Each Shade and Hue

T his song is one we had written one way, then replaced much of the second verse years later after going through a long process with God. The original words (by Ken) were: "Out on the dark horizon, I see a distant light; It's Jesus calling to me, trust by faith, not sight." Years later, after we had been through 1997 and its subsequent fallout, Kim replaced the words of those first two lines with what the words now are. I would say the first set of words were more where we were in 1991, and then the words we now stick with fit the story we lived much better. Opposition is guaranteed. If you find yourself standing in a tough spot where God dictates one thing but people pressure you to do the opposite, you have to choose obedience. It does not matter who the other person is or how powerful they might appear to be at the time. Mordecai always has a Haman (read the book of Esther). He could have chosen to bend his knee to Haman, give in to the power Haman seemed to have. He c...

1997 was literally the opening line to A Tale of Two Cities : "It was the best of times; It was the worst of times." There seemed to be a song that year that notated every detail we experienced. October found Kim and me crossing state line after state line after dropping our very young kids off in New Jersey so they could hang out with their grandparents for a couple of weeks. We encountered what seemed to be defeat after defeat during that very long season in life, and there was less than zero hope in sight. Everything from those years is somewhat of a blur, on the rare occasion we are forced to revisit it (which we do now only when absolutely forced to). Not many words were exchanged between us on that trip between the lonely roads of Maryland and Virginia, where this song was born. I sang it over and over, and Kim caught the tune and we sang it together over the next couple days as we charted our destination.  We realized that the most painful circumstances are best bathe...

T his short chorus started as a very simple prayer one Wednesday night when I was hours away from my family and alone.  When I prayed that night, I knew God heard my heart and joined with me in my family's circumstances. This song still touches me at the core of my heart. The words to this might be the equivalent of someone asking God for patience. If you are not familiar with that whole concept, it is a "be careful what you ask for" thing. Should we ask? Absolutely. Does God just wave His hand and impart it to us? Oh, sure, He does. In the form of impossible people, road blocks, disasters, challenges, losses, and other things we would never choose to have in our lives. "Burn me," is the same concept. But maturity and becoming like Christ require it. To listen to this song, click below:

O ne thing we are promised in a life following Jesus is the cross. We often do not like to acknowledge the "suffering" part of this journey. The times your flesh is annihilated, you get your preferences roughly zero percent of the time, you start looking odd to people, you end up losing things, being alone ... whatever. The more you lose, the more alone you become, the more you realize that eternal things are it. Nothing else really matters. We can't even make our own heart beat, which is necessary to stay alive, so it is actually laughable we think we control anything else. The fact we can stand unashamed in His presence at the end of it all, no matter how imperfect we are is all that really matters. We have had a lot of disappointment and a lot of loss. Some stories, I do not believe we will ever even tell because reliving it to tell it is too painful. Suffice it to say, we have deeply lived the songs we have written. Second Corinthians 4:7 states: "But we have thi...

I n my youth, I lived in a really small community In spite of that, my school system featured an extremely skilled athletic program. One of our varsity teams would often reach the top spot in Class C statewide. Basketball, soccer, and track rounded out my school offerings. I was poor, at best, in all three. I couldn’t dunk a basketball to save my life. I wasn’t built for cross country. Our community had a hockey rink, but I couldn’t skate if I had to. I figured my chances at lettering in high school were slim. I did take a position as team manager for the varsity soccer team for a season. THAT I could do. I squeaked by with my school letter ... barely. I remember when I discovered my athletic ability in a sport that only required one! It changed my life when I found I could do well at speed lap swimming. I lived at the pool from then on. I ate that up like there was no tomorrow. Had I had that opportunity in high school, how would that have changed the course of my uncoordinated, awkw...

B eing used and thrown away is par for the course when you decide you are going to become serious about following Jesus. It comes with the territory. Darkness does not light, and lies do not like the truth. Sometimes God will do things in your life that people closest to you do not understand, and it will begin to isolate you. The isolation years in the process of deeply seeking God can be loaded down with rejection and abandonment. This song celebrates the fact that Jesus will never do that. He promises to never leave us or cast us aside (Hebrews 13:5). To listen to this song, click below.

O ur lives are much like a coin, and we only get one. We get to spend that coin how we see fit. God gives free will, and completely leaves the choice to us whether we will spend that coin seeking and serving Him, or if we want to fit in and do things the way everyone else does them. To "reserve" something means to set it aside for a specific purpose. I decided a very, very long time ago that I did not want to show up in the musical field the way most do. That is their coin to spend, and they have to be accountable for their own coin. I just never felt that certain places were where I should be with what God had given me, and I held to that. I took a lot of flak and turned down many things that I know made me look insane, given what was going on in my life in addition to that. Compromise could have made a lot of situations a lot easier in the short term, but I couldn't do it. I believe in the long term, which is eternity. There are simply things I have felt deep conviction...

M ost of this song was written rather quickly in 2010, but I could not get the tag line to save my life. I tried line after line after line, and none of them felt right. Three years later, after going through a very specific process, the line fell into place, and helped me understand why I could not fill it in before. We had to walk through the circumstance first. In the early spring of 2013, I was working diligently on the task I felt God had laid on my heart, which was to make sure I sang every song I had ever written into my phone and then store them on my computer. This song was the last song I ever did that for, because 24 hours or less after I recorded it, I had a massive stroke that has left me in a condition that doesn't let me play the piano with my right hand. Although God restored my ability to speak, singing was physically painful up until a couple of years ago. I am working on getting it back, but it is rough. The first lines of the song that say:  "In an hour of ...

T his two verse chorus was written while we were at a family's home for Christmas. We were reflecting on the work of God in our lives over the past year. Psalm 37:7 says Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for Him; do not fret when men prosper in their ways, when they carry out wicked schemes. One of the most difficult things to do is to remain silent in the presence of evil. Sometimes God has you speak your piece, and you do that, but often, He wants us to just be still and allow Him to fight on or behalf. I laugh about a meeting I had with one very wealthy guy eons ago who called following Jesus a crutch for weak people. First of all, maybe it was not an inaccurate assessment. In almost every way, I am very weak, and I do need a spiritual crutch. Who better to lean on that Someone who did it all perfectly, died for me, and is holding the flashlight through the flames to the safety door? Secondly, it probably is easy to mis-define "weakness" until you actually t...

"I n between." That describes where and when this song was written. We were in the middle of a huge move from one side of the country to the other. To add to it, we had another obligation requiring our presence for the three months in between our old location and our new one. It virtually turned our situation into a double big move all within the span of three months. We had a toddler and a one-year-old. The "in between" was a literal limbo. Cue a home owner who somehow managed changed the closing date on our new home. This left us with a loaded moving truck, two toddlers, and a pregnant cat in a hotel room for two weeks. Nothing came easy during the limbo session. The bill on the moving truck climbed, changing from several hundred to several thousand dollars. The cat got uncomfortably close to her due date, and the kids were more than over it with our close quarters. Our communication with God became utter silence from his direction. It was one of those situations ...

F irst  Peter 4:1-19 is a hard act to follow. We want to do something, then see positive, and (hopefully) instant results that ease any of life's discomforts. We want to make positive connections with people. We would like to see reciprocation in friendships, or at least, some level of loyalty. We want to sow into those who are appreciative on some level. But if we are told to relate to Jesus by relating to HIS sufferings, what does that look like? It looks like sowing into people who really aren't going to care if we live or die. It means being unjustly accused, insulted, betrayed, mocked and abandoned in our darkest hour. It means serving people who drain us, praying for people who treat us with contempt, and doing things in life differently than what "normal human life" might dictate. Lights are not generally put into lightened rooms. It is usually a dark one. The journey makes us weary. It is difficult to keep showing up sometimes. We may find ourselves less lovin...

I was in  my third year of a musical hiatus after  writing music consistently for the 15 years prior to that. Kim and I found ourselves crisscrossing the country late night in February of 2002. We each had a parent in an ICU unit in different parts of the country, while we were in yet a third part of the US, and we were about to juggle all that entailed.  It was the first time in a long time that a song popped into my head while driving. It was typical of me to start thinking of lines of a new song while driving at night when everyone else was asleep (it is frowned upon for the driver to sleep, so songwriting usually kept me alert and mentally occupied). Isaiah 26:3 is the verse that came to mind and caused me to pen these lyrics and the play on words they contain. ( I am one who is drawn to plays on words, regardless how silly they may be.) We are instructed what to do when He says, “You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.”...

T his song was started in 1998 and then sat in my writing book for the better part of 15 years. I dug it out every few years, took a stab at completing it, and stuck it back in my drawer. My wife was normally better at remembering my songs, my lyrics, or the melodies better than I, so I was always grateful for her help when I couldn't quite remember how it went. However, this song was one she had never heard, for whatever reason. In early 2013, I dug it out for the fourth or fifth time, and this time the missing pieces came together. It was finished. I quickly recorded it into my phone so I'd remember the tune. There it sat for the next few weeks. Then, the life-changing event of our lifetimes happened ... my stroke: the one the doctors predicted I would probably not pull through. There were many dark days during the months I sat in the hospital. One of the darkest for my wife was in the ICU while I was still paralyzed, was not aware of my surroundings, and could only speak gi...

J esus said to be careful of the yeast of the Sadducees and Pharisees, which is hypocrisy (Luke 12:1). What is hypocrisy? It is when someone considers themselves to be on a pedestal above others, to speak for God, when they themselves will not lift the burden or hold themselves accountable in the same area. It is preaching one thing but living another. It is having a massive problem in your own life, but ripping others apart for doing that same thing. It is the opposite of what my friend, Jean, taught me years ago. She said any time she would say something about another person, her mother would have her follow it up with one of two phrases. It would go something like this: "That person is awful!" "And so am I." "They think they are so much better than everyone else." "And so do I." Sometimes it genuinely is not true, but sometimes it is, ha, ha. It definitely is a good checkpoint. I think there is a problem where everyone has a "leader"...

T his song was one of the ones God used to solidify how I did (and did not) want my music to be used, along with "Just One Man." The words of all these songs have spoken into our lives a lot, and sometimes a song has brought along circumstances that have taught us things outside the contents of the song. This is the second produced version of this song. I trashed the other one, even though it was really, really good, and the music went back into a box for many more years. The heart of a project is even more important to me (and, I believe, to God), than how great the finished result is. These years have dealt some painful blows. The road was dark, lonely, painful, plagued with many fearful days ... but at the end of it, we had what Jesus taught us through it, and that is something that cannot be taken away. Click below to hear this song.

I started writing this song on a drive home from work a very short time after Kim and I were married. The muse was the fact that the weather had been socking us with constant rain for much of the summer of 1992. The song's theme and words stuck, and I slowly added to them over the following months.  It was nearly a year before I considered this song finished. I found the particular style was unusual for me to write, not one I played well on the piano. My reference recording has traveled with us across the country time and time again, but no one is ever allowed to listen to it, ha, ha. It is nice to witness this song coming to life after enduring the recording of the skeletal chord structure for so long. This version I am posting matches exactly what I heard in my head when I wrote it. As I writing this historical recollection, my mind travels to memories of the town we lived in at the time. In addition to memories of all the rain storms from that year, I remember a car suddenly car...

W hen I was in Bible college working through my radio major, I often gathered around the piano with other music-loving people. One day, a guy named Glen came to me with a yellow pad of paper and 75% of the words to this song jotted down. He asked if I could help him finish the song. He wanted a lot of bass, and he wanted to keep it with the music style of that time. We went over to the piano and started banging it out, and girl who was a student there came into the room and asked what we were doing. She stayed and listened as we wrote the rest of the song and she ended up singing through it with us when we finished it. That is the music file I used to build this demo. Since the whole concept of this song was Glen's idea, I thought it would be fitting to keep the production in alignment with what he heard when he wrote the words. This song reflects the emotional war we often experience with depression and discouragement. Life gets heavy. Things get difficult. Days begin to feel like...

I thought I would reprise a write-up I contributed to a book my wife wrote years ago. E very home has closets. Each closet has a purpose. Some closets are useful for storing clothes or cleaning supplies. Other closets become catch-alls for all sorts of junk—items we just can’t admit we’ll never use again and hold onto. Just like homes, our hearts have closets. Instead of T-shirts, tennis shoes, suits, belts, and junk, these closets hold actions, emotions and memories. Sometimes these closets have only one purpose: to hide the failures, struggles and pain built up over the years. For these, there is no thrift store drop box where we can discard items no longer useful to us. Instead, they become vivid reminders of things that keep us defeated. We spend much of our lives trying to forget these rooms even exist, while attempting to live life as normally as possible. Recently, I ran across one such closet in my own life. For the previous twelve years, I had been storing pain, failure and de...

I n Matthew 11:28, Jesus says everyone who is weary and carrying heavy burdens can come to Him, and He will give us rest. Finding that place of rest can be very difficult in a culture filled with road rage, rebellion, immorality, rising costs, medical stressors, or a myriad of other things. That tells us that our rest and peace definitely do not come from external sources. I believe it comes to the point where we can either fixate on the day-to-day things we are experiencing, or we can go to Jesus and say, "Here is what I am handling. Here is what it feels like. What do I do???" The circumstances do not often change overnight, but Jesus can give a supernatural, irrational peace in the middle of situations that should leave us down for the count.  John 14:27 Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, nor let it fear. Click below to hear this song.

T his seems like a pretty basic statement when you claim to follow Jesus. "You are my God." A lot of people say this, but I think when a person follows Him long enough, they are brought to the point of asking, "Is He really ?" What if following Him puts us at odds with family? People we think are our friends? Coworkers? Is He still our God? Is He our God when things do not work out the way we think they should? What if we appear to receive the exact opposite of what we are praying for? What if God does not stop the foreclosure? What if the person is not healed? What if the court case does not go in our favor? What if the person does not stay? Is He still our provider when the circumstances say, "No way," or do we believe He is going to work it out? When we are being judged, attacked, maligned ... is He still our shield and defender? What does it look like "to give full control"? These are the kinds of words we do not shallowly sing-song thro...

T he idea for this song came about during a casual conversation with someone. The completed song quickly made its way around my former college, since the other writer was still attending there. The school's music department contacted me and asked if I'd mind if the school's musicians could incorporate the song into their music program. A duet of it happened to feature a lady who would become my wife two years later. She and my co-writer sang it as a duet through the entire year's college choir tour. One of my favorite memories was being on the college choir tour bus on the return trip from an event: the entire bus broke into four-part harmony, singing this song. To this day, I wish someone had recorded that. It was beautiful. This song relays the concept that there is literally nothing we can give to Jesus that He does not already have. A piano only has 88 keys, and they have all been utilized in one way or another. No matter what I (or anyone else) writes or sings or...

I remember sitting on my bed one night in the mid winter of 1990.  Having pen and tablet in hand, I began to jot down a song idea that came to me during the week. The lyric was complete in just a few minutes, but it would be a few days later when I would get to a piano to see what I thought about what I had come up with. I played it for one guy, and he declared it "the worst idea he had ever heard for a song" (lol ... true story). I happened to like it, and others did as well, so I called a capable friend to help me with a track I could use to allow the song to sung. In the summer I gathered a make-shift vocal crew to pound out the song in the studio. The song was always one of my early favorites. It was actually my turning point in how I was going to handle my music. It had been accepted by a music label for use on an upcoming album someone was recording, but I had a change of heart and withdrew it. God began to convict me regarding how He wanted me to use the music He gave...

T his song was written in between packing boxes to get ready to move from the state where my wife and I had met, married, and had seen the birth of our kids. It was completed just in time to throw it into a box, where it would stay untouched for the next two years. The thought behind this song was ... what could we be certain about during uncertain times? During our most uncertain, frightening, and insecure times, the only real certainty is Jesus. There are a lot of songs written about heaven, going there, being there, experiencing new things, seeing loved ones .... and that is all well and good. But Jesus will be there, and it really should just be a continuation of the walk we have with Him here. Click below to hear the song.

"T ravel On" is song I wrote two weeks before our family embarked on the roughest spiritual terrain we had ever experienced. Some days, it really is just put one foot in front of the other and keep going. We had taken some steps in obedience to what God was leading us to do, and it came at a very high cost. We had to answer the question: What do I do when I know I walked in obedience to the best of my ability, and it all went south anyway? Like the song says, the next two years would take us down a path that was very unfamiliar to us. But, without a doubt, we would never go alone. A walk with Jesus is all about faithfulness. You get up each day, and you do the best each day to keep putting one foot in front of another. We are not promised unicorns and rainbows; we are promised it will all be worth it in the end. I put two versions of this song up here. There is one I have the way it sounded to me in my head when I wrote it, and I have a version Kim likes. I'm a nice guy, ...

  O ne tenth of a degree off does not seem like much. Try taking a long trip on that premise, however, and if you keep going long enough, you will find yourself in another country. You will be confronted with languages you do not speak, foods you cannot identify, and probably get busted at the border for trying to cross. We all have seasons like that: one severe hardship, one unchecked attitude, one lie believed, or just a casual drifting away from spending focused time with Jesus can have a large impact over time. You might wake up one day and hardly recognize yourself or even understand how you got to where you currently sit. I actually wrote this song ahead of a long process, where we were literally asking a line to this song: "Can time really heal old wounds? Do God's promises actually come to fulfillment in or lifetime, or is it going to be Hebrews 11, where you die without seeing the end of the process?" I find so many things I have written were foreshadowing of da...