BackstageI want to tell you about a sound that used to make my hand shake.
Not a frightening sound to anyone else. Just music, a rhythm coming across a field. But for years it arrived tied to the worst of what I had lived, and the two came in on the same beat, twenty-six years knotted tight. And then one morning, in a room full of ordinary worship, the knot came loose. The first note landed clean. My hand did not shake. And I understood something I have spent this whole album trying to give away: the music was never the problem. The hand was carrying a wound. And Yeshua came to take the wound the sound used to find.
Why I Made This Record
Some of us were taught, with real conviction, by people who loved the Son, that the drum was dangerous. That the old songs, the rhythms carried in our blood, belonged to the enemy and had to be laid down to be holy. My own great-grandfather set the music down out of fear and shame. He did it because he loved Christ, and because he was told it was required.
It was not required. And I could not carry that misunderstanding one more generation.
So Healing in His Wings is my reclamation, but I want to be precise about the spirit of it. This is not rebellion; it is restoration. On the song It Was Always Good I sing, we do not hate the ones who taught us wrong; we lay the wrong down and pick up the song. I name the teaching as wrong. I do not name and shame the teachers. That distinction matters to me more than almost anything on the album, because bitterness is just another wound looking for a beat to ride in on.
What the Title Means
The title comes straight off the page of my grandmother's worn Bible, from the prophet Malachi: the Sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in his wings (Malachi 4:2).
There is a play in that verse that never stops thrilling me, the Sun that rises and the Son who rose are, in Him, the same sunrise. The Healing Has Come is built on that dawn breaking over the eastern ridge, the first light on the high country, my grandmother's God who is my God, the same One. She prayed for that Sun on her knees; and the morning I sing about is the morning her prayer crested the ridge.
This is where my own mountain comes into it. I am named for a mountain, and I have learned that the high places in Scripture are always healing places, Sinai where the Law was given, Horeb where a broken prophet was fed and met by the still voice, the mount where Yeshua was transfigured in light, the hillsides where He withdrew to pray (Luke 5:16). Healing keeps happening on the high ground. The first light finds you there first.
The Heart Behind the Songs
Let me open the record for you, because it is built like a sunrise, dark to dawn to full day.
The First Light begins before I have even earned the morning: the first light of the morning is not mine; the first light is His mercy, new, on time. That is Lamentations again, his mercies are new every morning (Lamentations 3:22-23). The day is His before my mouth is His. I only have to wake into what He already started.
Heartbeat Under My Own is the quietest thing here, and maybe the most important. I wrote it about the night my mother died, lying below my own ribcage with my pulse uneven, and hearing, underneath it, another heartbeat, older than my bone. Psalm 139 was open on the floor beside my hand: you knitted me together in my mother's womb (Psalm 139:13). When my own strength was flat against the wall, the strength I needed was the deeper pulse inside my chest. When mine cannot, His can. When His holds, mine is held.
Then comes the reclaiming center, It Was Never Wrong. I stand on Paul's plain word to the Romans, nothing is unclean in itself (Romans 14:14), and on the oldest verdict in the Book, from the day the world was made: and it was very good (Genesis 1:31). The song was on the list when the world began. It was never the enemy's gift. The teaching was wrong; the worship wears His crown.
Where the Joy Breaks Loose
I did not want this album to end quietly reclaimed. I wanted it to end dancing.
You have turned my mourning into dancing.
That is Psalm 30:11, and Dancing for the Risen One is where the whole record breaks into the open. The round stone moved. The tomb was disproved. The mourning of three generations finds its answer in the feet of the Risen One, and the joy simply cannot stop. Right beside it, When the Music Stopped Hurting tells the truth I opened this letter with, twenty-six years late, but the morning came, because joy comes with the morning (Psalm 30:5).
And The Cross the Old Man Carried is the testimony I hold closest: an elder who whittles a small wooden cross all winter, and a young woman who comes on a Saturday in March with hands she cannot still, and holds the cross once while the old man prays in the Name of Yeshua, and the shaking does not come back. The Carpenter Christ stilling a hand through a carpenter's small carved cross. Whose hand stilled her hand? His. From the start, His.
Who This Is For
This is for the worn-down believer who was made to feel that some good gift in them was too dangerous to bring to God.
It is for the one whose worship got tangled up with a wound, so that the very thing meant to heal you became the thing that hurt. Hear me: the music is not your problem. Bring the wounded hand to the One who takes wounds. He is the Sun rising over your ridge with healing in His wings, and He is patient with a knot that took decades to tie.
And it is for anyone in a dry season, standing on their own high country waiting for the light. Calling, Lamb Answering is my picture of it, a lone voice at the canyon edge at dawn, singing the worship a grandmother handed down, and the wind carrying it out, and the Lamb answering, because my sheep hear my voice (John 10:27). The song is the call. The wind is the carrier. The Lamb is the answer. You are not shouting into an empty canyon.
The album closes with The Song Will Not Stop, because the kingdom of our Lord is forever and ever (Revelation 11:15). Past sunset, past this age, past the rolling up of the heavens, the song does not stop, and neither does the healing that started the morning it stopped hurting. Lift your eyes. The first light is already His, and it is already yours.
