[Verse 1]
He stretches out the north over empty space
And hangs the earth on nothing
And how faint a word we even hear of Him
And yet - our eyes and ears and minds get all the candy
[Chorus]
I sing for grace
For grace it lets me sing
And all I've ever seen or heard
Or haven't seen or heard
It's His
There is no other
All of this is but the fringes
[Verse 2]
And these are but the fringes
And all the world hinges
On His grace and on His word
It speaks things into being
And the spoken things revealing
The glory of our God and King
[Bridge]
I'm stumbling upon things that aren't mine
Things he spoke to life before time
Name one thing that's not
One law or thought
He taught the clay
Molded it
Behold, He called the sheep
That's why they came
Sheep! Who by grace get a peep
And make it cheap by calling it mine
[Outro]
"Behold, these are the fringes of His ways
And how faint a word we hear of Him!
But His mighty thunder, who can understand?"
Fringes
Song Meaning
Shane & Shane build "Fringes" on a single, deliberately small image — a fringe, the edge of a garment, borrowed from Job's language about how little of God's greatness anyone actually perceives: "how faint a word we even hear of Him... all of this is but the fringes." The verses undercut human perception on purpose — "our eyes and ears and minds get all the candy," distracted by lesser things even while glory is present.
"I sing for grace, for grace it lets me sing" keeps the song from becoming purely about human smallness — the singing itself is credited to grace, not effort. "He stretches out the north over empty space / and hangs the earth on nothing" quotes Job almost word for word, grounding the song's cosmic scale in a specific ancient text rather than vague awe.
The closing lines, set off in quotation marks as if spoken rather than sung — "these are the fringes of His ways... but His mighty thunder, who can understand?" — end the song on the same note it opened with: not resolution, but reverence for how much remains unseen.