Music is intrinsic to my way of life.  It is the way that I both serve the Church and provide for my family.  It fuels my soul.  Basically, I can't live without making music.  I know it sounds so arty and cliche but some days I don't eat until I've written a song...it's just that bad! 

But more than that, making music one of the very few ways to really be honest without giving it all away.  You can expose your soul while maintaining anonymity, creating closeness from a distance.  Let me explain...

I can write a song.  Another person on the other side of the world can sing it, connect to it.  I can lead a congregation in singing, venting my heart in every ascending and descending phrase while no one in the room really knows me. And that is the beauty.  We couldn't possibly all know each other intimately but somehow, music brings unlike people together.   

Just last night I was on YouTube and stumbled across videos of different folks singing one of my songs.  They were connecting to what stirred in me late one night a couple of years ago.  It's quite surreal that something created in the confines of your little life gets broadcast to tens of thousands, and people connect.

There is an unwritten, undefined way in which music helps people connect the dots of their lives.  I'm not talking about wrapping up our wounds in beautiful bows or having to have happy endings or clean story lines.  I mean that music helps us understand without fully knowing the meaning.  It gives us peace in the not seeing.  It helps us relate to each other and to the world in ways that language, race, institutions, government, literature, and oratory cannot.  It gives us a shared emotional and spiritual space, a moment in time when everything seems right.  It gives us permission to feel.

And I love being a part of those moments.  You know, when you look around and everyone knows we just had a 'moment'. But those moments can fade as quickly as they come.

My goal as an artist, writer, song-leader, worshiper is to bring truth and beauty in every moment.  To help connect the dots.  To create space for celebration and saddness.  To give legs to what it is we're all searching for.  I don't need to provide easy fixes or happy endings.  I just to need to help cut the path toward something that is Real.  


It seems that there is so much in the world that is not Real.  By not Real I mean not true or dishonest or unauthentic.  The same is often said of my context, the Church. There is so much that is not Real about the way Christians get together.  And that irks me.  But I quickly remember that I am the Church.  I am the wrinkle on the forehead of an ugly bride.  I hide my faults.  I avoid discomfort.  I like happy endings, even if they aren't reality. I'm lazy and half-hearted and very often completely selfish.  I am at war with this and yet have peace within knowing that I don't have it all figured out. This is the only way I know.  


And I know this is the only way.