Lay Down My Guns

I came across this on youtube. I've loved Sanctus Real for awhile now, and I love the song Lay Down My Guns from their most recently released album, We Need Eachother. This interview is with Matt Hammitt the lead sing on the subject of that song and then there is a video that is amazing...please watch it. Its intense. I hope it gives you hope in your life that we can find rest in GOD and also, I hope it moves you to pray for our soldiers and the leaders of this country. We are blessed to live here, even when its hard to remember that, its none the less true.

Interview with Matt Hammitt...
JFH (John): What's the story behind "Lay Down My Guns?"
Matt: There's this guy named Doug McKelvey who contributed some of the lyrics for "I'm Not Alright" on the last record and he was really the first cowrite we used with the band besides producers who had contributed stuff here and there. What he had basically done with that song, "I'm Not Alright," is he came in and had done such a good job with helping us edit the lyrics and taking them to the next level. So we had been looking to get stuff from him ever since, if it works. So instead of just cowriting, he'd send us some random lyrics. We actually weren't going to use any outside writers on this record, and then Doug sent over kind of a b-file of extra lyrics and he had a worship song that had the line, "Lay down your guns, lift up your hands." And I just liked that one line. We didn't use any of the other lyrics and I basically wrote a whole new concept on that one line, and then even changed that line a little bit. Because it immediately made me think of the war that's going on right now and what soldiers go through, and just thinking of these guys away from their families for so long... They basically live to defend themselves in our country. And how good does it feel when you can finally come home and set your guns down and be able to not be on your guard anymore. Just be able to have that release, y'know? And then it made me think of how that's life too. That, while we're on this earth, kind of like spiritually and emotionally, we have so many defenses up all of the time that we have to have because we have an enemy. What would it feel like? How good would it feel to get to heaven and lay down our guns and lift up our hands and learn to completely love again. It's really just a metaphor using the war in Iraq as a metaphor for our spiritual journey. I like that song a lot.