How Sacred Youth Music Has Changed — And Why EFY 1999 Still Reaches My Soul

How Sacred Youth Music Has Changed — And Why EFY 1999 Still Reaches My Soul

Note: these are my thoughts, but ChatGPT has modified some of the language and format 

I started my mission in 2000, and even though I never owned the EFY 1999 album A Season for Courage, those songs are burned into my memory. They must have been passed around on the mission, copied, shared, played in apartments and mission cars, because every track feels strangely familiar — like an old friend I didn’t realize I’d missed.

Listening again 25 years later, one thing stood out immediately: compared to today’s Strive to Be music, the songs of that era were more subtle, more tender, more metaphorical. They didn’t just declare devotion; they illustrated it. They carried symbolic threads from verse to verse, inviting you to sit inside an emotion instead of simply naming it. There was depth woven through the simplicity.

And some of those songs still cut straight to the soul.

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“Feel the Fire” and the Ache to Return

Feel the Fire hits me especially hard. There’s something painfully honest in the line:

“I’ve grown so cold from bitter rain,

And I need to feel the fire again.”

I know that feeling. I’ve lived it.

There have been moments in my life where the Spirit came so powerfully — so supernally — that it’s impossible to describe them in human terms. Before my mission, in solitary prayer, I felt a literal opening of Heaven. During my mission, after teaching lessons, the constant cycle of studying, praying, and testifying brought me to a closeness with God I have rarely felt since. Those were times when peace and joy didn’t just comfort me — they elevated me. I felt like I was walking on air.

And so when I hear “I need to feel the fire again,” it resonates with something deep and real. It feels like remembering who I was in the presence of God — and who I want to be again.

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The Call of Devotion in “Whatever It Takes” and “When All Is Said and Done”

Other songs on the album strike me in the same way. Whatever It Takes and When All Is Said and Done speak to a kind of total devotion, the desire to give everything to God. They capture the lifelong question discipleship demands:

Will I kneel and wonder at the Savior’s feet?

Will I hear Him say, “Well done,”

When He sees who I’ve become?

There is nothing — absolutely nothing — more important than hearing those words from His loving lips one day. To enter His presence not with fear or shame, but with awe, gratitude, and joy. These songs remind me why that matters.

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Why This Album Still Matters to Me

Listening again, after so many years, stirred something in me I didn’t expect. It helped me remember. It reminded me that I truly do love the Savior — not in an abstract sense, but deeply. Personally. Longingly.

Today’s youth music is bright, happy, and direct. It speaks plainly of Jesus and brings smiles and warmth. But the songs of 25 years ago reach somewhere different. They touch a deeper longing, a reverence, a yearning toward the divine that feels both ancient and familiar.

When a song can awaken a desire to reach inward and upward — to seek God again, to remember Him more fully — that’s when you know it’s something special.

And that’s what this album did for me.

Again.

After all these years.