Brian Johnson – Resounding Silence

It’s a departure from what we often do on our compilations, which are these big worship anthems. I think those are awesome. I love it all, but we just wanted something different. We often feel that silence is not okay, that silence is awkward. We feel a pressure to fill it with noise, but you can make it so silence isn’t awkward and people can gather their thoughts and recollect and refocus on central things to achieve.

I had a nervous breakdown a year-and-a-half ago and a lot of these songs came out of that time to get ahold of God. I’ll tell you what, sometimes we can miss God and then we’re just going through the motions and doing what normally works. But when you come to the point in your life where like I was in the hospital and could not breathe…consider it a gift when God becomes your only option.

CCM: Are you able to avoid getting there again?
BJ: I’ll preach on this where I’ll blow up a balloon and tell everyone that obviously, at some point, this balloon is going to pop. If someone says something offense or there’s a relational fallout that you don’t take care of or you have some stress, it all begins to add to the pressure in that balloon. Eventually if you don’t take care of that pressure, it will blow up on you. We are not God. No man can possibly carry all of that. We’re not supposed to carry it. We’re supposed to give it to the One who died for all of that.

I know forgiveness and bitterness and injustice. We run the label and we have a big department and there’s just so much going, right? We were seven years in and I just didn’t see it coming. It just hit me out of nowhere one day, and I couldn’t breathe. I was shaking. It was horrible. So I’ve learned that I just have to stay in my lane. You can only get done in a day what God has called us to get done in a day, and everyone can carry that weight. But a lot of times, we end up taking on too much and we can put that on the people who work for us.

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