Sunday, April 24, 2016

Song Stories #3: After the Fire

So I thought it might be nice (even if maybe over-explanatory) to take some time and use up some of the infinite interweb real estate to share a little bit about where the songs from the new album came from.  You can click the linky-link below to listen, and scroll on down to read the lyrics -- because, well, that's where my heart tends to show up and where most of that fun angst lives.  :)


“After the Fire” -- a place of rest and healing. It’s a space where clarity sweeps across the landscape, explaining and encouraging and illuminating the reason to the rhyme.  It’s the goal, the destination, but the trip to get there is turbulent and uncertain, chock full of doubts and questions.  Becoming gold, the kind of shine the Maker intended, is painful, perplexing, penetrating . . . unfair, we’d say. 

I began writing this song with two particular friends in mind -- two wonderful women who were slow dancing and stumbling through some pretty tough life spaces.  The precious way they struggled and questioned in humility -- and yet with gut-level, rugged honesty -- fortified my soul as I got to walk with them.  I witnessed their refining, and, finally, their sparkle when they made it to the other side of the fire.
 
I never feel like I have much to offer in situations like theirs, so I did what I thought I could.  I wrote a song for them. For them . . . I thought.

But in the days that followed, this little song turned into a lesson for me personally when the waves crashed unexpectedly down on my own world.  And in those days when I wanted to rage, to cry “Unfair!” and grow embittered and hard, I had to hear my own words echo in my ears while we prepared to record this song.  

When I was dark and down; when I wouldn’t listen to other voices spouting platitudes of “God has a plan”, He knew I would need to be crippled by the fact that He had already pointed me to the comfort I would need before the stifling blow was ever laid upon me.  His typical crazy, pre-emptive, merciful love.  How could I not trust His direction through the fire?

But the healing never comes immediately; even now years later, sometimes the scar still bleeds and tries to open wide to consume me in measure. And these words from one little song didn’t resonate because they were eloquently prepared by some master craftsman, but because I knew their root – however wilted and browned the bloom itself might be -- in the Almighty’s truth.  The only truth.  And it's hard to talk back to Love's own truth.

It’s funny how, in the work we do, we just never know when God is using what we think will be an outreach to others to be our own in-reach of His love.  He’s just wild like that.  Sometimes in serving others, we end up serving and witnessing to ourselves.  And He serves us.  And all of it serves our Creator.  So I think that makes the best kind of sense.


After the Fire

Patience is the practice of the Father, but worry is the way within the heart
Every day you dress up in your armor to fend off every single fiery dart

Memories of the days when you were dancing melt in the heat that is today
The edges of your life singed and pounding
Refinement should not have to feel this way

Don’t hang your head
Lift your hands up higher
Think of who you’ll be after the fire

When you will be gold, glistening gold, the purest of gold
In the middle of the flame the promise you hold
Is who you’ll be after the fire, the you you’ll be after the fire

The enemy is prowling in the break room
he’s the poison coursing through your veins
he crouches in the quiet of the still womb defining you with every ache and pain

Don’t hang your head
Lift your hands up higher
And claim who you’ll be after the fire

All things for the good, child
But the pain is so real, so, yes,  first you kneel
But then you stand up on the Word, child
And you believe
When it really hurts believe

That you will be gold

Copyright 2015 Jennifer Hildebrand

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