Britney

Album: Bebo Norman (2008)
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Songfacts®:

  • Though this song alludes to the troubled Britney Spears, Norman said on his website that it carried a bigger significance. He explained: "[It's] a song about what our culture says and does to young women these days. It's about the lies we tell them about fame and money and what's beautiful and what will give them life. It's an apology for those lies. But more than that, it's an invitation to the truth about a God who is bigger than the pain this world so often leaves them in."
  • Bebo Norman told Christian Music Today about how some late night television viewing inspired him to write this song. Said Norman: "That song caught me off guard. It's not one that I was anticipating writing or expecting to write. I was up late one night and couldn't sleep, and I was flipping through the news channels, and landed on this story about Britney Spears. To be completely honest, my first inclination was to keep changing the channels. But for whatever reason, I stuck on this story for a minute or two and realized pretty quickly that it was a heart-wrenching story that was unfolding: She was being taken away in a stretcher to an ambulance to a mental hospital; the whole story involved her kids and a lot of stuff that's hard to watch."
    Norman then explained what it was in the news story that particularly struck him: "There was just this look in her face that the camera captured. I've never really fancied myself as a longtime Britney Spears fan or anything. I hear her music on the radio just like everybody else. But I just think that this look on her face, there was complete brokenness. It really stopped me in my tracks and put me in my place. I realized in that moment for the first time that I was looking at her life less as a tabloid story and more as a real-life story in need of redemption, just like my real-life story is. It was striking because I suddenly saw her and her story through the eyes of Jesus rather than through the eyes of condemnation—something that we as the church are sometimes so quick to do. We're so quick to point the finger and point out people's faults, where they have fallen short, rather than embracing them with the compassion of Christ. We're all responsible for our own choices, but in light of that, [we're] to embrace culture with compassion."

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