Nowhere To Hide

I’m sitting in the studio listening as Miles Ferrell and Jeff Cowan are making final tweaks to the mixes for the “Midnight Sessions”.  We’ll begin mastering within the hour.
It feels like a great time to share a little about what we’re doing with this project.  A little over a year ago, our four year old daughter, Gracie, began having seizures.  Our whole world was turned upside down as we began searching for answers.  It was one of the most difficult times we’ve walked through as parents.  It would take too long to characterize all that we experienced during the last twelve months so I’ll just leave the details for another time.

As Vangie and I pulled Gracie and Jaxon close for prayer and frequent times of communion as a family, we began to experience something new.  As worship leaders both Vange and I spent most of our time worshiping together in church.  It was pretty rare that we would actually take an hour or more to just sing and pray together in our home.  And then it happened.  We hit a wall.  We couldn’t fix our little girl.  We couldn’t make this thing stop.  We felt helpless and out of control.

It was in our desperation that we felt like we met Jesus for the first time.  Vange grew up in a Pastor’s home and I had grown up in church.  We both share years and years of ministry experience.  And yet for the first time we felt like we were just getting to know this person who we had been talking about.  The desperation of the season was captured in many late nights of prayer and worship.  There was something about the songs that were coming out of our hearts.

Through that season we both wrote almost thirty songs and felt such a stirring to share these songs.  The challenge for us was that we felt like an overproduced project would be disingenuous.  So after long conversations with friends and many evenings where we sat around the piano and shared the new songs, we felt like it would be special to capture the songs the same way they came out.  The two words I’ve used to describe this CD is “Raw and Exposed”.

Listening to the songs here in the studio I think we’ve stayed true to the original intent.  I’ve laid down my guitar and sat at a piano.  I’ve resisted every desire to tweak the vocals and cover all my mistakes.  I’ve fought myself and my pride to offer something that leaves me exposed with nowhere to hide.  From start to finish you can sit with us in our Living Room and worship for a little over an hour.

So in just a few short weeks we’ll announce a release date for the “Midnight Sessions”.  The CD will be available in many of the digital media outlets including iTunes and Amazon.  I pray you find a place to just sit and enjoy the presence of this very real and very living Jesus that we’ve recently met.