This song has been on rotation for me recently. It popped up on my suggested list yesterday because I’ve been listening to Nigerian Christian artists (Sinach et all). Now I got into Nigerian music and movies recently because of a job interview last year with an African bank based out of Nigeria.
Oddly we have a few connections to the Nigerian community. We (me and Mrs Sambar) were invited to speak at a large Nigerian church here in Chicago a while ago, and we loved the community. It’s crazy how similar our immigrant experiences are whether we are Indian-American, Nigerian-American, Japanese-American, Chinese-American, Korean-American or anything-American. I’ll cover that in another post at another time though.
My connection to Nigeria goes back further. I recall in a previous role in Singapore, I worked for a bank with a significant African presence, and I took a report from our Lagos office to my boss at the time. She asked me what country it was from and told her the report was from the country of Lagos. I’ve never lived that down. She still laughs about it when I whatsapp her after all these years.
Anyway, connections to Nigeria aside, it’s important to check up on the artists we listen to, something I’ve learned after some artists I used to listen to ended up being connected with questionable ministries. Dunsin seems to be affiliated with large Pentecostal churches, so I’m hoping all is above board there. I reflect on the words “I Keep praising you, yet no word sums you up”.
I’ve never thought about the name Yah. But as I looked into it, Yah is just a short form of Yahweh, the tetragrammaton, four letters that represent the “name of God” as the Jewish people reverence the name of God too much to speak the whole name “Jehovah”. But we are God’s children, and I believe we can call God by His name. Not in vain of course, because if my kids decide to call me by my first name, just to be funny, there’s gonna be some “talking-to” happening right-quick.
So what name fits God? The only one in the Universe who cannot be bounded by words? My view is that it doesn’t matter. In Malaysia, Christians call God, “Allah”. Whatever you call God, it is more important that you trust Him, love Him and stay close to Him. All our human words are not sufficient to do justice to His person.