Words

"Words can build you up
Words can break you down
Start a fire in your heart or Put it out"

These are lyrics to a song that has really touched me lately. The song is called "Words" by the band Hawk Nelson. As a vocalist, I was taught quite early on that words have meaning. It's also something I try to impress on every vocalist I work with and encourage. But outside of songs, words have plenty of meaning. It's not only what we say, but how we say it. I know that intentionally and unintentionally, I have caused harm and hurt with my words. And I have been caused harm by plenty of people, intentionally and unintentionally by their words. As a human being, it is easy to be sensitive to those hurtful words, replay them over and over and over again and create that negative self-talk and doubt.

A few months ago, even though money was tight, I told my wife that I needed to buy this book. The book was titled "Start" by Jon Acuff. I read his blog "Stuff Christians Like" and it's pretty funny. I had heard about his book "Quitter" and it sounded pretty good. But this book.....there was something different. I think it was the tagline "Punch fear in the face, go from average to awesome and do work that matters" that caught me. You see, I had let those words cripple me with doubt and fear. I had fallen into the trap of settling for average or "good enough", and I questioned if what I was doing mattered. This book changed my life and my outlook, primarily with this idea of negative self-talk and doubt.

I've felt this pull to write music. I'm a musician. It's what many of us like to do. I know the basics of music, music theory, music composition, and more. But putting all of that together to make something beautiful is not always easy. So I quickly learned. But, I forgot the one important lesson to anything in life. The more you do something, the better, more comfortable and more confident you get. But I didn't do that as much as I should. After reading "Start", I decided that I would record on my IPad one song I wrote over a year ago, one song inspired by words my 4 year old was singing, and one song that was in my head, and upload them to www.noisetrade.com/harmannymusic. You can go and download it if you want. So far, in about a month, I've had 7 downloads. Not great, but that's 7 more than 0. But here's the kicker. Tonight, I received a tweet that shared a link to a review of 20 albums downloaded from noisetrade. One of them was mine! The comments were "

good worship themed messages.. piano backed.. not very high quality.. but some pretty good lyrics that are lifting of God". I know full well that they were not high quality in recording, as I did it on my IPad. But that wasn't the point. The point was to put them out there and get a response from folks. And I am thankful for this!

Does that mean that I've made it? Absolutely not. But hearing positive feedback encourages me and challenges me to do more and try to do better. And I am grateful for that. I know that I don't share those encouraging words with others as much as I should, but this is a good reminder to me that I should be doing much more encouraging than I have in the past.