Gertrude Stein once noted that Hamlet continues to be discussed not because of what is understood about it but because of what is not. David Ruis’s “There Must Be More,” a staple of Christian contemporary music since its release, in 1994, is hardly Hamlet; still, despite its inclusion in a genre of music not known for its complexity—a genre known, if at all, for a simplicity not always distinguishable from vapidity—it remains both baffling and beguiling.

The argument the song’s narrator makes is more or less as follows: I am crying out for something real because I know, deep in my soul, that there must be more. I am tired and weak, but I keep hanging on—“just keep hangin’ on/ ’cause there must be more.” The speaker is in manifestly bad shape—groaning, kneeling, and perhaps in danger of what centuries of Christian thought have designated the worst of sins: despair. But not yet, because each stanza offers an uplift from dejection at the conjunctive pivot. Because.

—Reese Okyong Kwon