Behind the Lyric

When we started writing Hope in the Hurting, I was at a really low point in my faith.

I had spent hours, days, weeks, filled to the brim with impostor syndrome. If you don’t know what that is…well, I’d never wish it on my worst enemy. Essentially, impostor syndrome is the feeling that, no matter how smart-qualified -gifted-fill-in-the-blank that you are, you do not belong or that you’ll never be good enough. It’s that gnawing in your gut, the whispers in the back of your mind saying, “do I fit in here?” or “I don’t belong here, I don’t know why I try.”

Yikes, right?

I had been struggling in secret for a really long time with this feeling. I questioned every move, every strategy, everything. So when I got the invite to meet with the team and start writing songs, knowing I’d never even written so much as a jingle, I knew it was a God thing.

We spent hours working on a melody, some verse lyrics, and chorus lyrics. All of our ideas centered around the idea that God has a purpose for us, even in the middle of our pain. Needless to say, it hit really close to home. I spent a lot of that first morning somewhere between feeling condemned and convicted, really just wishing that we could write about something else. Anything other than what *I* was struggling to remember.

But that’s the thing about God. He doesn’t need our permission to reveal what we need to be reminded of most. He doesn’t need my signature on the dotted line to make beauty from ashes, and that’s what He did through this song. I was reminded through phrases like, “in my pain there is purpose” and, “I might never see it, but God I believe You’re working” that God makes things work for the good of those who love Him. Maybe not in our own time, maybe not how we feel like He should, but in His way and His timing.

So, to make a very long and all-too-personal story short, as we were writing, I could feel God reminding me that we have to choose to believe that He has a purpose for the chaos we face. We have to believe it with every fiber of our being, from the tops of our heads through the tips of our toes, that God is not done with us yet.

With everything inside me, God I’m choosing to believe.
This is a reminder that we all need, no matter what we’re going through. Even in my rock bottom, fighting through the noise of impostor syndrome and self-doubt, I had to choose to believe that He is working. The most important thing that we as a church, team, but mostly as a family, can do is wear this message like a banner and…well, choose to believe it.

The first time we sang Hope in the Hurting at Cross Timbers, it was all that I could do not to disappear into a puddle of tears. It was overwhelming in the best way to see that I was not alone in my pain, and that others could relate so deeply to something we had been working on for so long. To hear people singing and really believing lines like “You’re working” and “I know Your promise is for me” was just…man. Talk about top five highlights of my life. Getting to be a part of something so much bigger than myself has been, and probably always will, be so humbling. I can’t wait to see how God moves through this song when it leaves our walls and enters the world!

I started writing Hope in the Hurting earlier in the year at a time when my family felt like it was completely falling apart. I just wrote a chorus because I don’t think I really even started writing it intending for it to be a finished song one day, like how I usually write. Those words were just what I needed at the time to see past my current circumstances, and whenever I felt like I needed to, I would sit down at my piano and sing that chorus a few times.

Flash forward to a few months later, Chris and Bryce were like “Hey we’re gonna write a whole entire worship album in like a month!” When we sat down for the first writing session, I think we all could feel how daunting of a task this was probably going to be. After a few minutes of sitting around not quite sure where to start, I said “umm I have this chorus I wrote a while ago that we could use.” Sharing unfinished songs for the first time can always be a bit nerve racking, especially since I had almost no experience writing worship songs at the time. I was mentally prepared for everyone to say it was terrible or needed a lot of work after I played it, but thankfully that wasn’t the case.

So originally, the chords for the chorus I had written were what the bridge chords are now, but in true serendipitous Cross Timbers Worship fashion, Bryce kept playing the chords for the chorus wrong by accident, and it sounded good so we kept them. One of the reasons I love this song so much is that everyone contributed a lot to the writing process. Whenever I hear it, I can hear where everyone’s minds came together and influenced different parts. For example, I’m used to writing a lot of pop music, and that definitely comes through at times in the song, which is really cool to hear.