AMY TURNER
There’s a moment in gospel music when a song stops being just a song. It becomes testimony. It becomes the thing a family reaches for when the doctors have delivered news that lands like a stone in still water, and the ripples just keep going. For Richard Hyssong and his family from Maine, that moment arrived twice, seventeen years apart, and the second time, they already had the song waiting.
The Hyssongs have been a fixture in Southern gospel circles long enough to know the difference between a number that fills a setlist and one that fills a room with something harder to name. “It’s Not Over Yet,” their new Horizon Records single, belongs firmly in the second category. Written by Jason Cox, Kenna Turner West, and Brian White, the track rides a stately, unhurried arrangement produced by award-winning Jeff Collins, with Dell Hyssong stepping forward to carry the lead. The production is deliberate in its restraint; there’s nothing here designed to distract from the lyric, which doesn’t pretend to offer easy comfort so much as it insists, plainly and without apology, that the story isn’t finished yet.
Richard reaches back to 2008 to explain why the song landed so personally. Their daughter Makayla was born into a situation no parent should have to navigate: 22 tumours in and on her heart, and a massive number of brain tumours alongside them. The prognosis was bleak. Doctors told the family she would likely not survive, and if she did, she would face severe limitations. “We were devastated,” Richard says simply, the understatement carrying the full weight of what those days must have been. But the tumours on Makayla’s heart disappeared. She grew up. She talks and walks and sings, and she now travels with the family, lending her voice to the very ministry that her survival helped to shape.
That backstory would be enough on its own to give “It’s Not Over Yet” its emotional ballast. But then December 2025 arrived, and the Hyssongs found themselves standing at a second crossroads. After years of good health, doctors discovered two tumours on one of Makayla’s kidneys, and one on the other. The song they had been singing to audiences about holding on and trusting God had become the message they needed to receive themselves all over again.
“We are not going to give up,” Richard says. “We know that ‘It’s Not Over Yet.’ The same God that healed her before can do it again.”
The lyric itself doesn’t shy away from the scale of what it’s asking people to believe. It invokes the parting of the Red Sea and the fall of Jericho, reaching for the kind of precedent that makes current impossibilities feel smaller. “Are you staring down a giant that just won’t seem to fall,” it asks. “Are you facing the impossible, your back’s against a wall.” The chorus doesn’t offer a formula or a timeline. It offers a posture: keep trusting, keep believing, don’t let your heart forget. The simplicity is the point. Theology dressed in plain clothes, for people who don’t have the bandwidth for anything more complicated.
Richard frames the song’s reach in terms that go well beyond Makayla’s story. “Maybe you have had a bad report from the doctor or family member,” he says. “Maybe you are struggling with finances and think it is the end.” The catalogue of ordinary crises is the point: the song isn’t reserved for extraordinary suffering. It’s for whoever is sitting with something that feels final, looking for a reason to believe that the last word hasn’t been spoken yet.
That’s a hard thing to pull off in any genre, and Southern gospel has its share of songs that attempt it and land somewhere closer to platitude. “It’s Not Over Yet” avoids that fate partly because of the restraint in the production, and partly because the Hyssongs aren’t delivering it from a position of resolution. They’re singing it from the middle of the story, still waiting, still trusting, still travelling Sunday to Sunday and believing it themselves. There’s a credibility in that which no studio polish can manufacture.
Whether the song crosses over beyond the Southern gospel faithful likely depends on how many people in any given congregation are quietly carrying something the doctors or the bank statement or the calendar has told them is over. If the Hyssongs’ experience is any guide, that number is higher than it might look from the outside. And for those people, “It’s Not Over Yet” arrives at exactly the right moment, with exactly the right message: hold on. He has the final say.
