BackstageSomebody told me I should be further along by now. They meant it kindly. They pinned a verse to me the way you pin one to the version of a person who is fine. And I decided, standing there, that I was done preaching a healing I did not actually have.
Healing Wounds is the album that came out of that decision. It is a record for the wound that is still here, the anniversary that still arrives, the grief still sitting on the edge of the mattress at 3 a.m., and for the God who has not flinched once at any of it.
The wound is still here, and He is still here
The opening song is simply called "The Wound Is Still Here," and it is the most honest sentence I have ever put first on a record. I am done preaching a healing I do not have, Lord, so here is the honest thing: the wound is still here. And You have not flinched once. I built it on the oldest promise of healing in the book, by his stripes we are healed (Isaiah 53:5), and on the God who heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds (Psalm 147:3). Notice the tense. Not were healed and moved on, but being healed. The anniversary comes and Yahuah does not shame the tears. He never once asked me for a timetable.
Because here is what the healing industry does not tell you: some healing is a sprint, but most of God's repair is a walk. "Slow Mercy" is the song at the heart of the album, and its whole claim is that His mercy reads a different calendar than the one the world hands you. At the pace of breath and blood and tears, You meet me in the years. There is a grace that does not look like lightning. It looks like Yeshua pulling up a chair on the long Tuesday afternoon when nothing at all happens, except that He stays. And His staying is the miracle.
The miracle is not the speed. He is the miracle. And He is staying.
He does not fix me too fast
The most counterintuitive prayer on the record is on "Stay With Me": Jesus, do not fix me too fast. Do not rush me past the part I do not understand. I mean that prayer. Most of the sermons I have actually needed were not sentences at all. They were His face across from mine, a chair pulled up, a door not closed. He is the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction (2 Corinthians 1:3–4), and He is near to the brokenhearted (Psalm 34:18). He does not hand you a verse and leave. He sits down beside you and He does not explain. He just does not leave.
And He does it in the dead hours. "Three Forty Seven" is set at the exact minute the wound wakes up, the hour when the grief you thought you had sent to bed is sitting on the edge of the mattress. The song calls Him an insomniac of love, because he who keeps you will not slumber; behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep (Psalm 121:3–4). I used to fight the grief at the door. Now I set a chair for it, and I find He is already seated there, awake, keeping the night watch in my room.
The room around me, and the balm that is a Person
I could not make an honest healing record without the church, because I did not heal alone and neither will you. "The Room Around Me" is about the body of Yeshua as the actual bandage the Spirit uses, the casserole on the porch, the hand on the shoulder, the friend who showed up at six months and two years, long after the polite window had closed. He healed me inside His body, not off by myself. And the album's peak, "Balm for Gilead," takes the ancient cry, is there no balm in Gilead? (Jeremiah 8:22), and answers it with a Person. The balm is His body broken and His blood poured out. The Healer is not a technique. He is a Man with scars who does not leave the room.
Which is the whole turn of the record. On "Scars Become Songs," the wound that almost ended me becomes the very vocabulary the Spirit gives me to love the next hurting person, because one day someone I love reached the 3 a.m. hour I had reached, and I had nothing to give them except the scar His hands had already touched. He comforts us so that we may be able to comfort those in any affliction (2 Corinthians 1:4). The scar is not the shame. It becomes the song.
Who this album is for
It is for the one who buried a parent, a child, a marriage, a self, and is quietly ashamed it is taking so long. For the person whose faith promised a fast fix and delivered a long walk instead. For anyone worn out by well-meaning people counting the months. Hear me: you are not regressing. You are being healed, and the inner self is being renewed day by day even while the outer wastes (2 Corinthians 4:16).
The album ends on "The Road Home," and it does not pretend the scar is gone. It calls us a caravan of the still-being-healed, walking with a God whose home is not where the wound ends but where the wound is held, because the Way Himself is both the home and the road (John 14:6). So take His pace. Lay down the striving. He is not in a hurry, He is not going anywhere, and the mercy that will not rush you is the mercy that will get you all the way home.
