Recently I was informed that “Awaken My Heart” has been nominated for Worship Leader Magazine’s “Indie Worship Song of The Year.” You cannot imagine how thrilled and humbled I am.

This song has really been the little song that could, and honestly not by any effort of my own. The funny thing is, that I just kinda gave up a while back. I wrote “Awaken My Heart” back in 2007 and tried to promote it by sending it to every artist, pastor, reviewer, magazine, publisher, label, manager, etc. that I could think of… INCLUDING Worship Leader Magazine.

NOTHING. Worship Leader Magazine had rejected “Awaken My Heart.”

As you can imagine this was quite disheartening, but then one of my great mentors and friends, Tom, told me, “Stephen, just pray and rest in God… if He wants to do a work here, He will.” From that moment on I just kept feeling that God was continually giving me little hints to stop and rest in His sovereignty. To cease striving and simply know that He is God. To seek His kingdom and righteousness and let everything else fall by the wayside. So I did.

A year and a half later we re-released a new recording of “Awaken My Heart” on our People of Redemption album. We had just been seeing it connect with people all over the country more and more. It was apparent as we were praying through which songs to record that God was not done with this song and we needed to redo it.

This time I strived to do nothing but pray and let God do what He saw fit.

Then, out of nowhere in mid-June, on the cusp of leaping in faith to full-time itinerant worship leading, I was approached by not only Worship Leader Magazine to feature “Awaken My Heart” in their Song Discovery compilation, but Spin360 as well, and then AllAboutWorship podcast. So it has been quite a humbling past couple of months as we have just watched the Lord work on our behalf and see that no matter how hard we push or exert or force stuff, it will not come about unless the Lord does it.

Certainly God is not done with us and has confirmed it tonight with this honor that is completely unmerited and undeserved. “Awaken My Heart” being nominated is just such an honor because:

1.) I know I didn’t do it AND 2.) I and many other people have said it would not go anywhere because it is SO heavily focused around my reformed stance on the sovereignty of God in our salvation and that is not predominately the viewpoint of our generation, but rather, fairly controversial…

Either way, Christ has seen fit to bring it to this point and I trust that if He wants to carry this on to completion as “Song of the Year”, He will. However I do find it fitting to give you the opportunity to vote. SO, if you’d like to, you can vote HERE and spread the word as you see fit…

Love you all more than you could know.

Grace and peace,
Stephen Miller