Blog

I don’t think I was yet in kindergarten when my brother told me that he was going to fold me up like a towel. Actually fold me up. In my pre-operational stage of cognitive development, I kept trying and trying to wrap my mind around how he could do that to my body and what it would feel like to be folded into halves and thirds and put under the bathroom sink. I fully believed he was capable of human towel origami. 

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I could say a lot here. I could talk about 60+ people coming through our home in one week in October of 2020, many of whom took a turn behind a microphone to record their lines. I could talk about treks to Shelbyville to help listen in to the editing process, and mostly work on stuff while Bobby did the real work. I could mention fall breaks spent working on this and weeks in summers that Bobby and Morganne Pickett gave to this project and endless text threads and phone conversations. I could mention staying a week at Bobby and Morganne’s while Erik Samborski and Bobby Pickett mixed and mixed and mixed some more. And I sat in the room and studied for state licensure exams and provided a tertiary opinion when asked for one.

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“I'm currently thinking/wondering if the questions we ask may be one of the most important things we do as learners and as teachers…” Let that one soak for a minute. This runs completely countercultural to everything we think about in terms of education, theology, our way of being and doing.

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Right here in these short days and long nights before the celebration of Christ’s incarnation, His coming to dwell with us, right here I want to offer you some peace.

These long nights can feel anything but silent.

Tonight is the longest night of 2021 and maybe you need something to help bring that stillness and silence and solace that only comes with the sense of His abiding presence.

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Rule was, any book in my father’s study was fair game. Any of us six kids could go in at any time and choose any book off of any shelf and read it. I don’t remember when I joined the ranks of older siblings as a patron of my father’s library, I don’t remember the time when my ritual of slowly walking around his room began, carefully reading authors and titles, slowly selecting the books, feeling them in my hand, reading the blurbs,

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Sometimes that preserving and holding close and keeping is painful as He pulls us away from what we love the most. Let us not forget Who is preserving us, and that He preserves us for Himself.

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Not sure what gave us the inspiration, but over a decade ago Oldest Brother and I decided we’d walk to church everyday instead of drive his car. Save us on gas, we thought.

So early every morning found two walkers, backpacks strapped on, making our way along sidewalks and grassy areas and across a four-lane highway, covering the mile-and-a-half distance in as short amount of time as possible. He made his backpack heavier than mine as he was trying to train for a hike on a missionary trip in Haiti. We were rather proud of ourselves when we got our morning walk down to nineteen minutes.

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I got a message today from a listener saying that her husband was making breakfast this morning as he listened to my newest album These Saints. And he shed some tears over the omelette. In fact I’ve received quite a bit of feedback over the last week since the release of These Saints. And (almost) without fail, y’all are telling me that you’re crying. So glad someone has joined me in sheding these tears.

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These Saints is finally done and sitting in my living room and it’s ready for you to listen to. I approach this moment with a mixture of excitement and fear. Excitement because I have long prayed for these songs, and prayed for you as my listeners that those who need to hear the lyrics will hear them. Fear because I’m aware that what you will hear in these songs is a story that doesn’t make complete sense and I know it might not be understood.

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When I was three or four my cousin told me that the thunder that shook the heavens during the midwestern summer storms that frequented my Indiana hometown was the laughter of God Himself. And I believed him.

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Long before my first day of kindergarten, two of my dear cousins appeared from behind our backyard playhouse and gave me the hard news. “We’ve buried your baby doll in the dirt.” Buried it. My baby doll. In the dirt. It was a very upsetting experience to me. Morganne and Patrick finally retrieved it for me, but the doll did not emerge unscathed (I mean, after all, it had been entombed beneath our black, Indiana loam). 

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At the intersection of 87th and Pulaski in Chicago stands a lady. She stands there every day with a sign: “Anything helps. God bless you.” Few people stop. It would be a shame to support this kind of living. Even fewer people know her name. After all, she’s just a beggar at an intersection, an inconvenience to their busy lives. They avoid eye contact. It’s pointless to put a name with the homeless lady asking for a handout. 

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My vision is that listeners will gain a new appreciation for the local and catholic (universal) body of believers that they are a part of. It is also my prayer that the honesty of the songs will make listeners aware of some of the doubts and questions that even “put together” believers grapple with. This album isn’t about easy answers or feel good lyrics. I want the songs to give listeners space to look their doubts head-on and bring those doubts to a God Who, as Michael Card once said, “invites the conversation.”

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Guest post by Elizabeth Smith Hamilton. I’m one of those people who had the privilege to change regional and church cultures when she got married. I remember at my reception, hugging a seemingly endless line of crying loved ones who all knew that as I left for my honeymoon, I would never be back as the same. And I wasn’t. I was moving 600-700 miles away to a different culture, people, denomination, and life.

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Thomas made an audacious proposal in his open disbelief when his fellow disciples told him with wide eyes, “We have seen the Lord.” Thomas stood unmoved. He just simply said that he refused to believe it unless he could place his own fingers on and in those red and raw wounds. Now the Risen Christ and the Doubting Disciple are to meet. Christ comes, scarred and wounded and with fresh blood in His untreated and open wounds.

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I look back at the scenes and acts in which I took part alongside him, and the scenes move slowly, as if recorded in slo-mo, and frames freeze, and I catch my breath. And I stare at the script that is now mine to follow, try to reconcile the part I played before and during Josiah and the part I am to play now, in the after. And I realize that a chasm, an uncrossable crevice, has cut right through the heart of things, right through to where things matter most.

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In Matthew 25 we read what we have come to know as the heart of the Gospel message: feed the famished, quench the thirst of the parched, welcome the alien, clothe the destitute, comfort the incarcerated and infirmed. It might be worthwhile to note that Christ Himself led by example: He fed the 5,000, showed kindness towards unwanted minority groups, cured and clothed the demoniac, visited and healed the sick. But I find no event recorded in the Gospels where Christ visited a prison.

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Questions Without Answers

I remember playing a party game as a kid (though I’m not sure it was an official party game). The victim (or contestant, rather) would be blindfolded and given an item of food to try. Sometimes it was various flavors of baby food, sometimes it was random items from the kitchen (and I do mean random). Regardless of the selected smorgasbord awaiting testing, the end result was always the same. Each contestant was told whether their guess was correct or incorrect and what it was they’d actually placed on their palate. The mystery was revealed, the secret divulged.

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