Steadfast: The Listener’s Guide
The songs on Steadfast are the prayers and promises I clung to through two years of real heaviness.
They come from all over the Old and New Testaments and are laid out to be a journey that mirrors my experience from darkness to light, from haziness into hope.
The first three songs function as a combined invitation into scripture memory:
Psalm 1 – outlines the blessing and steadiness that comes to the one who meditates on the law of the Lord.
Isaiah 55 – highlights the promise that God’s word does not return void but accomplishes exactly what He intends.
Matthew 6:33 – Jesus’s invitation to seek His kingdom and righteousness, trusting God to bring the rest of life’s needs and priorities into right order.
They function like a Biblical marketing campaign for the album, like “this is what happens for the person who endeavors to meditate on scripture; they become as steady as a tree planted by streams of water.” Heart change will happen because we know from Isaiah 55 that God’s word does exactly what he intends and from Hebrews4:12 that the word is “living and active, sharper than any double-edged sword…discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”
God wants us to know him,
and when we commit to seeking him,
he promises that we will find him!(See: Jeremiah 29:13, Deuteronomy 4:29, Proverbs 8;17, Isaiah 55:6, Matthew 7:7-8, 2 Chronicles 15:2, Acts 17:27…to name a few).
The fourth song is Isaiah 42:16 which says, “I will lead the blind by ways they have not known… I will turn the darkness into light before them.” This is essentially the contextualizing song for the whole album. It encompasses the journey I have been on. I felt blind. Everything felt dark. And God led me, gently, kindly, tenderly out of darkness and into light, by showing me who he was.
The reality is, God did not change my circumstance. He changed my perspective. He showed me who he was and that changed everything.
The rest of the album moves through the passages that I clung to on that journey out of darkness into light. They are passages that speak honestly about who God is while acknowledging that things are far from good. They are requests for His help and healing, and declarations of trust and a willingness to wait for his timing with expectation.
I needed to see in scripture the tension I was feeling in my own life. These passages brought me comfort and lifted my eyes to the bigger story God was writing in my life.
And then, the album concludes with Hosea 14:9: “The ways of the Lord are right, and the righteous walk in them.” It brings everything full circle, back to the call of Psalm 1—to become like one who delights in God’s law, to become like a tree that yields fruit in season and does not wither.
AND, to express that full-circle arc musically, there’s an extended outro at the end of the album. It holds little melodic easter eggs, melodies from earlier songs woven together into a kind of musical summary. As you get familiar with the album, you’ll begin to hear them: the promises and prayers revisited in small, subtle ways.
I hope this journey blesses you as deeply as it has blessed me.
