Face to Face

Yemi can date this song to the minute. It was conceived on 10 March 2019 at 11:07 pm, and then it refused to be finished for five years.

The circumstances were unglamorous. He was commuting two to three hours a day and had turned the car into a prayer room — praying in tongues, worshipping, driving. He describes a presence filling the car that he could not ignore, and then a whisper: come away with me.

That is the second time those four words appear in his account of his own writing. He heard them once before, around 2017, and obeyed them by booking two nights at a prayer house — which produced Behold The Lamb. This time he was already exhausted and resisted, and the prompting grew stronger until he gave in.

The question underneath was older than either song. If Jesus appeared to people after the resurrection, and people have gone on testifying of encounters since, why not him? He knew the standard answer — anyone who has seen me has seen the Father — and says plainly that knowing it did not settle anything. What he wanted was the kind of conversation Moses is recorded as having: face to face, as a man speaks to his friend.

My commute stretched between two and three hours every day, and in that time my car became a sacred space. Instead of mindlessly driving, I turned each journey into a prayer room.Yemi Alafifuni

Then the song stopped. He could not finish it, however hard he pushed, and his reading of that was not writer’s block but an instruction: not yet.

The melody came on the night of 5 March 2024 — five years, near enough to the day, after the line that started it. He had largely forgotten the song by then. It was released the following February, as one of the singles leading into the YHWH EP.

If Jesus appeared to His disciples after the resurrection, if so many have testified of encounters with Him since His ascension — then why can’t I see Him too?The question the song came out of

The lyric names its own sources in the first two lines of each half. Just like Moses said — Exodus 33, where God speaks to Moses face to face as a man speaks to his friend. Just like David sang — Psalm 27:4, one thing have I desired, to behold the beauty of the Lord. He is not claiming the wish. He is pointing out that it is an old one.

But the line that explains the whole five years is in verse two, and it is not a wish at all. Whom I behold I become. Whom I see I am changed to.

That is 2 Corinthians 3:18 — beholding the glory of the Lord, we are changed into the same image — and it turns the request into something other than curiosity. He is not asking to see God for the experience of having seen. He is asking because, on this reading, looking at something is how you turn into it.

It wasn’t about doubt. It was about hunger.On the prayer behind it

Which retrospectively explains a title he chose four years earlier. Behold The Lamb is an imperative, and its refrain moves from behold, to I see, to you are. Face to Face is the footnote to it: this is what beholding does. Son asked to see in 2018, Behold The Lamb gave the instruction in 2021, and this says why it mattered.

One more echo, from the same year. My soul thirst for God, the only Living God, like the air inside my lungs — the lung image also carries YHWH, released two months later, where the four letters are the name inside my lungs. And my soul thirsts for God is Psalm 42:2, which makes this the fourth song drawn from that psalm after HERE, Deep and Son.