Each Shade and Hue

  Jeremiah 29:13 And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart. Earlier, I was sitting and listening to some music.  One of the songs wasn't in English . The words translated to this :   “We don't listen to anyone,   We don't think of anyone We only have one life,   We don't listen to anyone,   We don't believe anyone anymore We take tomorrow for granted.”    These phrases got me thinking about this blog entry I had on my agenda to get written, as this does seem to accu rately reflect the mentality that has been adopted by m u ch of society.   Since this is mainly a blog site about my music, I guess music is a good place to start. Even though I have written a lot of music, I listen to a lot of other people's mu sic as well. I amassed  lot of my song library from scro u nged vinyls. I do not have subscriptions to any of the latest subscription song services. I never listen to the radio. Even thoug...

  T oday I was reading in Malachi chapter 1 and meditating on what I read. Immediately, some images and thoughts popped in my mind. In the second part of chapter 1, we read about priests that were polluting offerings given to the Lord. God says in verse 6 this: “A son honors his father, and a servant his master. If then I am a father, where is my honor? And if I am a master, where is my fear? says the LORD of hosts to you, O priests, who despise my name. But you say, ‘How have we despised your name?” What God was saying was, a son gives obedience and respect that his parents deserve in their household; a servant does what his master requires or deserves, but why are the expected consideration not given to the Lord? Why is He not even on the level of what we are expected to give our earthly relations? Shouldn’t we be going above and beyond what we would offer to a parent or earthly master? Instead, He was offered less. There was no attribution of respect, fear, and duty. God told th...

I n my repertoire of songs I have written over the past four decades, a handful still do not have lyrics. I was working with one tune in particular last month, trying to pair it with a lyric. No theme connected. After a while, a memory popped in my head and pointed me in the direction I ended up feeling the song needed to go. When I was in fifth grade, a group of students were ushered in a room for a meeting. We had been chosen to be the test group to learn French. It was understandable, since our county borders a large part of Québec, whose main language is French. Seven years later, I was still in the program. I was in the first group to make it to the end of the school’s program. To celebrate the achievement, the school decided to take the students who had participated in the program to Québec City for some immersion and exploring. I signed up. There were eight of us invited, but only seven decided to go. I was an only child. I grew up in a very small community with no sibling...

A s a parent and grandparent, you hope and pray that at one point or another, the good seeds you tried to sow stick and begin to grow, then way surpass anything you ever tried to do. Today, I get to out my son a bit. I was cleaning out files from a folder we share for various odds and ends, and I found this song in the trash. I listened to it, and it brought me to tears. I let Kim listen to it, and all she could say was, "Whoa." Weeks later, I ran it by his wife, who also knew nothing of it, and we all conspired against him, ha, ha. We get chills every time we listen to it. When he was visiting for a family birthday, I threw myself under the bus and admitted I had found it. (I think it sounded like, "WHY ON EARTH WOULD YOU THROW THIS INCREDIBLE SONG IN THE TRASH?!?") He reluctantly agreed to allow me to resurrect it and share it as a guest post here. I can think of at least a couple of stories from his childhood for most lines, and I am sure he has many more. This i...

I started this song in June of 1997, when my son had barely turned two. He and I were talking about 1 Kings 19 a week or two ago, as he was sharing some verses with me he had recently read in that passage. We talked about situations Kim and I had been through relating to it, and how the passage also related to things in his own life and what God had taken his wife and him through more recently. My conversation with him and the thoughts he shared with me allowed me to finish this song after twenty-nine years of it sitting in a folder untouched. Prior to this, it was just some notes I had jotted down while in the middle of what Kim and I both consider to be the most taxing assignment God ever gave us. I have only heard the audible voice of God one time in my life. It was in dire circumstances, and it was probably the only thing that ever could have kept me pushing through in the situation I was in at the time. It boils down to being called to stand toe to toe with evil without backing d...

This song came together based on the verses in Hebrew 13:8 , Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. First John 4:12, No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. Ephesian 2:4-5, But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved. and Romans 5:8, but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. E ach of us co-writers wrote song segments when we had a few minutes to get together. We wanted a peppy, lively tune to be catchy to keep on our minds even in the hard-to-be perky moments in life. We got a good portion of it finished, but then we all ended up moving before it was completed. We each landed in a different states, separated by hundreds of miles. When we all went our separate ways, the song only needed one more brief session to be done,...

  I do not think we even come close to fathoming the things God does on a daily basis to watch over us, when we are walking with Him. Kim has been dedicating a short season to fixing things around her mom's house so she is safe and everything is functioning as it should. One night, neither Kim nor I could sleep. By 4 am, we were looking at each other saying, "WHY CAN'T WE SLEEP?!" The next morning, Kim's mom found a very beaten-up impact driver on her front step, a door we rarely even use except for deliveries and minor other things. Kim realized what she had thought had been the sound of a raccoon (her mom lives in the woods) had been the sound of someone trying to break into the house. She ran over to the recently painted door handle and deadbolt and saw striations where someone had begun to drill out the lock before I "randomly" had turned on a light when I was unable to get to sleep. If we had not been awake, pacing, turning lights off and on, and ba...

I have had a video sitting in my “watch later” list. Yesterday, I decided it was as good a time as any. The man speaking was in Sweden, and he was commenting on the changes in people globally in the past few decades. I have been feeling the same thing myself and I wanted someone else's take on it. He especially caught my attention when he said one phrase: giving someone "my full attention," because that was the title of the song I was working on a blog for. I wrote “My Full Attention” December of 2016, three years into my stroke recovery process. My biggest fear as I learned to speak again, is that I would never again be able to write something that started and completed a thought in a cohesive way. I wondered if I would be able to remember words again at all, let alone rhyme them and get them to match a melody. This song was my first full-song writing attempt since my brain explosion. Could I still do it? It was still a struggle for me. I did complete the lyric and mel...

A   short time ago, I ran across a document containing this completed song lyric that I had written back in early 2022, complete with melody with chords and all. I had very little recollection of the song, and zero remembrance of the writing process of it. (Brett!? How do you forget writing an entire song?!) I began to browse through that time in my daily journal that I have kept during stroke recovery to look for any indication that would tell me what led me to write this particular song. There aren't a lot details in my journal, just a note about a very tender spiritual one-on-one moment with God. (I love those.) It was centered around the verse that says: "Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you" (James 4:8). There are times when you know God knows exactly where you are, and He reminds you that He has not forgotten You. I cherish those moments when I experience them, and I long for them. Those intimate moments with God are priceless. We have had this song on rep...

  K im was out with her mom, and I was getting ready for the day. Weird as it sounds, I find that the things God speaks to my heart end up happening when I am in the shower. It is a thing. Four lines, complete with melody and words, suddenly just were "there" in my head. I started humming it as I continued to get ready. I sat down on the couch to jot it down, and the rest came quickly and easily. By the end of the day, I had a version of it to the copyright office. This is one that gets stuck in a person's head. We found ourselves humming it for days, and some days, it is still on repeat. There was a day early on in the stroke saga where the neurology surgeon was talking to Kim, explaining what had just happened to my brain. I was blissfully unaware. They had me so medicated, trying to lower my blood pressure and figure out what had just happened to this very active, healthy-eating young guy. I normally walked to work, just for the exercise. If we had to go somewhere with...