Recorded by Larnelle Harris and co-written with Larnelle and Don Koch. It was a Thursday morning in 1987, and I still remember how intimidating it felt to have one of the top artists in Christian music sit down in my little room at the old Benson company and want to write. I had heard they already had all the songs chosen for his new record so my expectations weren’t that high the song would be cut, but I was in awe at the opportunity.

 

He said he wanted to write a song about the children of Israel crossing the Red Sea and the celebration that took place on the other side. Larnelle told me when he pictured it in his mind he could hear tambourines playing and people singing and shouting. We were about halfway through the lyric when we brought Don in to write music, and the whole song came together in what seemed like no time at all.

 

Larnelle liked it enough to take it to his producer, Greg Nelson who scheduled a session for the following Monday morning. Greg gave the work tape to arranger extraordinaire David Clydesdale on Friday to prepare the song. When I heard that David was going to be out of town that weekend but would work on it on the plane, I didn’t get my hopes up too high. I had no idea at that point what all he was capable of.

 

On Monday morning I walked into Great Circle Sound recording studio which was one of the bigger studios in Nashville and saw the biggest orchestra I had ever seen ready to play. David walked out to the center of the room and counted the song off and the studio exploded with the exact celebration Larnelle had described just a few days earlier in the writer’s room.

 

The record won a Grammy, and our song ended up being the title cut and the first single. On December 1987, the song went #1in the country. It was my first #1 and as far as that young skinny writer knew, it might never happen again. Fortunately, that was not the case for the Father hath provided again and again and again.