It Is Faith – the story behind the song

Fields of golden wheat stretched as far as I could see; I was staring out the window of the little red house. Even this vast, quiet view, brought no comfort; it only intensified my feeling of aloneness.

I began to sing my prayer …

Here I am

What am I supposed to do?

Not a clue of what to do, with this mountain in my way.

Tears were streaming down my face and I wanted to double over in grief.

All this time I have followed in Your steps

Waiting here how I have wept

So unsure of what You’d have me do

I needed God to help me. Here I stood in utter brokenness, having lost everything. I truly didn’t know how to even make any sense of it.

I am weary of this rocky path

I am weary of the way

Now a mountain looms to hinder me

With this raging sea in front of me

I stopped singing at this point. Sobbing, hopeless …

But then the Presence of the Lord came over me, carrying with Him the peace that passes understanding … and my heart rose up inside of me. I began singing the chorus with conviction.

It is faith that moves the mountains

It is faith that calms the sea

And with God I’ll move these obstacles

That have formed in front of me

“Brenda, believe!” I told myself.  I began singing the 2nd verse …

Here I am, now I know what I can do

All my faith is placed in You

There’s not a mountain that can hinder You

Though with men things may seem impossible

There is nothing You can’t do

And there’s victory for me in You

 

God's comfort brought its strong encouragement.

 

Though the path be ever weary

Though the way is blocked from view

Though the mountains loom to hinder me

You can clear a pathway through

 

Raising my arms in full surrender, closing my eyes, I continued to sing the chorus …

 

It is faith that moves the mountains

It is faith that calms the sea

And with God I’ll move these obstacles

That have formed in front of me, Oh

It is faith that moves the mountains

It is faith that calms the sea

And with God living inside of me

I can have sweet victory

 

I sat down and began writing out the lyrics. I cried some more; then washing my face and gathering my purse, I left for a scheduled appointment with my ministry team.

“They want us to perform at the convocation that is coming up in a couple of weeks. There should be around 8,000 people in attendance, but they want us to sing an A Cappella piece … and we don’t have one.”

I was listening to the chatter, only partly aware of what they were saying. When they finished with some business I said, I have a new song.

They looked at me.

“Okay, sing it!”

I did.

“That’s it!!! That’s it!!” They looked quite pleased. “That’s the A Cappella piece we will perform!”

And that is the first place that this brand-new song was performed. We recorded it on our next CD as an A Cappella piece.

God would use this song again.

The next time that it was brought into attention, it was a most peculiar situation.

A friend’s daughter was having terrible migraines and the doctors in our hometown didn’t seem to be doing much to help her. She was seriously going downhill. I decided to call a highly skilled brain surgeon to see if he could advise us where to take her, but I didn’t have his contact information.

I called a hospital in Southern California to try to track him down. When I reached the hospital, I was passed to at least five different young people who had never heard of him. Finally, I asked them to please put me in contact with their oldest brain surgeon, for I was certain that he would know him.

They did—and he did.

I spoke with that wonderful gentleman for quite a while. He gave me the surgeon’s phone number and address. Then he said, “You must be a nurse.”

I assured him that I was not. “Oh. Well, what do you do?” he questioned.

I told him that I was a composer.

He showed unexpected enthusiasm over that, then said I needed to call a very well-known Recording Artist that had just performed at a medical evangelism convention that he had recently attended. He made me promise to call her, and I did.

This Recording Artist had been on her knees praying for a composer at the very moment the phone rang with me on the other end. After I explained everything to her, she asked if I would send her some of my songs and so I did.

Two weeks later I got a call from her. She wanted to know if I was sitting down; she told me I was not going to believe what she was about to share with me. She had gotten the songs and was going through the many I had sent. Then she came across the song It Is Faith. She said she just froze and thought to herself, it can’t be!

Three years earlier she had been asked to appear on a television program. The artist who went on before her sang a song that moved her so deeply that she almost couldn’t go on stage. She got a tape of the program and learned the song. She had been performing it for three years and found that it moved her audiences as much as it had moved her. She wanted to put it on her upcoming CD. But she and her producers could not find the performing Artist or the Composer. For three years they had been searching.

Brenda! You’re the composer!

She recorded it on her English and Spanish CD.

Hmmm, another miraculous situation regarding that song. It would happen again.

One day while sitting in church I prayed that someone would find one of my songs and sing it. At this point, even though it had been years since the writing of the It Is Faith song, I was still in a very broken situation. I needed to know that God was listening … seeing.

When I got home (California) there were several messages from my son, who was living in Kentucky.

He proceeded to tell me this story:

He had decided to visit another church in a nearby town that he normally did not attend. When he entered the church, he saw a young lady he had met doing evangelistic work. She was excited to see him. She, then, asked him to pray for her because she was going to be performing special music that day. My son prayed with her and then started walking off into the crowd. But he heard something that stopped him in his tracks. He went back to his friend and said, “What are you humming?” She told him that it was the song she was going to be performing. He asked her the name of the song. She said, It Is Faith.

My son started to laugh and said, “That’s my mom’s song!”

“Oh, she likes this song?”

“No, she wrote that song!” 

He had her come out to his car and played the original version of the piece. She could not believe it! My son could not believe it. And chills washed over me; I was dumbfounded that God had answered my prayer before I had even asked! Yes, He is listening … seeing. I was greatly encouraged.

Fast forward a few years.

I was working with a new artist and we were in Nashville heading into the studio to record a new CD. Early in the morning I asked God for a “stamp of approval” for what we were beginning that day. The phone began to ring. It was a friend from California, which meant that it was very, very early for her.

Laughing, I said, “What are you doing calling me so early?!”

She said, “Listen! Listen!” She put her phone up to her television. What I heard coming from her television sent tears flooding down my face from the sheer joy and amazement of what my God could do.

That well-known Recording Artist was doing a television special that was airing that particular morning; and she was telling thousands of viewers about the day that God had miraculously brought us together regarding the It Is Faith song.  Again, God used that song to minister to me in a very unusual way.

The artist that I was working with at the time, wanted to know more about the song, as I had related the story to her. She decided that she wanted to record it, too … and a few years later she did. Beautifully and with much passion.

Years later in a time when it was certain that I was going under again, God reminded me of the lyrics. My website had rarely had anyone comment or engage in conversation. The night when all seemed impossibly dismal there was a ping on my phone. A visitor was asking for the backing track for It Is Faith. I pulled up the long-forgotten lyrics and re-read them. I was reminded once again of the faithfulness of our Heavenly Father and HIS ability to alter any situation.

And then …

The extraordinary vocalist, Jay Dref, came into my life. He took that song and breathed my voice into it; my emotions, my memories of the moment God and I had had our meeting of the hearts. Michael Arrom arranged and performed the piano … gorgeous, perfect! But it needed strings ... It had always needed strings; THAT is how I first heard it; those stirring, haunting, deeply comforting strings. The A cappella versions breathed my heart … but the strings breathed God’s emotion back to me. Enter Yoed Nir, String Arranger. I cried when I heard the extremely beautiful, nuanced strings that he had arranged and performed. The song had finally, after 30 years, found its full voice.

In 2022, over thirty years since the breathing of that prayer in song and watching God gently bring fulfillment time and time again of His innate ability to remove mountains of difficulty, I would be standing in awe of how faith, (trusting in His ability to do the impossible) would once again mark my life with the beauty of its truth.