Music has always been a big, beautiful part of my life, and if I’m being honest, music as the “thing” that I do was always the secret dream. I just never thought that path – this path - was for me.

 

Almost five years ago, my dad died after battling metastatic cancer for a little over a year and a half. He was one of my absolute favorite people, and this quiet, strong, steadfast presence my whole life. Before he was gone it was unimaginable to even think of having to live in a world that he didn’t exist in. 

 

Seven months before I lost my dad, my grandma (his mom), who I was also very close with, died following a car accident. Two weeks after my dad’s funeral, when I could barely get myself out of bed, I woke up to the text that a close family friend had been killed in a wrong place, wrong time situation. 

 

And my world just collapsed. 

 

I had been a Neonatal ICU nurse for ten years but needed to step away to take time to grieve and heal. During that time, I started feeling sick more and more frequently, a month of which my oncologist team thought was cancer. When we initially discovered something, it was in the same exact way we found out about my dad’s cancer. And a year and nine months after we found out about my dad, he was gone.

 

And so for the briefest of moments, I was faced with the potential reality of this being my story – what happens if this is the time that I have? What would I want to do with that? How would I want to embrace that?

 

Thankfully, I did not have cancer, but health issues turned my “step away” from nursing to the closing of a chapter that I didn’t ever expect to end.

 

All of these sudden, irreversible, different forms of loss made me feel like I had also lost my identity in so many ways. And music, once again, became my safe place to process and heal. The place that I could go to and sit with Jesus and journal out all the things. 

 

And it was in this season of my life when God was gently pressing in, asking me, “What else?” As in, “What else do I have in store for you?” This soft reminder that He’s not done writing my story. That He can still do something with what felt like the rubble of my life.

 

And so, we started on this adventure together, slowly at first. Easing into Him making me new. With God just asking me to explore what else He could have for me.

 

I felt myself being drawn more and more toward the creative part of me, but pursuing it as something I do felt intensely terrifying. And then one day, while we were singing “Gratitude” in church, I felt God whisper to me, “Be bold”. And in that moment, I decided to say “yes”.

 

This eventually evolved into God inviting me to share these songs that I wrote without the intention of anybody ever hearing them. These songs that I wrote in the middle of the night when I was too broken and couldn’t sleep. And so, I went to work. Learning, researching, and saying “yes” to God’s asks over and over again. Each one more uncomfortable, but He has caught me every. single. time.

 

And here we are! If you’re here, then “hello”! These songs are now (soon-to-be) for you too. ​

 

As a Christian artist, these songs are my story of how God brought me out of such a broken, impossible time to the other side. One that’s still filled with hope and purpose. These are the songs birthed from journal entries written in the middle of the night when I was overwhelmed with grief and couldn’t sleep, never ever thinking that anybody would hear them. Of God asking me, “What else?” when nursing was taken off the table. And of Him also telling me, “Be bold” in the face of officially deciding to pursue music. And my hope is that by sharing my story, it’ll help others who are grieving to have space to do so, to articulate what they’re feeling so they can start to heal, and for everybody to know that they are not alone and that it won’t always feel this hard.

 

I can so tangibly now believe not only in the hope, but in the promise, that the hardest story can still be beautiful. Because it will be. And it is. There is goodness in every story. We just need to keep moving forward to look back and see it.

 

Let’s see what God can do.