More than 20,000 university-aged students converged on Atlanta, Ga. the first week of January 2011 for the Passion Conference: four days of worship, teaching and encounters with God, with the purpose of refreshing, restoring and inspiring the emerging generation to live for Jesus and to be filled with His love.

With a veritable “all-star” line-up of gifted and consecrated worship leaders, the albums made from the times of worship at Passion conferences have given birth to many much-loved songs in the global Church. Passion: Here For You, the much-anticipated collection of new songs features sixstepsrecords artists Chris Tomlin, David Crowder Band, Matt Redman, Christy Nockels and Kristian Stanfill. The album and new song offerings reflect the desire of a generation to lay down their lives to live for the renown of Christ.

I’ve been collecting every Passion worship collection since the albums began in 1998. From the beginning, the Passion movement has been rooted in the confession of Isaiah 26:8:“Yes Lord, walking in the way of Your truth we wait eagerly for You, for Your name and renown are the desire of our souls.”

One of Christian music’s most recognizable and prolific female voices is Texas' Christy Nockels. Together as Watermark, Christy and her husband Nathan recorded five albums with Rocketown Records, including hit songs “Knees To The Earth”, “My Heart Your Home” and “Glory Of Your Name.”

Christy and Nathan have served at Passion Conferences since 1997 and in 2008, they moved to Atlanta to be a founding family of Passion City Church.

“Waiting Here For You” is the newest single by Christy Nockels from Passion: Here For You. I had the chance to talk to Christy about the song.


Please share the background message behind the song "Waiting Here For You.”

I didn’t actually write this song. It was in a group of songs we were all writing together with Chris Tomlin, Matt Redman and Louie Giglio. We all get together before the Passion conferences, and last fall we prayed and wrote songs together, asking God for themes that are stirring in His heart for His people.

After the last conference, Passion: Awakening, we saw that those themes really connected with people and God really answered our prayers. For this conference, Passion: Here For You, we did that again and this song emerged from Chris Tomlin as he and his bass player, Jesse Reeves, wrote a song called “Expectation.” The verse lyrics are now the song “Waiting Here For You.” Then, we invited Martin Smith from Delirious? and he and Chris ended up writing the chorus of the song together.

I remember my husband Nathan and I having lunch with Chris during that writing time and he played us the song. Immediately the melody grabbed me, and I thought it sounded incredible, not even thinking I would end up singing the song. Somewhere along the way Chris said he felt strongly that this was a song I was going to sing at Passion. It feels a lot like I wrote the song.

It’s funny, because it takes awhile to learn to sing a song, especially if you didn’t write it. There’s this period of time where the song has to get inside of you. You need to believe it and own it in order to deliver the song to people. So we had this neat time of rehearsing and changing the key and the tempo of the song. We performed the song at our Christmas Eve service at Passion City Church, and on the way home I told Nathan I didn’t know if we had it right yet. He encouraged me to finish the song in time for Passion.

Sometimes you don’t know why it’s such a struggle to sing a song, either because you should or shouldn’t sing it. In this case, it was because I was supposed to sing the song. I needed to make the song my own, especially the bridge part where it builds to “Alleluia.” I put my own spin on the bridge. Singing the song and seeing people respond to the song has encouraged and blessed me.

Please tell me about the Bible verses that tie-in with the message of the song.

Isaiah 26:8: Yes Lord, walking in the way of Your truth we wait eagerly for You, for Your name and renown are the desire of our souls.

… and James 1:18: He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created.

How have those passages and the message of this song been a part of your life?

The Lord has really put the message of this song on my heart. It is exactly where I am in my life. It's where we all are, to some extent. Every night that I sing this song I get emotional, especially when I sing the second verse, “You’re the Lord of all creation, And still You know my heart, The Author of Salvation, You’ve loved us from the start.”

When we pray beforehand, we pray that God will give us individuals with faces and stories to know who is out there hearing our songs. You can think that everyone hearing the song is a Christian music fan and that’s not always the case. There are people out there in absolute despair. Every single night we hear heart-wrenching stories from people who have just buried their child or husband or wife. There are people going through such hard things in their lives.

When I sing that verse, if there’s such a thing as an intercessory song, I feel like that’s what I’m called to do. When I sing it, I’m praying for God to help that person know that Truth as well. The song goes so well into Louie’s message about our God of all creation.

I based my song “Gloria” on James 1:18. The idea behind that song is that God is our Lord of all creation, but He chooses us and knows our hearts. He is the Author of our salvation and promises to complete that work in us. My prayer for this song is for people to know God and understand that He’s a personal God that we can know personally.

Here are the lyrics:

If faith can move the mountains
Let the mountains move
We come with expectation
Waiting here for You, I’m waiting here for You

You’re the Lord of all creation
And still You know my heart
The Author of Salvation
You’ve loved us from the start

Waiting here for You
With our hands lifted high in praise
And it's You we adore
Singing Alleluia

You are everything You’ve promised
Your faithfulness is true
And we're desperate for Your presence
All we need is You

Singing Alleluia
Alleluia, singing alleluia, alleluia

Waiting here for You
With our hands lifted high in praise
And it's You we adore
We're singing Alleluia

I'm singing Alleluia
Waiting here for You
With our hands lifted high in praise
And it's You we adore
Singing Alleluia
Singing Alleluia