BackstageI know the word. The one spat across the street at someone who looks like me, or prays like me, or comes from where I come from. I know the glance that says you do not belong here, and the silence where a welcome should have been. I did not learn about prejudice from a book. I learned it the way most people from my part of the world learn it, on the skin, in the gut, in the pause before a door that does not open. This album was written out of that wound, and out of the harder question the wound forces: what do you do with the hatred once it has found you?
Refuge in God is the most vulnerable record I have ever made. It is not a theology lecture about shelter. It is the walk itself, the wound named, the anger owned, the healing begun, the refuge finally found, for anyone who has been hated for who they are and does not know how to survive it without either shattering or turning to stone. And its answer, the only one I have found that holds weight, is a Person: Yeshua, Yasu', who does not offer escape from the harm but grounding underneath it.
He names the wound before I do
The record opens with the thing most of us were told never to do: it says the wound out loud.
"Jesus, You Name the Wound" refuses the lie that faith means pretending you were not hurt. You see the word they spit across the street, You see the glance that said I don't belong, You see the silence where a welcome should have been. I don't have to pretend it didn't happen, Lord. That last line was the hardest and freest thing I ever wrote, because so much religion asks the wounded to bury the wound in a hurry and call it forgiveness. This album will not. The One I follow is the Man of Sorrows of Isaiah 53, acquainted with grief, and He is the Lord who stood at the grave of His friend and wept (John 11:35). He does not tell you to be quiet about your pain. He weeps with the rejected before He heals them.
You are the Christ who bleeds with the rejected. I lay the wound at Your pierced feet tonight, and You do not look away.
And He sees. The third song reaches for one of the tenderest names for God in all Scripture, given by an outsider in a desert, Hagar, the Egyptian slave woman, hated and driven out, who met God in the wilderness and called Him El Roi, the God who sees me (Genesis 16:13). She was foreign, low, and cast off, and she was the first person in the Bible to give God a name. That is not an accident this album could pass by. The God who sees is the God of exactly the ones the world refuses to see.
What to do with the anger
Then the record does something I have rarely heard a worship album dare. It gets angry, and it does not apologize for it. It hands the anger up.
Because if you have been truly hated, you know that pretending you feel no rage is not holiness; it is a slow poison. So "Jesus, Carry This Anger" brings the fire to God instead of swallowing it or aiming it: I cannot be its keeper, I will not let it become my god, I will not let it make a stranger of my face. You are the Lion, You are the Lamb, You know what to do with the fire. This is the wisdom of the Scriptures, not a denial of it. The apostle wrote that we are to leave room for God's wrath, for it is written, vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord (Romans 12:19). Handing the anger up is not weakness. It is refusing to let the hatred conscript you into its own army.
And that leads to the line the whole album turns on, the one I named this reflection for. "Jesus, Keep My Face Like Yours" is a prophetic refusal set to melody: let Your meekness settle in my jaw, let Your mercy settle in my eyes. I refuse to become what wounded me, I refuse to hand them my likeness. That is the real danger of being hated: not only the harm done to you, but the temptation to be remade in the image of the ones who harmed you, until your face hardens into theirs. I will not. I was made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), and I will not trade that likeness for the likeness of my enemies. The deepest act of defiance a hated person can make is to keep a merciful face.
The refuge that does not deny the harm
The center of the record, its title song, is where the shelter finally opens. "Jesus, You Are My Refuge" is built on the oldest refuge-poetry we have: under the shadow of Your wing I hide, Lord, in the hollow of Your palm I rest, Psalm 91 is singing over me again.
I want to be careful about what kind of refuge this is, because I am not selling escapism. The Psalms that overflow with refuge language are not promising that the harm is not real. Psalm 91 does not say no arrow flies; it says the One who dwells in the shelter of the Most High abides under His shadow through the flying of it. God our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble (Psalm 46), present in the trouble, not instead of it. So the chorus does not pretend the wound away: safe in Your arms, beyond this harm, beyond this shame. You are the Rock that does not move. The refuge is not a denial that harm happened. It is the affirmation that harm does not get the last word over a life hidden in God.
That is the difference between hiding from reality and being grounded in ultimate reality. One is a locked room. The other is a fortress with the door open and the King inside.
Healing without waiting for the haters to heal
The album's last movement is the one I most needed to sing for my own people, and for anyone the world has taught to hate back. It refuses two false endings, the numbness that pretends it never hurt, and the bitterness that lets the hurt become the whole self.
"Jesus, You Are Justice and Mercy" holds the paradox the prophet Micah held: to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God (Micah 6:8). You weigh the scales I cannot weigh, You render the verdict I cannot render, vengeance is not mine, Lord, it is Yours; forgiveness is not easy, but it is Yours too. I do not have to become either the judge or the doormat. I can hand both the scales and the forgiveness to the One who can actually carry them. And the record ends gathered, "Jesus, You Gather Us," one flock out of every wounded people, and beyond it the healed tomorrow, the city where the hating finally ends. The old spiritual called Him the balm of Gilead, the healing for the sin-sick soul; that is the church's song reaching for the same hope the prophet voiced, and I sing it with them.
I made this for the ones the world has hated for who they are. For the immigrant and the outsider, for the diaspora heart in a cold city and the wounded heart at home, for anyone who has felt a door close in silence. You do not have to bury the wound, and you do not have to become the hate to survive it. There is a God who sees you the way He saw a cast-off woman in the desert, a Man of Sorrows who bleeds with the rejected, a Rock that does not move. Hide in Him, hand Him the fire, and keep your face like His. Yeshua is a refuge that does not deny the harm. He simply outlasts it, and He means to heal you whether or not the ones who wounded you ever do.
