What Passed You By While You Were Sleeping?

Dakota Voice contributor Paul E. Scates emailed me with links to this material this morning.

It's a powerful song from Casting Crowns called "While You Were Sleeping".

An excerpt from the story behind the song:

’While You Were Sleeping’ took me nine years to finish. The year was 1996. I was trying to come up with something new to sing to the Lord for Christmas. I wanted to compose a new arrangement to the famous hymn "O Little Town of Bethlehem." I set out to use the hymn’s original lyrics but to spin them into my own version with different chords. I didn’t even make it to the second verse. I was playing with some chords and realized halfway through the first verse that I was 27 years old and had been singing the song since I was a kid without grasping its meaning. Halfway through the first verse, the whole point of the song hit me: They missed it! Bethlehem missed it. They never knew what happened. They had no idea their Messiah, the Savior of the world, had fulfilled the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and was sleeping in a feeding trough in their very village. They slept through the whole thing...

I thought, 'We’re doing the same thing. We’re missing it. We’re missing the Answer. We’re missing the Savior.' Instantly the second verse took the song in a radically different direction...

It is amazing and sad what wonders and opportunities can slip past us while we're unaware and sleeping.

This Christmas, don't let the ultimate opportunity slip past while you are sleeping...

Just wanted to share a Christmas video I created in 2005 for Casting Crown's "While You Were Sleeping". Think about all the things we let slip by while we have become so complacent in our lives.

In His Service,
Brian