“A Divine Shock Absorber”: Tolu Omolayo on Faith, Loss, and “Glory to the Lord”

“A Divine Shock Absorber”: Tolu Omolayo on Faith, Loss, and “Glory to the Lord”

That’s how she describes God. A divine shock absorber.

I’ve heard a lot of people try to explain what they believe. Most of it comes out in language borrowed from somewhere else. Tolu Omolayo reaches for a car part, and somehow it lands harder than anything polished would have.

Start with the paperwork, because the timeline is the story

Look at how “Glory to the Lord” got built:

She starts writing songs. Same year, she writes down the spoken word section, which she took directly from Psalm 104, verses 1 through 4.

More of the song shows up.

More again.

Then a gap. A long one. And at some point recently she’s driving to work, an ordinary commute on an ordinary morning, and she feels the Holy Spirit pushing her to finally go record the thing.

Thirteen years, give or take, from first fragment to finished record. Read that timeline again and tell me it isn’t unusual. Songs don’t normally survive that. They get lost in old phones. They get replaced by newer ideas that felt more urgent at the time. This one just sat in the drawer and waited her out.

The scripture is doing real work here

Three passages run through this, and none of them are decoration.

Revelation 4:11 is the spine. That’s the verse the whole worship anthem is built on, and it sets the register right away. Praise directed upward, no negotiation.

Psalm 104 is the spoken word. Smart choice to speak it rather than sing it. That passage is enormous, full of wind and fire and light, and a melody would have gotten in the way of it. Some text needs air, and she gave it air.

Then 3 John 1:2, which she points to as the reason her music works the way it does. Mental, physical, emotional, spiritual. All four, all at once, not ranked. She’s not writing songs about escaping your body or your problems. She’s writing about being okay across the whole of you.

She is not selling you a smooth life

This is the part I respect most.

Plenty of worship music implies that if you get the faith part right, the hard part goes away. Tolu says the opposite, flat out. Life is not always a bed of roses. There’s no promise of a life without conflict. She’s very direct about that.

What she says is promised instead: victory in the storm. Beauty for ashes. Joy for mourning. A garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.

Notice the pattern. Every one of those is a trade, not a cancellation. The ashes still happened. The mourning was real. Nothing gets erased, it gets exchanged. That’s a much more honest thing to sing about than pretending the storm skipped your house.

And it loops right back to the shock absorber. Not a promise of no potholes. A promise about what happens when you hit one.

The message she actually wants you to take

Encouragement. That’s what she calls the core of it.

Nobody’s walking through this alone, whatever’s in front of them. She’d say that’s true whether or not you show up on a Sunday, and it’s the reason this song will reach people who don’t usually go looking for worship records. The theology is specific. The comfort isn’t.

She also talks about carrying a song of worship in your heart at all times, which I keep thinking about. Not a thing you do at a certain hour in a certain building. A thing that’s just running in the background while you drive to work. Which, given how this song finally got recorded, is not a coincidence.

And it started with her mother

Almost forgot the beginning, which is maybe where I should have opened.

She was 13. Her mother had a band, brought her into it, and made her the lead singer. That’s where the whole thing starts. Her mother has since passed, and you can feel that weight sitting under everything else Tolu says about music.

She eventually left for the United States looking for opportunity. Kept singing. Kept writing. Built a song across three separate years and then waited almost a decade more to record it.

A kid handed a microphone by her mom, still at it, still convinced there’s a song worth carrying around in your chest.

Listen to Glory to the Lord

The article was brought to you in collaboration with One Sunmit, the smart way to promote music.