BackstageI did not name this album for a revival I saw somewhere else. I named it for the one I needed in my own body.
There is a particular tiredness that does not show up on your face. You can lead worship with it. You can smile through a whole service with it. You can carry it onto the train at six in the morning, plantain in the market bag, mother's hymn still humming somewhere behind your teeth, and nobody around you would ever guess that on the inside you feel like a field of things that used to be alive. That is where this album started. Not in a stadium. In the valley I was quietly living in.
The Question I Could Not Answer Lying Down
Yahuah took the prophet Ezekiel out into a valley full of bones and asked him one question that has never let go of me: "Son of man, can these bones live?" Ezekiel 37. The prophet does the wisest thing a person can do in front of a God like ours. He refuses to lie in either direction. He does not say yes to look faithful and he does not say no to look honest. He says, "O Lord Yahuah, thou knowest."
I lived in that answer for a long season. I could not manufacture a yes. I was too worn for that. But I would not say no, because I had a grandmother in Port-of-Spain who had already settled the matter on her knees decades before I got tired. So I stood in my valley and said the only true thing: You know, Lord. You know if this can live.
And the word that came back in the vision was not a feeling. It was an assignment. Prophesy to the bones. Speak to the dead thing on purpose. That is the whole architecture of the opening song, Dry Bones, Wake Up. It is me obeying a command before I felt a thing:
Bones don't have to stay bones, Spirit can come down. Same wind that raised the prophet's army make a Caribbean sound.
Why "Bones," and Why It Had to Be Mine
I could have called this record Revival and pointed it outward, at the culture, at the church, at the diaspora at large. It would have been easier. It is always easier to prophesy to somebody else's valley.
But bones are the most personal thing you own. They are under everything, under the skill, under the ministry, under the accent you switch between the office and the phone call home. When the marrow is dry, no amount of platform covers it. So I put the word revival exactly where the deadness was: in my bones. Because I have learned that Yahuah does not usually revive the room first. He revives the one who has to lead it, and then the room catches fire off a person who has actually been raised.
That is why the same Spirit language runs from Ezekiel's valley straight into the Upper Room on this album. In Same Spirit, Same Fire I say the thing I most needed to believe: Acts 2 is not a museum. Acts 2 is right outside the door. The wind that filled that room was not a one-time weather event in a Bible I read about. It is the same breath, and it still knows how to fall on praying people, even praying people who are Brooklyn-tired and island-far from praise.
The Instruments Were Never the Problem
There is a lie that gets whispered over diaspora believers, and it is that our worship has to be translated into somebody else's sound before Heaven will take it seriously. I put Steelpan in the Sanctuary on this record to break that lie in half. Psalm 150 does not hand you a short list of approved instruments. It opens the door wide: praise Him with the trumpet, the timbrel, the stringed instruments, the loud cymbals. Trinidad simply answered that invitation with an oil drum turned into a bell of praise.
Father, You don't only love the organ. You don't only love the choir. Holy Spirit lifts up every diaspora, Father, set our pans on fire.
When those bones started standing up in me, they did not stand up in a borrowed accent. They stood up to a steelpan tremolo and a Hammond swirl and a cowbell on the offbeat, because revival does not erase where you came from. It sanctifies it.
The Prayer That Was Answered Before I Knew to Pray
The heart of the whole album is a small back bedroom in Port-of-Spain. Granny's Tarry-Room Prayer is the truest thing I have ever put in a song, a kneeling rug worn down into the linoleum, a coconut-oil King James, Bay Rum still in the curtains, and sixty years of a woman meeting God at dawn for grandchildren she could see coming apart from a great distance.
Scripture calls this the faith of Lois and Eunice, the grandmother's faith that lives in the grandchild before the grandchild even owns it (2 Timothy 1:5). James tells us the fervent prayer of a righteous one accomplishes much (James 5:16), and I am the much. I spent years thinking I had wandered too far to be reached, and the whole time I was simply walking in the answer she never said out loud. My revival was not a new thing Yahuah invented for me. It was an old prayer arriving on time.
Who I Made This For
I made this for the one who leads the singing and cannot find their own. For the diaspora daughter and son holding two homes and a low-grade grief nobody sees. For anyone who has stood in front of their own dry places and could not honestly say yes, and refused to say no.
Here is what I know now that I did not know in the valley. You do not have to feel alive to be commanded to prophesy, and you do not have to raise yourself. The wind is not waiting on your strength; it is waiting on your obedience to speak to the thing you gave up on. Yeshua is the resurrection and the life, not the reward for people who resurrect themselves. Say the true thing. Lord, You know if this can live. Then open your mouth over the bones anyway.
Mine stood up. They are marching now, to a beat that came from the islands and a breath that came from Heaven. Yours can too. The same Spirit is right outside the door.
