An Ocean in the Fog
This album was written in a dark and disorienting season of my life.
I felt completely untethered and hazy, like God was distant, and I couldn’t find my way out of the heaviness. I couldn’t see it at the time, but looking back, I see God’s gentle guidance and sovereignty: an invitation to a scripture memory seminar I barely said yes to that landed me in a weekly Bible study I didn’t know I needed which gave me a consistent opportunity to witness God’s character not only in the Bible, but also in the lives of the women gathered in that room.
He gave me the courage to say yes. Not once, but over and over again—tiny, daily yeses to show up to his invitation, to study his word, to create melodies to help me memorize it, to get in the car to go to Bible study, to lean into a situation with my child instead of disengaging. They were hard yeses. They cost me comfort, energy, and the easy-way-out. And they have compounded into a beautiful story that I get to tell of how God gave me what I didn’t realize I needed most: Himself.
In the profound words of Sally Lloyd-Jones, God loves us with a “never stopping, never giving up, unbreaking, always and forever love.” Steadfast love. And this album is an Ebenezer to the journey where God etched that truth deep into my heart.
When it came time to choose album imagery, I wanted something in nature that reflected that idea of steadfastness.
Initially, I chose a sunrise because the last two years have felt like a slow dawn: moving through darkness, waiting for the light of morning. But none of the sunrise images I played with really landed.
My frustration with the cover art came up in a coversation with a friend, and I jokingly asked if he had any images I could use. He started texting me photos, just everyday moments he’d captured, and after a while, he said, “I’ve got a misty ocean, but that’s probably not what you’re looking for.”
When I saw the picture, I was immediately transported to the summer before I moved to college.
I was 18 on a beach in Massachusetts with my family and in a similar season of wrestling, uncertainty, and disorientation. I remember standing waist-deep in the ocean, the waves rolling past me, and hearing God say, “My grace for you is like the waves of this ocean—it never stops washing over you.” And I stood there in the Atlantic for a long time and wept.
And 16 years later, standing in my friend’s kitchen, the lesson clanged through me again: God’s grace hasn’t changed. His care is still constant. Still steady. Still rolling in, wave after wave.
But, the fact that the cover image shows mist over an ocean is wildly poetic. Since that time when I was 18, oceans have come to represent God’s grace and nearness. But the mist? The mist captures what the two years of anxiety and postpartum depression felt like. Like standing on the shore, surrounded by fog, not sure if the ocean was still there. But the ocean doesn’t move. It doesn’t stop washing across the sand, and even if I can’t see it, smell it, hear it, it’s there—constant, unwavering, vast—and woven into every moment of my life.
So standing in my friend’s kitchen, that misty ocean photo became the official cover of Steadfast, a full-circle reminder that God doesn’t change, and I can trust his care for me even when I can’t see it.
