power of the drums to create that lift. Just all the ambient textures and the repeated declaration of God, you're just so good. You've been right there by my side. And talking about the topic we've been talking about all throughout this show is how when there's negativity in the earth and there's tragic news all around you, we have to realize God has always been right here by our side. And the last couple of lines at the song, He sings with gratitude instead of triumph, it's just so grateful.

Mac 36:44

Well, it builds, I mean, many worship songs are victorious, you know. This one though is thankful. And that's different. The vocal isn't look what I overcame. It's it's clearly I still can't believe God stayed with me. And that creates a tenderness there that that you wouldn't normally feel.

Rhoni 37:06

Yeah. And that tenderness, I think, is what we just happen to be thinking about in this last week of the shows we've watched, and um just different things that have gone on in our past. Most of our listeners just kind of have been on a have been on this journey with us over the last year. Just the things that we've gone through, how God still keeps showing up. He's been faithful, he's he's never left our side. And this song just really mirrors that message. It it doesn't really sound like somebody standing on a mountaintop singing, it sounds more like somebody looking back over the road of the last year or the last month or the last couple of months or the last few days, and just saying, honestly, after everything, God has been so good. It just squeezes my heart. And when I think back to some of the things we've talked about, we've talked about some of our young adult mistakes in some of our episodes. God always has made something beautiful out of everything.

Mac 38:17

I don't think either one of us would trade anything for what those experiences did to bring us closer to God, even if we did not know it then. Right. We know it now, and that's an amazing, sweet, intimate thing.

Rhoni 38:38

For which we are grateful. And the last two lines of the song are I survived, and I'm here to testify. God, I'm so grateful for you.

Mac 38:50

Yeah. It's Chandler Moore and Elevation Worship, and it's called God, I'm just great. And if there's one thought to carry with you, maybe it's this. Darkness is not proof that God is absent. Goodness is proof that he is still here. When someone helps, when someone forgives, when someone rebuilds, when someone chose mercy or chooses compassion instead of fear, that's not small. That is light. And for those of us who follow Jesus, we're not just called to notice that light, we're called to carry it. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with us. If this episode encouraged you at all, share it with somebody who could use a little reminder that the light is still here. And for Ronnie, I'm Mac, and thanks for coming along on the Weekend Joyride.