Found

Found was written twice, years apart, and both halves are answers to the same question: what are you looking for that God cannot supply?

The chorus came first, written some years earlier against what he calls self-gratification thoughts. The rest arrived much later, and the two turned out to be about each other. Underneath both is his own bewilderment at having survived a childhood he describes as extremely difficult — and his refusal to credit himself with it.

The song reverses the direction people usually assume. It is not about a search that succeeded. The searching in it is God’s.

The refusal is not something he said about the song afterwards. It is the first line of it. I will not monetise you — I will not trade you for gold — I will not trivialise you — I know where the power is. Before the title word appears, before anything is found, the song has already ruled out selling what it is about.

It was not that I could keep myself, but that God found me. He came running for me, even when I did not deserve it.Yemi Alafifuni

Asked at release what being found meant, he took the same line further: a culture that monetises every experience, divine ones included, and worship not among the things for sale.

That was 2023. Every recording on this site is now free to download, permanently, with no email required — including this one. The conviction was stated two years before it became an architecture.

And it was not the first time he had acted on it. In about the year 2000 he wrote Padre to win a job at his church, got the job, and turned it down because he could not shake the feeling that he was selling a gift he had been given. He was twenty-three years early to his own argument.

The scripture he cites for it is Acts 17:27 — that every person would feel their way toward God and find him, for he is easy to discover. Two songs later, DNA is built on Acts 17:28: in him we live and move and have our being. Consecutive verses, from the same speech Paul gave to people who did not believe him, split across two records a year apart.

We must refuse to monetise God and our worship. We cannot sell salvation; it is already paid for.On why the song exists

The rest of the lyric is quieter about its sources and no less exact. You came running for me is Luke 15:20, the father who saw his son at a distance and ran — the same verse Prodigal Father is built on. Love like fire in my bones is Jeremiah 20:9. And no stone will take my place is Luke 19:40, where Jesus says that if the crowd is silenced the stones will do the shouting instead: a line about refusing to be the one who goes quiet.

There is also, in the last verse, the strangest and best phrase in the song. I will not double date You.

Produced by Jake Isaac. Announced at the time as part of a body of work called The Prodigals, which has not appeared.