The Story Behind - "The Anchor Holds" written and performed by Lawrence Chewning

you know i want to sing a song that's uh real special to me it was written about 10 years ago 11 years ago and i want to tell you just a little story behind it before i sing it uh have you ever had a year where just everything happens wrong at the same time anybody ever had a year like that we had one of those years 1992 and my wife and i call it our year of sorrows because it was just an accumulation of of one sad thing after the next it started out with the death of my father who was just a wonderful man a godly man i was in the room with him when he died my wife was facing some potentially serious health problems at the time i didn't realize it at the time but i was a burnout pastor i was middle of real burnout our church just been a wonderful church and it was in the middle of some real division and then the summer of that year my wife had her third miscarriage and i remember uh praying for that little child for months that god would keep it in her womb and would let us have that child and i remember when i got the call that my wife had been taken to the hospital and i needed to come on up and meet her right away i remember racing to that hospital and just praying my heart out you know god i just really want that child i remember walking in the door of that hospital room and my wife turned to me and she said do you know yet we lost him he was a little boy and she said the nurse wanted you to see him if you wanted to and there lying on a little pillow was my 13 week old unborn son and he was about the size of my hand and i remember holding that little baby in my hand and looking up at the ceiling and just crying out to god and basically saying god i love you i've loved you since i was a child but i just don't understand you i don't understand what good could come out of this at all and you know you start feeling like well you know aren't i serving you lord aren't i doing my best for you why one more blow and that blow sent my wife and i both into a real season of of discouragement and depression and uh things that i'd read about about the long dark night of the soul where you know the bible says god is there and yet you can't feel him anywhere we went through that for a few months and i was pastoring a church like i said and i took a sabbatical from pastoring for six months and i just wanted to be alone with god just wanted to get through this thing and what i started doing was playing the piano again for hours at a time i would go down i would just play the piano and that was real therapy for me and one day i found myself playing a song and it i never heard it before and after a while i realized i had never heard it before because i was in the process of writing it at the time and took a while for me to catch on to that but i remember finding myself singing in in my deep discouragement the anchor holds though the ship is battered and that's just how i felt at that time the anchor holes though the sails are torn i've fallen on my knees as i face the raging seas but the anchor holes in spite of the storm and you know after a while i had this long song it was like uh 10 minutes 11 minutes 12 minutes long and i really thought it was just something that helped me through a hard time you know it really did help me and through a set of circumstances i went up and saw ray bolton concert up in maine i was living in massachusetts at the time and we began to just chat about the last year and i told him it's been a rough year but god has helped me through a song he gave me called the anchor holes and a few months later ray gave me a call and said would you care if i recorded it and here's a world famous singer now he's not the kid stumbling down the steps at the coffee house now he's this world famous singer and i don't have a job anymore i've resigned from pastoring and i'm thinking how am i going to ever make a living and ray calls me and i said ray you can sing it but it's a long long song you can do whatever you want to with it but i know it's too long ray took that song and broke it down into something that would work and he created a bridge and and collaborated on it and came up with the version that we hear today and he recorded that song and uh i just want to tell you that when he went to put on the radio he at first was met with less than an enthusiastic reception uh and uh i guess the first time around they didn't release it and ray god bless him went back and said i really want you to reconsider the song that seems to have an effect on people when i sing it and they humored him and put it out and and you know the rest that's the rest of the story that we're still singing it today but i want you to know that that song is coming from down way down in my heart it was not an attempt to rhyme something and create something that would sell it was coming from my deep inner heartbreak and brokenness and i want to sing it to you tonight maybe you're sitting here and you're going through a storm there is life after the storm there is an anchor and it really does hold and i want to sing it as frank sinatra would say my way i have journeyed through the long darkness out on the open sea my faith alone side unknown yet his eyes are watching me is hose though the sails are torn i have fallen on my knees as i face the raging seas the anchor holds in spite of the storm i've had visions and i've had dreams i even held them in my hands but i never knew those dreams can slip right through like they were only grains of sand now i have been young i am a whole now there has been beauty these eyes have seen it was in the night through the storms of my life oh that's where god proved his love to me though the share is better the anchor holes though the sails i have fallen on my knees as i face the raising seas yes the anchor holds in spite of i have fallen falling down on my knees i have faced the raging seas and the anchor holes the eyes in spite of the storm you

Channel: Lawrence Chewning

Views: 1,123,423

Keywords: Christian or gospel music, church, piano, church revival, The Anchor Holds

Id: BxnQzwrF4OU

Length: 12min 15sec (735 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 03 2011