Amazing Grace

CeCe Winans sings John Newton's hymn without altering a word of it, and the opening line still carries the same blunt honesty it always has: "amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me." Newton, a former slave-ship captain, meant that word literally.

"I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see" pairs two separate images of rescue — lost-and-found, blind-and-seeing — the same blind-to-sight language the healed man in John's Gospel uses when questioned about Jesus.

"When we've been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we've no less days to sing God's praise than when we first begun" pushes the hymn's timeline out past death entirely, and Winans closes not with a final verse but with a sustained, repeated "praise God" that functions less like a lyric and more like the hymn simply running out of words for what it's saying.