You Have Seen My Trouble : a music podcast
A music podcast featuring an impromptu home recording of the song "You Have Seen My Trouble," by Samantha Klassen and Anass Quinten. The song was written by Samantha, based on Psalm 31:7-8, and is performed here with Arabic background vocals by Anass.
This recording is a single take of a jam session, and was not rehearsed or even planned. Samantha and Anass both sing and play guitar in this recording, using the guitars featured in the post image. The Arabic words Anass sings in the background can be translated as follows:
God, mercy!
Your mercy, O God!
Everything is known to you.
O God,
O God
Samantha offers the following reflections on the song, and on Psalm that inspired it.
I wrote this song in February, 2020, using words from Psalm 31, verses 7 and 8:
I will be glad and rejoice in your mercy,
for you have seen my affliction
and known my soul in adversity.
You have not shut me up in the hand of the enemy;
you have set my feet in an open place.
Psalm 31 was a psalm I relied on heavily for many months when I was in a troubled time. I would listen to a recording of it almost daily, sometimes many times a day. Over the months, as I became more and more saturated in the psalm, I found myself putting parts of it to music, turning the verses into songs. While some of the songs seemed to almost write themselves, this particular one was a bit of a white whale. I have nearly 40 recordings on my phone of all different iterations of the song, attempts over the course of a year to express the prayer that those two verses evoked in me.
Why did it hold my attention for so long, I wonder? I think partly it was because it felt rare at the time to find a prayer of affirmation that I could hold as my own, and I just needed to be able to sing it. There were many prayers of lamentation and distress that I could resonate with, such as the verse from Psalm 31 that says, "My life is wasted with grief, and my years with sighing; my strength fails me because of my affliction, and my bones are consumed." But in a time of chaos and crisis, prayers of affirmation like "God has saved me," or "God has healed me," felt alien and ill-fitting. I just couldn't pray those prayers honestly. Even to say "God will save me" seemed like the profession of a hope I didn't really have. I wasn't hoping, I was just surviving. Yet, in that state, what I could affirm was that verse from Psalm 31: "You have seen my affliction, and known my soul in adversity." Because the "You" in the verse didn't even necessarily have to be God. The people who were supporting me through that time were also the witnesses of my life. In a way, it is because of them that I could pray that prayer. Regardless of the chaos, regardless of what might be true or untrue about God, I knew that in their steadfast love, my affliction was seen and my adversity known.
We'd encourage you to view Samantha and Anass's Good Friday video, Stations of the Cross: Unweaving, and to take a listen to Anass's version of Jenny Moore's song, "Be Our Light."
You can also access the full catalogue of these music podcasts by clicking here.