Kirk Franklin - I Need You To Survive Lyrics

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I need you to survive with lyrics

Meaning & Inspiration

I was listening to this again, and it’s one of those songs that feels so heavy because of how simple it is. It hits that idea of being part of God's body, which is just straight out of what Paul wrote to the Corinthians about how the foot can't say it doesn't need the hand. It makes me stop and wonder if I actually live like I believe that. We treat people like they’re disposable so easily, but the lyrics keep coming back to "I need you to survive." It’s uncomfortable to admit that I need the person I’m annoyed with, or the person I disagree with, just to be whole.

It makes me think about the command to love one another, but taken down to this raw, survival level. I’ve always thought about survival as something you do alone, or maybe just with your immediate family, but the song flips that. It suggests that my actual spiritual breath depends on how I treat you. That part about not harming each other with the words from our mouths—that’s just James 3, isn’t it? About how the tongue is a fire. It feels like such a high bar to reach, but it’s the only way the body functions.

I’m still wrestling with the scale of it, though. Is it true that I need every single person in the body to survive? It sounds beautiful, but sometimes I feel like I'm doing just fine on my own, or at least I think I am. Maybe that’s just my pride talking. It’s hard to reconcile the idea that I am completely dependent on the rest of the body when my own heart is so prone to just wanting to keep to myself. I don’t know if I fully grasp the weight of what it means to be part of something so connected that if one part hurts, we all do. It feels like a standard I’m failing every day, yet I can't shake the feeling that this is exactly what’s supposed to happen when we actually start trusting God’s design.