Thank you guys.
Well, my wife, Jamie,
is this really awesome lady.
We used to travel together
for years and years.
She never really wanted to be a singer,
but she could always sing.
She was always very musical.
In fact, we met because when
I first went to college,
I went to this little Bible col lege in Florida
called Florida Christian College,
and my freshman year I did what all
incoming freshman mu sicians do,
and that is we started the
greatest Christian rock band
of all time.
And we needed a keyboard player,
and this was like the first month or so of school,
and I remember thinking to myself,
well, there's this really pretty girl
who plays piano in chapel.
I will volunteer to ask
her to be in our band.
And so I mustered the guts
and I went and I met the pretty girl and said, hey, we're
starting the greatest Christian rock band of all time.
Would you like to play piano
in our band?
And she said yes,
but she warned me that she didn't play by ear.
She only read music.
And I was like, oh, it'll be
fine.
I'll teach you the songs.
It won't be a big deal.
So for like weeks we would meet
in the practice room after class
and I would sit there and start to
teach her our songs
and and it ended up
Being kind of a frustrating process
because after two two or three weeks
of working on these songs every day after class
she still couldn't play them correctly
and I started thinking
that maybe looks weren't everything and
And so I started rethinking
that my whole game plan
But anyway, as things happened,
we ended up getting married about a year later
in the middle of my sophomore year,
and we've been married for 15
years now.
just a few years ago,
I was telling that story to somebody,
and Jamie was like, oh,
I never told you?
I knew how to play the songs all along,
I just was pretending like I didn't so that we could go to the practice room together.
All this time, I thought I was in control, I was not.
And so, anyway,
so whenever I graduated college
and we moved to Nashville,
and I decided that this
was going to be this career.
She was a school teacher
and we decided that we'd rather be together and be
poor than for her to keep her job
and have to stay home while
I traveled.
And so she kind of by default
became the background singer
in the band.
Which is funny
because she doesn't really like music
all that much.
And that makes her sound
like a cranky person.
She's not.
She's just not like a music lover.
She likes to listen to radio
and kind of like bouncy fun
songs
but like she's as far as I know
she has never read
like the lyrics to a song
or like poured over, like,
played on what?
You know, she doesn't love
music like that.
And so, as a matter of fact,
she's only bought one CD
in her whole life,
and it was the Titanic
soundtrack.
And that wasn't even because of the music,
it was because of Leonardo DiCaprio. And so,
anyway, hilarious.
And the further irony of her kind of
like, you know,
or the way she sees music
is that she is a piano teacher,
so I think that's funny.
she, so she doesn't often these days
because we homeschool our
kids, works really hard.
And she doesn't often get to
go with me on trips anymore.
But last year I ended
up going to this retreat
and we worked it out so that she could come for
the weekend.
It was so nice to have her with me
and singing with me and stuff again.
But it was this retreat full of these like heady people, know, and there was this famous
author speaker there and then we would break away into our breakaway groups
and discuss the guy's topic,
you know, and there were like five,
six of us sitting around talking and we were discussing,
for some reason that this particular day we were talking about
what we're doing to push back the fall.
Like, what are you doing in a practical way
to shed light in the darkness
and to build the kingdom?
And, you know, we're with these people who are authors,
you know, and it gets to them and they say,
oh, well, I'm writing a book on the exegetical ethos of,
I don't even know how to say that all right and and then they would get
to like the pastor there
and he would say oh well I'm preaching
and that's all good and right
and then it would get to me
and I knew my answer pretty clearly
because for years I've felt like if God made me good
at writing songs or stories or whatever
then it was to tell the truth
in the most beautiful way that I can
and that was my answer but the whole time I was wondering
what is Jamie gonna say
because she's the first
person
to tell you she's
not like an artsy fartsy person
I said that on the recording.
just so you know.
Whoops.
And so she's an artsy
tootsy person.
Awesome. She's an artsy person.
So anyway,
I was so curious to see what she would say.
And it got to Jamie and she said,
I'm shedding light in the darkness
by raising these three children
children in the Lord.
And it was a great answer,
it was like exactly the answer
our little group needed,
because in that one sen
tence
she kind of brought low all of us
on our fancy books and sermons,
you know.
Because if there's any,
like it's hard for me to imagine
a more concentrated,
specific version of what it means to shed light in the darkness
by pouring the love of Christ
into another human being
than what Jamie does for our children,
or what a mother in a household
does to her children.
Anyway, I was thinking about
how nice it is
that as a songwriter
I get occasional e -mails from people,
you know, who say,
I was driving through Punxsutawney
and your song came on and it
was a blessing.
And it's always
nice to get e -mails like that.
But then I thought how unfair it is
that moms don't often get e
-mails from people who are driving through Punxsutawney
and their motherhood
was a blessing to them as they drove
or whatever.
And so I wanted to write a song
that would be my e -mail to Jamie,
to thank her for the great work she's doing in the kingdom,
and for that matter,
for anybody out there
who's interested in doing work that really matters,
lasting work.
And so this is a song called Planting Trees.
