By Your Side

Tenth Avenue North lead singer Mike Donehey wrote this song with two of the group's producers: Jason Ingram and Phillip LaRue. In our interview with Mike Donehey, he explained: "That's a song that I wish I was writing for other people, but it really was my own inability to believe I'm forgiven. Right where I fall. And it's been crazy how that song has ministered to different people in different ways - in ways I never would have imagined. But the truth of it is when I screw up, I run away from God. And behind his words, it seems like when I fall it's exactly when I should turn back to him and run to him, not away from him.

In Corinthians Paul said that Christ pleads through us. And so it's sort of like writing a song allowing Christ to plead with me. Zephaniah, an old Hebrew scripture, says that God actually sings over us and stuff. I took that license."

This won the 2010 Dove Award for Song of the Year. Mike Donehey told us: "I'm looking at this little trophy and saying, you know, what's the purpose of this little trophy? And we walked backstage and this girl was volunteering, and she's in college, and she grabbed me by the arm and she said, 'Hey, I want you to know that that song that you won that award for, that song changed my life when I heard it January 3rd last year, and I became a Christian that night from hearing your song.' So that was pretty ridiculous."