The Story Behind Steadfast

Steadfast is an Ebenezer to a journey I needed and absolutely didn’t want.

After I had my third child, I slipped into a dark post-partum depression. My anxiety spiked so high, most days it was hard to just move through my house. I had never felt that disoriented for that long. I felt betrayed by my body. And, while I knew God wasn’t far away, it felt so hard to find him. 

About 18 months into this heaviness, I met an artist friend for coffee. She told me she had been feeling imposter syndrome like crazy; and instead of giving in to it, she was practicing saying yes to commissions and figuring out how to show up to her “yes” later.  “I’m only going to grow if I step out,” she said to me. The very next day, I was asked to lead some of my songs from Lamplight at a scripture memory seminar.

That coffee date was the only reason I said yes.  

At the seminar, a woman named Joyce Lasse spoke about the value of memorizing scripture, and when she spoke it was like the whole room leaned in. She spoke with a different kind of wisdom and weightiness. It was captivating.

After the seminar, I thanked Joyce and got pulled into a chat with her and a girl I’d only met once before, named Kaitlin, who promptly invited me to a scripture memory gathering she was planning that Joyce had (only just) agreed to lead. I didn’t want to go. That invitation felt entirely overwhelming to me. But, I am a recovering people-pleaser, and when the person who invites you is standing in front of you, you say yes. It was people-pleasing that got me to that meeting the following week. Isn’t it kind of God to use our weaknesses to bring about our good and his glory?

A week later, I knocked on the door with a terrible attitude, but I wanted access to the wisdom, depth and reverence for scripture that Joyce had modeled at that seminar. It was so compelling. At that meeting, Joyce essentially said, “I can’t really tell you how to memorize, but I can do it with you.” So, we all agreed to keep meeting. 

God knows we need him more than anything else. When we’re willing to look, we find him.

After our first meeting, I went home with my assigned scriptures to memorize, and God said to me, “Write a melody.” It made me angry. I told him that I had “zero creative margin with three children under 5 years old and a gnarly battle with anxiety and depression, which he wasn’t doing anything about by the way.” And he said, “Just one melody. You got it.” So, like a pouty, floppy kid I wrote a melody to Genesis 1:21-2:1. And it went ok, flowed pretty comfortably actually. But I had two verses to memorize that week. A little later, God nudged me to write another melody. “Nothing fancy. No pressure. Just a tool for memorization.”

And I did. 

Every week, our group was assigned 2 verses to memorize, and I got into a rhythm of writing songs to those verses each week. Two months into the study, the group found out I was writing memory songs and wanted me to send them out. I had written 16 songs. 

That rhythm continued for about a year, and I started to realize that the darkness wasn’t as dark. It was a hazy gray, maybe. I could see the beginnings of light at the end of the tunnel. And with that slow shift came mental margin to create with more curiosity, intentionality. The melodies became less functional and more thoughtful.

I found myself asking “What’s the message of this passage? How do I convey that musically?” 

Then I started writing extra songs for verses referenced in our study but not assigned and that gave way to picking passages on my own to meditate on and memorize. It became a rhythm I craved, a weekly practice of creativity and meditation on God’s word. And about 9 months later, I started to feel the tug to release music. Just humoring the impulse, I counted the songs I had written, and there were 108. 

It happened almost imperceptibly, the journey through anxiety and depression into clarity. It was slow and invitational. As I said small yeses, offered up tiny moments of obedience and made seemingly insignificant choices to stay in the fight, God gave me a clearer picture of who he is. He gave me himself.

I’ve been a student of the Bible for a long time, but those two years were potent. I saw, with incredible clarity, the character and heart of the God of the Bible. I found myself marveling at him — his kindness, his faithfulness, his care for his people.

In my daily life, I saw him EVERYWHERE. As if once I knew who I was looking for, I couldn’t miss him.

In Psalm 40:2, David says, “God lifted me out of the pit of despair, out of the mud and the mire He set my feet on solid ground and steadied me as I walked along” (NLT). That’s what God did for me. And this album is a creative monument to that journey. Praise be to God.