I wrote these songs when old tunes couldn’t walk me through my hardest season yet.  My husband and I had reinvented ourselves in so many places over so many decades. We had constructed a passionate marriage of opposites, a joyful family from miscarriages, and a real-people church on the faith of a dozen misfits. After that, we stretched further to run a justice restaurant, began homeschooling our middleschoolers and moved Jordan’s 80 year old grandmother into our already active household. We had dogs, cats, chickens, catfish, chameleons. And a middle aged, perimenopausal woman.

I dreamed of a clean house. Of a vacation. Of an easy conversation with the man I remembered falling in love with.  Instead, I started throwing out my back, had weeks at a time of vertigo, and practiced weeping in my car. Sometimes I broke trust. Sometimes I broke dishes. 

I still kept putting on my make-up, showing up and picking up.  Kept helping my kids and husband run toward their dreams. Kept inventing ugly but nutritious meals to please and offend the whole family equally. It felt like a long time of questionable progress.

And I tried to keep singing because singing has always proved to me that I'm real. With songs, I converse with my insides, and then together, me and me, we agree about the things we will never surrender: love that gets  better, good that we fight for, and the spiritual realities that encase us. 

There had always been lots of songs to choose from. At the very least I could count on an old hymn. But in that season, nothing spoke to me. I was starving for resonance.  

It was as if God led me to the brink of silence, to the blank page. 

Say what you know then. As you know it.

But it will be simplistic. Stupid. Self-indulgent. Half-baked.

Is there another way?

So then, here these came. Late at night on legal pads on the dining room table. Or whispered into my phone in the bedroom closet. Leaning on rhythm and rhyme, the lyrics ambled out and hummed back. Over the months, they helped me profess, confess and defend my faith.  Faith in God, in my husband, in the future, in the past, in small gratitudes and in my hope for heaven. And it was okay that the songs sounded like, well, just me. I am less shy of who I am at my core now.  Who'd have thunk it at this point of my life? Time has given way.  

One September morning toward the end of Covid, I felt the Lord speak into my consciousness. Some of you know that unmistakeable, unnerving prompting.  “Get up and start recording your songs.” A few hours later that led to a single phone call, which led to my meeting the very accomplished Imua Garza. He was uncharacteristically available due to the pandemic. He and his team served me with grace, patience and masterful skill as we produced this recording together. And that's how this happened. With gratitude and trust, I offer my songs back to God and to you.