Songfacts®:

• Tenth Avenue North are a Christian Pop-Rock band who formed while attending Palm Beach Atlantic University. They took their name from a major east-west road in Palm Beach County. This is the second single from their sophomore full-length release, The Light Meets The Dark. The song was the band's first #1 on Billboard's Christian Songs chart.
  
  This song was written by the group's producer Jason Ingram and their lead singer Mike Donehey, who told us: "The main thrust of the song began with an irritant. I heard Jon Foreman from Switchfoot talking about songwriting once, and he said often he writes songs like an oyster makes pearls - it actually begins with an irritant, and you're forced to make a pearl around it. There's a saying that it's the choices that make you who you are, and that sort of rubbed me the wrong way. I felt like it was doing injustice to grace and mercy. So I started that lyric that way." (Here's the full Mike Donehey interview.)
• This was the #1 song on the Billboard Christian Songs chart for 2011. When we brought this up to Mike Donehey, he replied: "It's cool when you hear about accolades and awards and stuff, especially a song like that, you're not writing for the chart position. You're writing to the person that's hearing it. I got my award on that song a long time ago just from letters from people saying the song helped them see things clearly and helped changed their lives."
• Talking about this track's meaning, Mike Donehey explained: "This song might have the most important message of the whole album. It says: 'This is not about what you've done or what's been done to you and it's not about where you've been but where you're brokenness brings you.' This is not about what you feel. In a world where our validation and our acceptance is based upon what we do, how well we perform, what we feel, I feel like that is just a really special statement to sort of negate all those false ideas that are going around."
• Mike Donehey tells us that he often hears from people who have been moved by this song. He gave this example: "Last night at our concert we got told that a grandmother took her daughter to the show, and we started playing that song, and she broke down crying and admitted to her grandmother that she'd been cutting, and that she wanted to stop. Cynically, I know several stories in my head of girls that have come up to us and given us their razor blades saying that that song helped them stop cutting. Which seems to be sort of a little movement of social distortion."