Seven Years in the Making

Yesterday a prayer was answered. It happened during the message at church. Our pastor was sharing on … truthfully I don’t recall all of it. There were two words he uttered that ignited something inside me. As he continued his message, I began to tune out, only half-listening. Okay, there I admit it. Let’s move on.

These two words I wrote down. Then I paused. Then I wrote down a few more words, as I heard them in my spirit. Again I paused. A few more words, now coming more readily, and before the service was over, what lay on the page before me was the chorus to a new song.

We went about our regular Sunday afternoon activities, and in the evening, in a quiet room, I sat down at my keyboard. I began to play. A simple chord progression began to rise from the keys. Then I began to sing. Thoughts were coming almost more quickly than I could keep up with them. I hesitated with some of the lines I wanted to write down, because of their boldness. The strong words painted a picture that was unlike anything I’d written before. Truth isn’t always pretty to look at. But it does result in our freedom when we dare to look it in the face.

The end result was a new song, the answer to a prayer, a cry of my heart that has gone up to the heavens for years. There was a time in my past when songwriting was as natural to me as breathing. Lyrics and melodies came from a place deep inside me where I was not alone. One of my secret disappointments over the last several years has been that I had not written a single song in seven years, since just before we moved to Arkansas.

Not that I haven’t tried. I could sit down and come up with something just for the sake of writing something, but this has never been my desire. I have always wanted my music to minister, first to the Lord, then to the earthbound fellow worshiper. My songs have always been intimate, very personal, and mostly vertical in their message.

Here is the truth I have uncovered regarding this new breakthrough. When my life was surrounded by noise clutter, I could not hear the songs that have been lying dormant deep inside me. Now that I am spending more time surrounded by silence, my spirit, my mind and my heart are coming together to a quiet place and are allowing the songs to be heard. In the silence, my soul sings.

The two words Pastor Craig uttered during his message Sunday have become the title for the new song, “Undivided Heart.” I am believing the Lord that this is only the beginning of what will become a series of songs born in a new season of my life and my relationship with Jesus. Many of my songs in the past were born out of pain and healing and restoration. These new songs, I believe, will be songs of deliverance and renewal, of returning to a secret, holy place of personal communion and worship, and of taking broken, hurting people to that place for the first time.