New Recording now available
Riddled Through with Glory: Songs of Worship and Waiting

"You're not the same as us, You are riddled through with glory." (from the song "I Don't Mind Waiting.")

I imagine Jesus as a vagabond, trudging dusty roads with a patched and torn cloak, hisskin weathered by sun and wind, wrinkled by smiles and tears, a man steady and tested, no stranger to sorrow but burning with an everlasting joy, like a barn that's burning up from the outside, a building riddled with bullet holes out of which escapes. . . glory.

Track List
Trust You Deep (previously unreleased demo)
The Way You Are (from Watershed)
I Don't Mind Waiting (from Now)
Not Right Now (from Seconds to Sunrise)
Be Thou My Vision (previously unreleased demo)
Water Fall On Me (from Gesture Drawings: Rough Demos, Orphaned Tracks and Living Room Recordings)

The Recording Backstory

After more than a decade writing and performing songs designed to encourage and challenge followers of Jesus in their worship and their Christ-following, I decided to write songs for a wider audience. This was 2002, two years after my first worship recording (Sonchild Responsible) came out.

For about seven years I wrote, recorded and played concerts as JRL. Spiritual themes remained prominent, and prayers regularly made their way on to the recordings even though my main focus was creating music that would be a gift to any listener, whether or not they shared my connection to Jesus. JRL ended in the 2009 and I began to work at integrating the various aspects and themes of my musical journey. I realized at that point that people were still finding worship songs I wrote in the 90's helpful in their spiritual journey. This got me thinking: What about those orphan worship songs from the last decade? Would any of them be relevant as well? I also started thinking about the people I kept bumping into who told me they usually "dislike worship music" but found what I wrote helpful..

Then the Watershed Project happened, (which is another story). It took me into new musical territory (I picked up the electric guitar) and veered more directly into the worship arena, albeit in an aggresive, lo-fi manner. It was also another step in integration process.

The most recent step was putting together "Riddled Through with Glory," a collection including two new song demos and songs from past records that were, at their core, worship songs. My hope is that the songs can be enjoyed, useful in personal reflection and corporate worship and prayer. I'm convinced that God uses music and worship as a way of shaping and forming individuals and groups into something they never even imagined they could be -- and yet which was written in their very bones and dna before time sputtered into existence!

A prayer: May God heal the bullet wounds in our souls and cities, train us to live in, through and for Jesus Himself and the new world He inhabits and is bringing, the Kingdom of God he talked about and which we see now in dreams, in the people who bear God's image, people who are sacraments and icons -- battered, worn and weathered, once full of fear and corruption but destined to be riddled through with glory.

"I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God."