But just for 7 days! Our band will be recording our first, full length album with BlueSky studios in Jackson during the first week of October. We're obviously quite excited, as any musician would be, but most of our excitement is directed less towards the album itself, and more towards the ensuing journey it will bring. This is our mission! This is how we're going to bring the Gospel to the dark places of our county! This is how many people we encounter will hear about Jesus, and hopefully respond with a desire to initiate a relationship with Him! I'll explain by telling you the full story...
I've always wanted to write songs. I first became interested in music when I was 13 and decided to grab my dad's Ovation from his closet and start awkwardly strumming out some chords my friend showed me. I learned fairly quickly and started doing cover songs the next summer, but that's about as far as it went for awhile. Granted, I did get a lot better a guitar, but I was never really able to write songs for about 8 years. Even my first few songs were messy at best. I was in a band in Jackson with 3 of my best friends in the world, and we were having so much fun making music that I decided we should do originals just for fun. What came after that was not necessarily bad, it just wasn't good. People said they enjoyed my songs, but I never felt like I had a gift of song writing. They were mostly about my relationships with Allie or stories about different people or places. They were mindful of Jesus, but not actually about Him. They were few and far between and I always felt like they were forced; sort of like telling a story in Spanish without actually knowing how to speak it very well... I could get by, I just wasn't fluent.
Skip ahead to this past winter where I experienced probably the darkest time of my life. An adrenal gland failure, mixed with a vitamin deficiency, during the worst Indiana winter in 100 years led to depression, chronic fatigue, and lethargy unlike I'd ever experienced. I lived in this for about 5 months before Jesus miraculously saved me. And when I say "Miraculously," I mean it. In one day, my condition was diagnosed, I started a vitamin program to heal my adrenal glands, God released me from the job I had endured for 6 months, He called us to be missionaries in our town to start the things we had been praying into for years, and we started planning a month long trip to our beloved Mississippi. Our lives changed. And with that change came something unexpected, but quite welcomed: I started writing songs.
Maybe the best way to describe what happened is to liken it to when people are baptized by the Holy Spirit and they start speaking in tongues: something wonderfully spiritual happens to a person and then they immediately start speaking a language they never knew before. I guess I was baptized by the Holy Songwriter. That's not to say that my songs are divinely perfect or anything... they're certainly divinely inspired, but I still wrote them and I still mess things up a lot. God just decided one day to give me the coolest gift that I'd been wanting for 11 years. His timing was pretty great too!
Maybe a month before this, I had planned on doing a show with a kid from our Tuesday morning art ministry who was a crazy good musician (his name is Jimmy and he's incredible. He was invited to play in the San Francisco Folk Festival this past summer... check his music out here). I had promised him the show so that he would have a chance to perform his songs for some people in our church. But then 2 weeks out, I realized that it would be too much to for me to juggle with my job, getting ready to go to Mississippi, and having to move all our stuff out of our friend's house that they were selling. I had planned on canceling, but before I could tell Jimmy, me and Allie were at a Missional Community conference in Ohio and the Lord clearly led me not to cancel. Jesus told me to do the show because He wanted us to sing songs about Him as a way to preach the gospel to the people in our town. I was really excited to get such clear direction and looking forward to doing the show, but I wasn't really sure what songs He was talking about. There were a few covers that I thought would be cool, but it seemed like something was missing....
Well, you can figure out the rest.
I got my sister and good friend together, and in 10 days, the Lord gave us 10 songs which we were able to perform at the show, and it was beautiful. As I looked at people's faces while we told them about Jesus using folk music, I couldn't help but think that He planned that for me before I was even a thought. I could see His smile, as He wrote the notes for my existence before He even created earth. I could see the joy in His face as He watched me, so fully satisfied in Him, as I operated in things He had for me, using things He gave me, to reconcile things back to Him. It was wonderful.
Have you ever done something you feel that you were created to do? Eric Liddell says that's when he "feels God's pleasure." I couldn't agree more.
Since then, we've written 30 songs and have painstakingly chosen 11 to record so that as many people as possible will hear these songs about the Jesus that has so greatly changed our lives. We want to bring these songs to dark and spiritually abandoned places to tell lost and hopeless people about a Man who wants desperately to redeem their hurting hearts back to Himself. We want to dispel the lies about the person they may think is Jesus with the lovely truth about the real, live, crazy awesome One.
And let me tell you: Jesus loves folk music. That is why we're recording a folk album.
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