Titles matter to me. A title isn’t just a label — it’s a promise. It tells you what kind of story you’re walking into before you’ve heard a single note. So today I want to talk about why this musical is called “Bring Us Home,” and why that phrase ended up doing double duty in a way I didn’t fully plan, but that I now think is one of my favorite things about the whole project.
It starts with Psalm 137
Almost everything about this musical grows out of one psalm — Psalm 137. If you’ve never read it, it’s the lament of the Jewish exiles sitting by the rivers of Babylon, weeping when they remember Zion. It’s the psalm that gives us the image of harps hung in the willow trees. It’s the psalm with that gut-punch line: “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”
That psalm is the emotional DNA of this whole show. The setting, the ache, the refusal to perform their sacred songs for their captors — it’s all there. And underneath all of it is one simple, desperate cry: bring us home.
The opening number — and the title
The very first song in the musical is called “Bring Us Home.” It’s sung by the company as the exiles are marched out of a burning Jerusalem and into captivity. It’s a cry — raw, communal, and immediate. Nobody on that stage knows if it will ever be answered. They just know what they’ve lost, and they know what they’re asking for.
So the title comes straight from that opening cry. Simple enough, right?
But then there’s the ending
Here’s the part I didn’t fully see coming until I was deep into writing the finale. The very last song of the show — the one that closes the entire story, after seventy years, after the decree of Cyrus, after the long walk across the desert to a ruined Jerusalem — is called “We Are Home.”
“Bring Us Home” opens the show. “We Are Home” closes it.
The title isn’t just describing the beginning. It’s the whole arc. It’s a prayer in Act One that becomes a declaration in Act Two. The same ache that opens the show with a question is answered, seventy years later, with a statement of fact.
Why that matters to me
I think a lot about how we talk to God in seasons of waiting. “Bring us home” is a prayer a lot of us have prayed in one form or another — not always about a physical place. Sometimes it’s about restoration. Sometimes it’s about a relationship, a calling, a season of life we feel exiled from.
What I love about this title is that it holds both ends of that journey at once. It’s the cry and the answer. The longing and the arrival. And I think that’s true to how faith actually works — it’s rarely instant, but the prayer you start with often becomes the truth you end up standing in.
One title, two bookends, one story
So when you see “Bring Us Home” as the title of this musical, I want you to know it’s not just naming where the story starts. It’s naming the whole shape of it — the prayer that opens the show, and the promise that closes it.
I can’t wait to keep sharing more of this with you.
Stay close to the story
💬 Comment below — has there been a “bring us home” season in your own life? A prayer you prayed for a long time before you saw it answered?
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Tomorrow, I want to dig into the question at the very heart of this whole show — one I think a lot of us have asked, even if we didn’t have the words for it.
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