Love Him in the morning when you see the sun arising

Love Him in the evening ‘cause He took you through the day

And in the in-between time when you feel the pressure coming

Remember that He loves you and He promises to stay

– from the “All Day Song” by John Fischer

My most well-known song has gotten a bad rap all of it’s life … from none other than me. I have always said it was too simple, a little ditty, and it was never finished. After all, it only has one verse. I always intended to write another one, but never got around to it. I boast about carrying it around for months in my back pocket until I pulled it out spontaneously for a Sunday night church audience and the rest is history. It soon met the fate of other John Fischer songs that don’t die, they just go to camp.

It was at camp, in fact, that the hand motions were first introduced to me by a couple of wacky high school girls. Those childish motions have loosened up many a crowd including some of the hardest guys you’ll ever meet in prison. Big guys with tattoos and bulging muscles making their suns go up and down, or playing like they’re threading a needle — tough and world-weary recovering addicts playing right along and experiencing a joy often missing from their lives. I don’t know why everybody loves this but they do. Maybe they never got to be children.

But there is another facet of this song that took me a number of years to come home to, and it is the last line of the chorus, “Remember that He loves you and He promises to stay.” I always thought that line was a little weak. I was just trying to rhyme with “day,” but I couldn’t come up with anything better. This is where I have learned to trust the prophetic nature in the songwriting process. It’s sometimes best to stick with the first version that comes to you.

Because when you think of the words of Jesus, “and lo, I am with you always even until the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20), and “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Hebrews 13:5), you realize how important it is to Jesus for us to remember that He promises to stay. And years later, you may realize it is the most important line of the song. Is that not the most comforting thought ever — that we will never, for the rest of our life, and all of eternity, be without the presence of the living God?