BackstageThe word "diaspora" is not a warm word. Strip it back to its root and it means scattered, seed flung to the wind, thrown far from where it started, landed who-knows-where. I have carried that word my whole life without stopping to feel its edge. Then I made Healing Diaspora, and I had to sit with it: what does the gospel say to people whose defining condition is being scattered?
It says a great deal. It says scattered was never meant to be the last word over you.
Two Homes and a Grief Nobody Sees
Let me name the actual wound first, because a healing album that skips the wound is a lie. The scattering is not abstract. It is the Bronx morning and the Kingston ache in the same body. It is the office accent and the granny accent, and the low-grade grief of never being fully home in either. It is the visa season, the diagnosis morning, the broken family, the homesick displacement at the kitchen sink that I put into the song Scattered Diaspora Cry, Bronx but missing Kingston, diaspora, feels alone.
I did not want to rush past that. Some worship gets to the victory too fast and leaves the wounded feeling unseen. So the record sits in the cry for a while, because Yahuah does. But it does not stay there, because in the very same psalm that names the scattering, the answer is already waiting.
The Verse That Holds Both Halves
Here is the sentence the whole album is built on, and I love it because it refuses to separate two things we usually keep apart: The LORD... gathereth together the outcasts of Israel. He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds (Psalm 147:2–3).
Read those two verses as one breath, because that is how they were written. In the same motion, Yahuah gathers the scattered and heals the broken. The regathering and the healing are not two separate programs. They are the same tenderness. He does not fix your heart and leave you scattered, and He does not gather you into a crowd while your heart stays in pieces. He does both, together, with one hand.
That is why the opening song is called simply Healing Diaspora, Father binds the broken, Spirit's covering. And the healing has a source; it is not sentiment. It is Calvary. With his stripes we are healed (Isaiah 53:5). The binding of every diaspora wound was paid for on a cross, which means the healing is not a wish. It is a purchase already made.
I set that healing on a reggae one-drop for a reason. The scattered are also the rooted, if the roots run to the right place, and on Roots Run to Jesus I lean on the promise that the one who trusts the Lord is as a tree planted by the waters... her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought (Jeremiah 17:7–8). You can be transplanted a thousand miles from where you started and still be deeply, unshakably rooted, as long as the roots are sunk in Him and not in a piece of ground you can be moved from.
Found Before I Knew I Was Lost
The peak of this record reframed my whole understanding of how I got here, and I put it in a song called Good Shepherd Found Me. For years I told my testimony as a story of my searching, how I went looking for God, how I found my way back. Then I read the tenth chapter of John more slowly.
You didn't wait for me to find You. You came across the diaspora field. Good Shepherd, called me by name.
Yeshua says of the Shepherd, he calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out (John 10:3). And through Ezekiel, Yahuah says something that reorders the entire search: I, even I, will both search my sheep, and seek them out... As a shepherd seeketh out his flock... so will I seek out my sheep, and will deliver them (Ezekiel 34:11–12). Do you see it? The scattered sheep is not the one doing the finding. The Shepherd is. I did not find my way home through the diaspora field. He crossed it, found me, and called my name before I even understood I was lost.
He Knows Your Name, Not Just Your Category
This is the mercy that undoes the whole ache of being scattered. When you are one of millions displaced, one more name on a migration map, it is easy to believe you are a category to God, a demographic He is generally fond of. Scripture will not let that stand.
I close the album with Gathered By Name, on the strength of one of the most personal verses in the Bible: Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine (Isaiah 43:1). By thy name. Not "the diaspora" in general. You, specifically, the particular scattered one reading this. And Yeshua completes the picture: other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring... and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd (John 10:16). Bronx, Brixton, Kingston, Toronto, Miami, one fold, one Shepherd, and not one name lost in the gathering.
And once gathered and healed, you are not meant to hoard it. Healed and Sent takes the man Yeshua freed and repeats His commission over the diaspora: Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee (Mark 5:19). The healing was always meant to travel back through the very family you were scattered from.
Who I Made This For
I made Healing Diaspora for the one holding two homes and belonging fully to neither. For the person who has read their whole life as a story of loss and distance and has never once considered that a Shepherd was crossing the field toward them the entire time. For anyone who hears the word "scattered" and feels it land as a verdict.
It is not a verdict. It is a condition, and it is temporary, because the God who scattered the nations is also the God who gathers them, one named sheep at a time. You were found before you knew to look. You were called by your own name, not your category. And the wound of the scattering was bound up at a cross before you were ever born.
Scattered is real. But over you, it is not the last word. Yahuah has spoken a later one, and it is your name.
