I wrote these songs when old tunes couldn’t walk me through my hardest season yet.  

My husband and I had reinvented ourselves in so many places over so many decades. We'd constructed a passionate marriage of opposites, a growing family from miscarriages, and a real-people church out of a dozen misfits. 

We'd stretched ourselves to run a justice restaurant, homeschooled our kids and adopted Jordan’s 80 year old grandmother into our household show. In our cast we had extras of dogs, cats, chickens, catfish, and chameleons. 

And there I was, in the role of “middle aged, perimenopausal woman”.

Oh, I dreamed. I dreamed of a clean house. Of a vacation. Of an easy conversation with the man I remembered falling in love with.  But instead, I started throwing out my back, had weeks at a time of vertigo, and practiced ugly crying in my car. Sometimes I broke trust. Sometimes I broke dishes. 

I still kept putting on my make-up, showing up and picking up.  Kept helping others run toward their dreams. Kept inventing ugly but nutritious meals to please and offend  equally. It felt like an eon of questionable progress.

I also kept singing and writing because those two exercises always help me know that I'm real. Through them, I converse with my insides, and then together, me and me, we agree about the things we will never surrender. Combined with prayer, we get a quorum.

So then, here these songs came. Late at night on legal pads on the dining room table. Or whispered into my phone in the bedroom closet. Leaning on rhythm and rhyme, the lyrics ambled out and hummed back. They helped me profess, confess and defend my faith.  Faith in God, in my husband, in the future, in the past, in small gratitudes and in my hope for heaven. And funny, the songs sounded like, well, just me. I am less shy of who I am now.  Who'd have thunk it at this point of my life? Time has given way.  

And that's how this album happened. With gratitude and trust, I share it with you.