The Kingdom
I began this song wanting to write about barrenness. I started chewing on that idea after visiting my cousin Matt and his wife a few months ago. Their 2-year-old son, Ian, was playing on the floor of the living room the whole time, with pictures of their two other sons, Stephen and Andrew, on the walls around us… neither of them lived long after birth. I’ve been so moved by their soft, soft hearts for Jesus—not in spite of, but I think because of what they’ve had to walk through in the past few years. It made me think of the stories of Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah, and Elizabeth: women whose wombs were closed, and yet, their barrenness was SO important to the Lord. He used those women’s heavy hearts to do something eternally significant in the Kingdom. And so, the morning after visiting my cousin’s family, I sat back in my room and started humming the beginnings of this song…

Come Find Me
I was so drawn to the book of Deuteronomy last fall—the book is just a lot of Moses reading the law over the people of Israel , who happened to still be wandering in the wilderness. The black and white on those pages came to life while I read about the blessings that come with following the Lord, and the curses that come with being rebellious to Him. To be honest, the people of Israel have always been a comfort to me, simply because I see so much of ME in their messy, human stubbornness. I kept returning to a particular passage in Chapter 4 that says, “…Watch yourselves very carefully. Since you saw no form on the day that the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, beware lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves… gods of wood and stone, the work of human hands, that neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell. But from there you will seek the Lord your God and you will find him.” (v. 15,16,28,29) It’s such a familiar fight for me, wanting SO badly to have something tangible to follow, but also knowing that there’s something irreplaceably and unexplainably sweet about loving and trusting a God who isn’t visible… yet.

Waking Up
I just started singing this chorus one morning last summer in the quiet of my room: there’s nothing like waking up to You, and kept singing it throughout that day. I’m so not good at writing songs from a simple, happy kind of place… it’s much easier to write when you’re in the middle of a big ole wrestling match! But, the Lord has moved me in such powerful, unexpected ways—everything from being in India this past June, to being stuck for hours back in my room reading about salvation and redemption in such a fresh way that it felt like I’d never heard it before. So, this song just kind of oozed out of me that day… a really, really simple “thank you” song.

Something There
I remember writing this melody in the green room on my first day out on tour with Jeremy Camp almost two years ago. We’d finished rehearsals and I walked backstage to my room to try and be alone for a couple of minutes to process… I sat down with my guitar and started humming, singing nonsense words. A few months later, I was reading the story of Jacob (I keep returning to him- his messiness is so comforting to someone like me!) and began brainstorming for a lyric on this melody. I knew I wanted the chorus to say “something there” (it was part of the original nonsense words that ended up fitting), and then I started to explore retelling Jacob’s story of wrestling and feeling the weight of his name (“deceiver”) over his life. Only days before recording in L.A. , Aaron (my brother/road manager) and I were hanging at our hotel one afternoon, sitting outside, reading… and I felt like I heard the Lord say, “go up to your room and wait for me—I’ll write the lyric.” After about 10 minutes of wondering if it was just Beth or really the Spirit of God influencing my heart, I took my book and walked up the stairs to my room, and 15 minutes later, the song was finished! Yet another time He proved to me that He really doesn’t need me to write songs. And even though the song isn’t, per se, about the life of Jacob, it still is very much a “wrestling song.” Begging for Him to give me proof that He isn’t through with me…

Change
I heard Beth Moore speak at the Passion Conference in Nashville a while back. Something she said that afternoon stuck with me: “The thing that can make me cry at anytime about Him… the thing that blows my mind… is that He changes us.” It rang SO true in me! Knowing all too well how much I’ve struggled with anxiety and fear and being addicted to guilt… and how He has healed so many of those things in me, and continues to! As the year went on and I saw the evidence of His moving in my life even more, I wanted to write a song about that simple, profound thing that comes with being around Him long enough… He starts rearranging the furniture… He ties up loose ends and, at the same time, stirs wonder and hope. I’m convinced that I’m different than I would’ve been on my own because of the reality of Jesus in my life. I’m so glad!

Top Of The World
I think the two things that have surfaced the most during this writing process have been wrestling with living in the unseen, and being completely overwhelmed by His affection for someone as unlikely as ME. This song has both of those themes in it… living in the wake of all that He’s done for me, all that He’s loosed in me, without really deserving it or expecting it… which, for a grew-up-in-rural-America-church-girl, feels like a kick in the stomach. A GOOD kick in the stomach, if that makes sense. Ed had the idea for a chorus with the line, “I’m on top of the world,” which fit so well around where my heart has been toward Him…completely in shock that He would care for me, and being so thankful that He does.

Tell Me
One morning out in the living room, my Mom, Aunt Deb, and I were talking about how so much of our movements toward Jesus are fueled by guilt. So much so that it becomes a familiar, almost comforting place to return to… convincing ourselves that He must think the way we do and react the way we do. It’s been such a painful thing to leave, honestly. I wish I could fully believe that my God loves me more than my tiny brain could ever understand. The picture does get clearer the more time goes by, but there’s always that lingering question… does He really, really, REALLY love plain ole Beth? The girl who sometimes would rather sit and watch TV for hours or strum a hunk of wood instead of just being quiet and listening for Him? The girl who forgets so quickly what humility looks like, or obedience? And even when I’ve done everything right… the super-Christian checklist complete: I’ve prayed, read the Bible, been sweet to my family, even wrote an encouraging letter to someone… I’m still haunted by the reality that I need grace to be dumped over everything anyway. So, during the summer, I wrote this song— begging for Him to convince me that His love really is better than I could ever hope.

Are You Sure?
In being loved—whether it’s a reflection in the tangible of being loved and pursued by Him, or by God Himself—there’s that constant second-guessing game going on in your head. If they really knew you, there’s no way they’d care for you. It’s hard to get over how human you know you are and try to accept that someone sees you in all your messiness and isn’t driven away by it.

When You Love Someone
It was such a fun process writing this song… Ed and I hummed through this chord progression during one of my trips to Nashville , and then one particular morning I showed up and had some thoughts for a lyric. He handed me a guitar, and I went and sat on the porch outside the studio and wrote six or seven verses… We sat outside that afternoon and worked on the chorus and then had a song! For a couple of hours, we just sat in front of a microphone in the studio and sang through it together… it was such a blast.

Beggars Heart
I’d been having conversations with a dear friend of mine early last summer about being a beggar before the Lord. That picture was so rich to me, especially with my trip to India coming up. I started to write the lyric before I left:

Change my mind/Say something I’ve never heard/Something that is too high/Leave me limping and in wonder…

I brainstormed about it for a while, worked on a couple different lyric ideas, but didn’t finish it before my brother, dad, and I left last June for India . I’m so thankful for that. Our first day there began in a train station in New Delhi… we had a three-hour trip to Ambala, where we were going to church with some Bible college students and believers who lived in the slums outside the village. The next nine days were full of the most overwhelming pictures of the Kingdom… and being poor in spirit… embracing poverty before Jesus. During that train ride, looking out the window at mothers holding their babies over the tracks to relieve themselves, I pulled my journal out and scratched out the lyric I had before, replacing it with this:

You changed my mind/You said something I’d never heard/Something that is too high/It’s left me limping and in wonder/ Because all the things I know/Suddenly seem so small…

You Are On Our Side
This was the first song written for the record. We came home in the fall of 2005, just before Thanksgiving, unpacked all of our suitcases and settled in for two full months off. That year had had lots of good things in it, but tiring things as well. My heart felt ragged and unable to really be broken, yet feeling on the edge of falling apart every time I went into my room to be with Jesus. What a sweet two months those were. Looking at it even now, it was the timeliest thing I’ve experienced from Him… the things I heard back in my room at 2 am on those nights are still sticking to my ribs. He began to really heal my mind—the way I approach Him, the way I see Him, the way I see me around Him… so unexpected, and exactly what I needed. One day I started to read Psalm 147 and sank my teeth in deep… I loved this picture: “The Lord builds up Jerusalem ; he gathers the outcasts of Israel . The Lord heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” (v. 2,3) So many passages I read during that time had the word “outcast” in them… It makes so much sense to me that He’d want to gather the strong, wise, together, churched, to Himself… and yet, I keep seeing Him gather the weak, poor, sick, depressed, unchurched, those who are cynical about the church… what a radical, scandalous thing; that the God of the universe would welcome a bunch of cripples to the table! And not to sit just anywhere, but in the place of honor. To see Him get up in the middle of the meal, wrap a towel around His waist, bend low, and begin to wash the crusty, caked-on dirt off our feet, I’m still so overwhelmed by that picture of Him… and even more, by the fact that it’s true. That day I started to sing this song back to Him.