and so we begin

Yes it’s 11am and I am still in my pajamas. It is a bright Saturday September morning, the smell of bacon and coffee still lingers, my belly satisfied with the sugar-lemon pancakes

I’m breathing it all in deep today, because something new begins. This afternoon we set up to begin recording the hymns EP – my first recording since college. It’s taken a long time to get here, and it feels like a lot of battles have had to be fought to find and document the song of my heart and my people. These songs come out of not just my own time with my maker, but with walking life alongside the people of God, my brethren. Beautiful, deeply flawed human beings without whom I would be a lonely wanderer, and who knows what else. I keep going back to Boenhoffer’s statement in his book “life together”, that the Christ in my brother’s heart is greater than the Christ that resides within me. Even those who have not remained with me in friendship after strained and difficult times, the Lord has used to mould me and teach me about love, perhaps in part what it is not supposed to look like, and the pain of hewing this stone has been necessary, and even in part, beautiful. It is always likely, I am learning, that a song worth singing comes with a burden of one sort or another. Some songs come out of a great joy and a burden to express it – others (more often for me) come from a costly path, one we must be willing to bear if we want our songs to bring freedom to those who must face the same trials we just walked through.

The saints have a song all of their own, a song that resides within the Great Story, a song I hope I can capture but a small essence of, at least for my part in it all.

It’s not lost on me either the wonder of the child that lives within me and grows as I embark on this recording. Though I walk tenderly with nausea and fatigue and some days struggle to keep up with being a mum to Jonah, and balancing my new role as worship arts pastor, and still finding time to be quiet and alone and filled back up again, these are glorious days of great victory.

Difficult days, yes. Because there is one who does not want these songs to be sung, and I face it daily.

Victorious – definitely. Because the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead lives in me. And I love Him more than words, but word and song will have to do, and I will sing to Him to the end of my days.

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