Come to Me.

I (Jenna) am keeping this one relatively short.  This is a feat where my verbose writing mind is concerned.  But it is important this time.  I am simultaneously inspired to write and to heed the words laid upon my heart.

We are preparing for a conference this weekend - we're returning to lead worship for a group of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship students in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania.  Just the two of us, no extra musicians along for the jam this time.  And it will be so good when we get there.  The week leading up to such things, though, is always a looming mountain to me.  I look upon each hour as a fractional piece, placing expectations upon us of practice in every spare moment to try to get even remotely close to the whole of "Prepared," because that is what we should always be and never are and we are SO behind and when will it happen if not now and how can we be professionals and what is wrong with us.

This inner monologue guilt trip is never once what God has said to me.  But heavens, I've recited it over and over again maniacally and tried to beat Chris over the head with it, too, in moments of desperation.  I will let you take about two seconds to surmise how effective this is.

So tonight, we cackled through the downhill spiral of Once Upon a Time over Mexican pie (unrelated: new obsession = savory pie), wrote to this precious face (the Compassion child we sponsor), watched the new Avengers movie trailer (and after he sopped up his drool, Chris explained all of it to me so I can pretend I know what's going on and be just as pumped), and at last sat down to practice.

I mean, LOOK AT HIM.  His future hopes include

becoming an evangelist and meeting us. *dies*

And as we sat down, Chris said, "Is it too late to add another song?"

I stared silently back and willed the giant YES back down and the eye-daggers back into their sheaths.  In my head, I looked quite receptive.  I won't ask him, just in case.

He said he just felt like it was a really appropriate response song, and it would be simple, and we didn't have to, but it was really poignant and maybe we could try it?  "Okay.  Try it."  Which translates to "Of course, my dearest love," and not "Sure. Go. I dare you," if you were wondering.

So then he sat down at the piano and played and sang the song.  

Come to me

Walk with me

Learn the rhythms of my grace

And I thought, well, maybe, harumph, okay.

Come to me

I have all you need

Learn to rest even while you are awake 

And then we pulled it up on Bandcamp to listen through to get it correct. 

Are you tired?

Are you worried?

Worn out from the day?

Have you been in a hurry?

I will slow the pace.

Hmm.  Umm.  Well.  Let's try it.  Key of Bb.  Jenna sings.

Come to-

And I was done.

I could sing no more words.

In a child's lullaby, the Voice of ages cut through my noise.
The floodgate was shattered.

One tear turned to three.

A trickle down my cheek turned to a river.

And I was small.  frail.  present.  listening.  

And He was Great.  Strong.  Present.  Speaking.

Come to me.  Come to me.  Come to me.

"Yeah, me too," said Chris.

Here I am.

And there I go.

The end.

Lyrics from "Come to Me" featuring Sandra McCracken from the Rain for Roots project album The Kingdom of Heaven is Like This. listen and purchase.  it will be worth it.

Mess.

Here's a little insight to my [Jenna's] past month or so.

I am now 30.  And with that has come an ever-increasing desire to live well.  In the physical realm, this looks like integrating main ideas of healthy eating into our grocery shopping and diet.  Like starting to run (read: jog/power walk/wheeze) in the mornings before work.  Like gradually exchanging chemical products in our home for natural solutions.  Like learning cleaning techniques our mothers and grandmothers knew like the backs of their hands, but for some reason didn't quite bridge the generation gap.  Like trying to get a handle on a schedule of keeping our apartment less of a wreck despite our crazy days.

This is a great image to illustrate my recent cleaning efforts, and also how I look and feel never.

The more I am trying to do these things, the more I am foiled in my efforts.  Shocking, right?

Specifically, I'm looking at you, cleanliness.  In the past couple of weeks, we have:

• knocked an entire container of bright yellow mustard barbecue sauce onto the carpet
• kicked a full glass of red wine over onto the carpet (beside the mustard stain)
• gotten home to discover a gallon of milk leaked into the backseat of my car (a mere week after DIY-shampooing the seats, because Pinterest! and cleanliness!)
• discovered the health benefits of turmeric and its part in creating delicious Indian-style food like lamb sloppy joes... as well as its apparent dying properties of counters, clothes, and anything ever
• had coconut oil-laden bulletproof coffee (healthy! let's do it!) leak into the depths of our Magic Bullet and all over the counter (incidentally, when you google 'hot liquid in M.B.,' disregard the half of people who say they've been doing it for years and heed the other half who say the pressure will make it shoot through the blade)
• discovered my old sneakers are now tracking black footprints everywhere, notably on freshly mopped floors
• and probably at least 29 other things.

 Thank you, universe.  Thank you, klutziness.  Thank you, thank you, irony.  (This would be my current version of that Alanis Morisette song.  Which, really, I could just say 'that Alanis song.'  Because who else is named that?!  I digress.)

And it INFURIATES ME.  To NO END.

 
It feels like such a waste of time.  I could be doing Big Things and Important Things and instead I am locked into a distasteful thing I hate for the next 25 minutes as I blot, scrub, press, shake. 

In a fit of rage and drama normalcy, I finally cried out, "I am DONE.  Get rid of it.  All of it.  Hire a dumpster.  Have a yard sale.  I don't care.  I am done owning things if all I am going to do is spend my time trying to fix them.  I don't want to own anything anymore."

Chris basically did a bell-kick in the air and gleefully asked when we can buy the RV and hit the road.

This would be fun for .4 days for me. 
Chris would be happy as a pup with two tails for life.

We have not sold all the things yet.  But truly, I have struggled.  I am attempting to become more responsible and care for what God has given us.  And it just feels like it keeps blowing up in my face.  I have not understood it.  And my frustration has grown.

And now, finally tonight, God has spoken.

I was at a prayer gathering - part of IF : Pray - and women were offering up sweet, honest prayers of hope, confession, desperation, life.  And one woman uttered, "I need You every moment, Lord.  Your mercies are new every morning because I need them."

And I heard: "This is why."

Clarity.  Undone. 

"Abide.  Need me.  Come to me."

Do I need God to get a stain out of a rug?  Well, working in my own strength sure isn't working out great, for me or for Chris.  Some of the messes have been cleaned up (praise the Lord - the spoiled-milk-dead-animal-soul-sucking-dementor smell in the car lingered for a good week, and I was getting ready to hitchhike to work); others stubbornly remain and I'm still fighting them.  I sourly, bitterly, selfishly fight.  Maybe the stain lifts, maybe it doesn't, but my mood is terrible and Chris wants to be nowhere near me.  I am anything but lovely.

Each new spill and drop and waste is an opportunity to lean on God.  Each is a tiny picture of the Mess I create in my life when I try to do it apart from Him.  That as I try to wrestle for control of my days, the Mess just gets bigger.  That as I push and scrub harder and harder through my gritted teeth, I grind the stains of my life in deeper and deeper and solidify the evidence of my mistakes and my foolishness.  But oh, how I try.

"I know You are there, catching, carrying this beautiful mess." - Sixpence NTR

So.  Deep breath.

When the next thing spills, I will pause and breathe and thank God for his presence and his reminder that I. need. Him.  I need him every hour.  Every moment.  Every second.  That trying to do life without him is futile and just messier and messier.  I was a Mess before he got a hold of me, and I revert to Mess each time I act in my own strength and not his.

I need You, God.  Thanks for putting me - literally - on my hands and knees.  This was an unusual lesson for me.  But I got it, eventually.  I need You.

"I need Thee, oh I need Thee, every hour I need Thee."

We Have Begun.

The album has, in most senses of the word, begun.

We released Waiting to Begin on May 20, 2014.  That day, we saw it appear on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, and all other online music sites.  People were posting it, tweeting it, giving feedback.  People sent cards and flowers.  People said "Congratulations!" all day.

And most times, I had to think for a moment why they were congratulating us before it sunk in.  I wondered why there were flowers on my desk when I got to work.  I truly wasn't sure what they were talking about for a good 10 seconds each time.

And then it would hit me - oh.  Our album is out in the world today.  So am I told.  Is that real, though??!

I think about 35% of those blank stares were because it hadn't hit me yet - each time someone asked how it felt, I answered, "Surreal."  I think the other 65% of those looks were because we were planning for the release show, happening a mere 10 days after the digital release.  A release date can be a huge deal, but when your eyes are locked on the next thing, it can slip by almost unnoticed.

Anne Lamott has a very humorous, very true narrative about the publication date of a new book in Bird by Bird.  This is the only book of hers I've had the pleasure of reading, but I adore her style - she voices all the crass humor and self-maddening lines inside my head, assuring me I'm not the only crazy person out there.  Her experience was a bit opposite of mine, for which I owe her and several wise, warning musician friends a debt of gratitude.  

"There is something mythic about the date of publication, and you actually come to believe that on this one particular morning you will wake up to a phone ringing off the hook and your publisher will be so excited that they will have hired the Blue Angels precision flying team to buzz your squalid little hovel, which you will be moving out of as soon as sales of the book really take off.

...I remember one year my friend Carpenter and I had books out on the same day.  We talked about it all summer.  We each pretended to have modest expectations...  The week before, we talked almost every morning about how excited we were and what a long time we had waited, and how it was just like being a a little kid waiting for Christmas Eve.  Finally the big day arrived and I woke up happy, embarrassed in advance by all the praise and attention that would be forthcoming.  I made coffee and practiced digging my toe in the dirt... Then I waited for the phone to ring.  The phone did not know its part.  It sat there silent as death with a head cold.  By noon the noise of it not ringing began to wear badly on my nerves.  Luckily, though, by noon it was time for the first beer of the day.  I sat by the phone like a loyal dog, waiting for it to ring.  Finally, finally it rang at four.  I picked up the phone and heard Carpenter laughing hysterically, like some serial killer, and then I became hysterical, and eventually we had to be sedated.

...This is often pretty much what it is like... I tell you, if what you have in mind is fame and fortune, publication is going to drive you crazy." - Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Truly, Anne, as well as Jeremy from Willet, thank you.  Your anecdotes and cautionary tales saved me from being a curled up, hysterically laughing centipede on the living room rug.  Expectations are everything.

From this, I take two big things.

1) "If what you have in mind is fame and fortune, publication is going to drive you crazy."  Chris has been very purposeful about the definition of success for Chris & Jenna.  We have seen too many musician friends focused on the idea of "making it," whatever that means, and dried themselves up in the process of attaining something they'd never truly defined or fleshed out for themselves.  Chris & Jenna's success is not based on gaining nationwide radio play.  It is not on becoming famous.  It is not on being affirmed that our music is good.  There are many goals like this that are not wrong to pursue; they are simply not ours at the moment.  Right now, success for us means that someone hears a message of hope in a lyric and is changed.  And that is happening.  And we are humbled to the core by it.  This, in part, is why our release day did not come with as much pressure as it might have.  We made art, we wanted to share it with the hope of speaking truth to people, and we did.  Therefore, it was a successful release.

2) When we are so focused on the next big thing, it is all too easy to miss the joy of what is happening now.  The release show was by far the biggest musical undertaking we have done, and it showed.  We were overwhelmed, we made a hundred mistakes and omissions in the planning process, we spent every moment between our day jobs and sleep on it.  So when the digital release of the album came, we were in a bit of a fog of preparation for a real live show.  Thus my incoherence and incomprehensible responses to folks' "Congrats!!"  Thank heaven for these excited people - otherwise, the whole day might have slipped by unnoticed.  With the weight of two years work on my shoulders, I think they really were more excited than I was in the moment. 

Let it be known that it all sunk in the night and day after the release show, and it was a beautiful, cathartic weekend.  All of the emotion and energy came rushing out, and we felt loved and blessed beyond measure.  It is not always this way when a creative project is unveiled, and we do not take it lightly.  Thank you to each and every person who came on board and made it so special for us.

So, the record has begun.  Keyword: begun, not finished.  We knew, and were reinforced by other musicians, that if we completely spent ourselves in the process of release, we would have nothing left to propel forward.  We did not make this album for 1,000 copies of it to sit in our spare bedroom.  We made it to share it with the world and impact people's lives.  The release of it is a beginning, a launch, to go and do that.

We've had our rest.  We have taken band work days and spent them guilt-free eating food and laying on the couch.  We have watched more episodes of Parenthood than I care to admit.  (I lied.  I'll admit every one of them.  I want to live in Berkeley with them, where everything is hilarious and achingly beautiful.)  Now, it is time to get back in the driver's (and passenger's) seats and move forward with what we've made, so it can fulfill its purpose and the definitions of success we set.  They may change.  We want to hold them loosely and prayerfully at all times.  But having clear definitions of what success is and being present in it are both preciously crucial.  To our music, to our mission, and to our very lives.

-Jenna

The Eye of the Storm.

All the feelings.  I (Jenna) don't know where to start.

Today, I got home from work to find two giant cardboard boxes sitting, soaking wet, in the pouring rain.  What did they hold?  Only 1,000 precious little CD babies of our new album.  After lugging them inside and facing the immediate dilemma of "I need to get these out of the cardboard mush ASAP before moisture gets into the CD packagings" and "Chris is not home.  I cannot open these album boxes without him.  That would be wrong..." I compromised by putting them up on their sides, opening the soggy tops & bottoms, and clawing a few smaller box corners open to let air in.  Or something.

 (Chris then got home.  And we opened them.  They look ok.  The peasants rejoiced.)

First order of business?  Open one up and start playing it, because something could have happened to the master we sent and the songs could be in the wrong order or there could be terrible sounds or something could cut off too soon.  (No, I don't have anxiety or trust issues. Obvi.)

(P.S.  The CDs work just fine.  Praise the Lord.)

So, as we started to take on other tasks while keeping an ear in the background to make sure Track 5 is indeed Track 5, I hopped on Facebook, like any good inefficient user of time.  Scrolling through the newsfeed (I gave that up for Lent this year.  I'm allowed to look now.  Often, it doesn't bring me enough joy to warrant how much I do it.  Go figure.), I saw this blogpost that a friend shared.  It has been raining for days, and flooding is starting to plague our area.  This is moments after seeing news reports of the wave of tornadoes that hit the south.  Truthfully, I haven't read much about it to this point.  I've maybe been slightly distracted by other things.

But I read this post.  The writer tells of being near the tornadoes, how the giant EF5 tornado hit the street they had just moved away from, and how her dear friend had just moved TO that area.  She writes about their frantic search for their friends and their children.  I will not do the author injustice by badly summarizing the ending and aftermath of their search.  But it talks of both incredible anger at God at loss of life and His apparent "plans," and of incredible faith that is not shaken even by the deepest grief - indeed, what is likely my greatest, deep-seated fear.

As I journeyed through those words, our album got to the song "Night."  It is a song about desperately trying to cling to hope when everything seems dark.  The chorus sings:

"Promise when all is said and done You'll be true
And that You're gonna make all things new."

My eyes did not stay dry.  This world is broken.  This is NOT how things were meant to be - homes being wiped clean from their foundations, children being taken, losing everything we hold dear.  Can everything really be made new??

...That's just it, isn't it?  It depends what we hold dear.  If it is things on this earth, then yes, we can lose everything.  But if it is something Deeper, something Greater, than it is impossible to lose everything.

The next song continued, "Far Beyond."  It was like I was hearing it with fresh ears, someone who hadn't played a part in its creation but just an earnest listener.

"Two things that I trust you will restore - 
The world, and my ever-broken heart;
knowing that I'll count them all the more
Beautiful for having once been torn apart."

The tears continued.  Is it really possible that one day this earth will be fully redeemed?  That in its radiance, every tear and woe from this life will make the new life that much more glorious?  Sometimes it seems too much to dare to hope... and then, at the same time, it seems too much NOT to trust it.  The pain we feel here is not the end of the story.  It is not meaningless.

I am grateful.  Grateful for an album that is complete and sitting here in our living room.  Grateful that as lightning crashes outside and rain pelts our walls, we are dry inside them.  Grateful that this album is not merely a business or a marketing venture - it is timid, firm Hope, in song form.  Grateful that technology can be used to help us rally around those who are despairing and struck down, however far away they might be.  And grateful for the sobering reminder that every last bit of our life could blow away tonight, yet we would still have more than we ever could have imagined for ourselves.

Again, the blogpost about The Cheerleader (the faithful) is here.  
And you can support the surviving family here.

-Jenna