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MR. MICHAEL OLSON: You know I, I am a Bible college graduate and actually one of the things I’m most thankful for is every major at the school I graduated from had to take 30 credits of Bible. So it was just this completely enriching period of time for me and that definitely carried over into this, you know, singer songwriter career that I’ve got right now. So I mean this new record, Where Fear and Faith Collide, is just completely infused with scripture. I mean the stuff that’s coming to mind right now is you know there’s this song called First Love, or I think it’s called Our First Love. I could never tell.

But you know it’s really, really heavily based on the first couple Chapters of Revelation where God speaks, you know, to the effusion [phonetic] church. And He says, you know I love all of these things you’re doing. You’re doing great stuff, but I’ve got this one thing and I just, I’m holding against you, and it’s that you’ve lost the foundation for all of these things that you’re doing. The root [phonetic] of it isn’t there anymore. And so, you know, that was definitely a very impacting moment for me writing that because it was very personal.

There’s another one that it’s actually a, it’s a, there’s a song called, If You Can Stop the World. It’s, I think it’s maybe song two or three on the record. And it comes off as sounding like this really kind of lighthearted pop song, but it comes from this very rather obscure passage of scripture in the book of Jeremiah. I think it’s the 33rd Chapter of Jeremiah. The prophet Jeremiah was, he was kind of this zealous guy who wasn’t really popular in Israel ’cause he was kind of a gloom and doom sort of a guy. And he was talking about how the Babylonian empire at that point in Israel’s history was going to come and kind of incur God’s wrath on Jerusalem for these things that they were rebelling against. Obviously it didn’t really drum up a lot of popularity for him.

So anyway, in the midst of this attack of the Babylonian empire on Jerusalem, Jeremiah is put in prison by you know Jerusalem, the officials in Israel. And God whispers this promise to him in the middle of this situation. He says, if you can break My covenant with the day, or My covenant with the night or if you can, basically if you can stop the world from spinning then I’m going to break My covenant with you. And I just had this tremendous picture of this man, Jeremiah, who is in this prison, he’s completely helpless, trying just an amazing amount of futility to stop the world from spinning. And the picture of how strong God’s covenant is with us of grace. So there’s just a wealth of songs that are based off of, directly off of scriptures.