Beauty Will Rise

This multi-layered number is the title track of Contemporary Christian singer-songwriter Steven Curtis Chapman's seventeenth studio album. Many of the songs from the record were inspired by the tragic death of his daughter, Maria Sue Chunxi Chapman.

Christianity Today magazine asked Chapman how he decided on the album title. He replied: "We were in China last May when the earthquake hit [the 2008 Sichuan quake that killed 70,000], though we were sitting in the Shanghai airport when it happened, so we didn't feel it. But when we came home, we heard about all the devastation. And then two weeks later, our earthquake hit [when Maria was killed]. And that was a real connection for me, in a way, to pray. In a lot of ways it was one of the ways we survived. When I turned everything inward, with the pain, questions, and devastation in our own family, I felt like I was going to cave in. But when I could pray for other people, when I could say, 'God, these people are feeling the same thing. Please give them the comfort that we are finding in your promises and the fact that we're going to see our little girl again. We know that hope. These people don't; they're in a more desperate place than we are, because they don't know. Let us share that with them.' As I thought of that, I had this desire to go back to China—which we did this summer—to the earthquake zone and sing over these people the hope that has sustained us. I was connecting our day of loss and destruction to theirs and saying, 'You know, today the world went wrong. But out of this, if I really believe God's Word and God's promises, God will bring beauty out of these ashes. And this is our hope. This is our comfort.' And as I wrote that song [the title track], it just captured the heart of what I would say in this album. That this is the promise, God. Beauty will rise out of this. I'm not going to pretend to know what that's going to look like. There's going to be a lot of it that we won't even see until heaven. But this is what I know to be true."