© 2007 Paul MarxhausenLyrics
Comments: There are very few Sundays when I'm not playing music at church and a week off gives me a rare opportunity to check out services at other area churches. Fall of 2006, fascinated by the story of a UN-L prof who migrated from attending an evangelical free church with contemporary worship to eventually settle in a Greek Orthodox church with ancient liturgy and song forms, my son Joel and I attended worship at Annunciation Orthodox church in Lincoln. Not only did Dr. Barnes explain the services - there were actually two, more or less running together - but he persuaded Joel and I to come up front to help him and an Eastern European graduate student chant liturgy for the 'Orthros' service. And so we found ourselves standing, humming a foundational drone pitch, in an atmosphere thick with incense, almost non-stop for an hour before the Divine Liturgy service began.
The chant (and maybe the incense) got my head into a different place in regard to inviting people in to worship, and that produced this song, which also has a lot of obvious influences from the band "Iona", whose music I was revisiting about the same time. Part of the invitation to worship may be like the song "Come On In": come on in, welcome home, you are loved, you belong here now. But part of it is also entering the presence of God in a very deliberate way.