BackstageI came to the crossing trembling. Dust on my boots, the line up ahead, the fear at my back. You know the feeling even if you have never stood at a literal border, that moment where the thing in front of you is bigger than you are, and there is no way around it, only through. And then I looked down at the ground where I was about to put my foot, and there was already a footprint there. Someone had crossed this exact spot before me.
That is the whole album in one image. La Cruz Cruza, The Cross Crosses, is a vallenato record about the discovery that no line you are afraid of is a line Yeshua has not already gone over first.
I set it to vallenato because vallenato is the folk music of the Colombian crossing country, accordion breathing like a pair of lungs, the caja drum, the scrape of the guacharaca, the music people actually carry on the road. If I was going to sing about a road, I wanted the music of the road.
What the title means
La Cruz Cruza means "The Cross Crosses." And the opening track adds the word that changes everything: Primero. First. La Cruz Cruza Primero, the Cross crosses first.
The chorus is a shout, and I mean every syllable of it:
The Cross won't wait on the far side of the river, the Cross steps in first to the depth of the cold. Before the wall, before the fear, before the checkpoint, the Man already crossed.
Think about who did the crossing. The Carpenter of Galilee, the Son of the Father. He "humbled himself, and became obedient unto death" (Philippians 2:8), that is a crossing from heaven to earth, the widest border ever traversed. Then He crossed a second line no one else could: from holy to sin-bearing, taking on our guilt as His own. "God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). He crossed from the Father all the way out to the orphan, and He did it carrying the whole weight of our fear.
Why I had to make it
Because too many of the people I love are living at a border of one kind or another, and they think they are facing it alone.
Some of them are literally at a line, the checkpoint at dawn, the wire fence, the dust on the family's shoes. But most of the borders that terrify us are not on any map. The diagnosis. The empty bank account. The estrangement that has lasted years. The grave. Every one of those is a crossing, and every one of them feels like a place where you have to step out first, into the cold, with no idea what is on the other side.
I made this record to tell you the truth about every one of those lines: He has already crossed it. The footprints in the dust are His. And the promise on the far side is not a scary unknown. It is a homecoming. "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved" (Romans 10:9). That is the only crossing that finally matters, and He made the way through it Himself.
The songs, and the road they walk
"Amanecer en el Checkpoint", Dawn at the Checkpoint, catches the first light hitting the wire, the moment of most fear, and answers it with the accordion opening like the sun coming up. "Río de Misericordia," the River of Mercy, takes the whole thing down to a ballad at the river bend at dusk, just voice and accordion, because some crossings you make quietly, holding onto nothing but the fact that He is in the water with you. Psalm 23 said it first: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me."
"Cocina de Abuela" and "El Rosario de la Abuela" bring the grandmothers into it, the way they always are, praying without ceasing over everyone who has to travel ("Pray without ceasing," 1 Thessalonians 5:17). "Cristo Cruza Conmigo", Christ Crosses With Me, is the companion truth to the whole record: He did not only go before me, He comes with me. That is the double comfort of the gospel, His footprint is already ahead of me on the ground, and His hand is already around mine as I step. "Hermanos al Otro Lado," Brothers on the Other Side, sings toward the family already waiting across every divide. And "Una Sola Mesa," One Single Table, is where the album is heading the whole time, hermanos on both sides of every line, sitting down together at last, the accordion still going, nobody counting who came from where.
The voice on the bridge
The moment that breaks me every time I sing it is the bridge of the title track, where the music strips down and the voice is no longer mine. It is the Father's, answering the trembling traveler:
Child. I've already crossed the river. Already crossed the wall, already crossed the cold. Every border that you fear, I crossed it safe. Every line of your whole life, I signed it with the blood of the Lamb.
That is the gospel with dust on its boots. Whatever you are standing in front of tonight, afraid to step, He has already been through it and come out the other side, and He signed the whole crossing in His own blood.
Where the road ends
The last song is called "Frontera Sagrada", Sacred Border, with the subtitle Fiesta Sin Frontera, the party with no border. Because here is where all the crossing leads. John saw the finish line and wrote it down: "a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues" standing together before the throne (Revelation 7:9). Every line crossed. Every wall down. One festival, every language, no checkpoint left to clear.
Who this album is for
This one is for whoever is standing at a line tonight, the real ones and the invisible ones. For the family in the dust at dawn. For the person facing the diagnosis, the bill, the goodbye. For anyone who has to step out first into a cold they cannot see the bottom of.
Look down. Those are His footprints. Look up, those are His stars. Go ahead, hermano; go ahead, hermana. He has gone before you, and He is going with you, and He has already signed your crossing in blood. The Cross went over the line first.
The far side is a fiesta. Come across.
