Chains Fall

Chains Fall was not written. It was overheard, at a bus stop, on the way to work.

Yemi had woken on a winter weekday morning wanting to worship, and wanting to finish something — a song called Behold The Lamb that had been sitting without a hook for a long time. Waiting for a late bus in the cold, he started humming. Within minutes he had the line: every chain fall. He was certain he had just solved the other song.

He had not. In production it became obvious the hook was not a missing piece of anything; it was a whole song of its own, in a different key of the soul entirely, and Behold The Lamb went back on the shelf for another year.

The more I try to live up to my faith, the more I failed.On the years the song came out of

What the song is about had been accumulating since he was a boy, and his account of how it started is worth having in full. There was a child in his class at school who used to stand at the front and preach. The other children spat at him for it. He kept doing it anyway, several times over, and then one day he stood there and wept.

Yemi says that broke something open in him. Weeks later, walking home, he called on Jesus and gave him his heart.

God kept saying, but I have given you victory over this. When I thought I was strong, I would fall again and again, to the point where I gave up. Thought myself a hypocritical Christian. And yet He never left me.Yemi Alafifuni

What followed was not relief. He describes the years after as an exhausting performance — rejection, low self-esteem, and a conviction that approval from both people and God had to be earned by behaving correctly. It did not work, and failing at it produced its own compounding weight: fear, self-centredness, loneliness, unforgiveness, debt. There was also, in his words, a particular sin that kept tripping him. He does not name it and neither does this page. What matters to the song is that for years it kept winning.

His account of what broke it is not a moment of triumph. It is the observation that the thing he was straining to earn had already been given, and that nothing he did in the meantime made God leave.

As it is very frustrating waiting for a late bus in winter conditions, we all need to be fed up with the chains binding us daily. Tell your struggles it is the last bus stop, call the name and see the chains fall.On where the title comes from

The rest of the song came out of Nahum 1:13 — in his own telling, he had the hook, and then Nahum happened — and out of three other writers: Brian Jackson, Ernest Vaughan and Owen Nixon. Underneath the choruses is Romans 8, where creation is described as waiting for the sons of God to be revealed and set free from bondage. Verse two is close to a paraphrase of it: a breakthrough happening, for the sons of God, liberated we are free.

Recorded at All Nations Worship Assembly in Chicago during lockdown, with Herb Powers Jr. mastering. It went to number one on iTunes UK Christian & Gospel four days after release.