This HAS to be God!!

Hey, y'all! :D

OK, hopefully I've built up enough excitement through various hints in blog posts, e-mails, etc. that a few of you will actually read this... ;) Here we go: my latest "this HAS to be God!" story. Warning: this could will be long!!! Just remember that I warned you. :D

I thought about making you all groan by starting with "On May 16, 1986, at 11:04 PM...", but I don't have to go back THAT far for this story, so I won't.

I am going to back up a little ways though. I've been scribbling bits and pieces of "poetry" pretty much since the time I could write. Some of those first ones are great for a laugh, and no--you can't see them. When I was 13 or so I started writing "real" poems, concentrating on the rhythm and rhyme and trying to actually make them sound good. And I was officially in love with the beautiful, lilting sound of poetry. One problem: poetry is rapidly going out of style. As my dad once said, "The poets of today are the songwriters." So, my dream became to be a songwriter. Again, just one problem: I had plenty of words, but I could not for the life of me write music. Trust me, I tried. A lot. When no one else was around. :D

Since it seemed like I was never going to make "songwriter", I tried to be content with writing poems. I started compiling little homemade books of them each year and giving them to people for Christmas. My poetry has always been a very personal thing, a product of my walk with God, my journey in life. It wasn't really meant for others. I was just giving it to certain people because a) I had no money to give them anything else and b) they were my parents, grandparents, and closest friends and I figured they'd like anything I wrote. :D Imagine my surprise when people started telling me that the poems were blessing them somehow!!! It took a while, but I finally came to realize that, through God (and HIM alone!) words that I wrote could touch others just like others' words had touched me. So, I kept sharing the poems I wrote.

Over the last few months, I've felt more and more strongly that somehow, I was supposed to be writing songs. Reminding God that I can't write music wasn't having any effect, either. This was the dream He had given me, what was I going to do about it?

Way back in June last year, the boys and I were in San Angelo for a visit and went by the church to see Pastor Jim and Debbie. While we were there, Pastor Jim got his guitar out and sang for us a new verse he had written to "Your Love, O Lord" (a song done by Third Day). The whole song is taken from Psalm 36, and Pastor Jim made a comment just in passing about there being a "third verse" there but he didn't have time to write it. Well, I read the Psalm and found what he was talking about right away...and it wouldn't let me sleep that night. So, I wrote a third verse and gave it to Pastor Jim. The congregation sang the song, with both new verses, in church on Sunday, and it was one of the most surreal moments of my life, hearing people sing words I had written by the grace of God. It wasn't a prideful feeling, just...a very blessed, very "this-is-so-right" kind of feeling. And my dream was set in concrete. :D I still had the very big problem of getting music for the words, though.

In July, I joined the Ernie Haase & Signature Sound message board and starting making some great friends from all over the world, united by our love for this awesome quartet.

In October, EH&SS released a new CD/DVD project called "Dream On". The first time I watched the video, I cried listening to them sing the title song...

Dream on! When the world just doesn't believe; God has promised never to leave you alone!

Dream on! Follow hope wherever it leads; in the seed of dreams, there's the promise of the dawn!

Dare to listen for the music, keep on following the star; morning can't be far! Dream on!

It was so perfect for where I was, almost ready to give up on my God-sized dream. And through listening to that song--and a few teary conversations with God--I realized that I was standing in the way of my own dream. I kept offering questions and problems and excuses when God just wanted me to trust Him and be willing. It's like He said to me, "Haley, you sound like Moses! So many excuses, so many questions, so many seemingly reasonable reasons to stay in your comfort zone! Just trust Me, little one!"

'Course, I kept arguing for a while. Here's an excerpt from my journal one night:

Note, arguing with God never really works very well! To every problem I could come up with, He simply replied, "just trust Me." Rather like hitting a brick wall! An awfully gentle and lovable brick wall, though!

Finally, God got me to a point where I was willing to say, "OK. You show me what to do one step at a time, and I will follow. Even if it means that, somewhere down the road, I'm going to have to face rejection...or my fear of 'famous-people-I-don't-know-personally'." :D Once I got to that point, I found myself finally at rest and really excited about whatever the future held. Here's another excerpt from my journal:

I look ahead, "dreaming on" with a crazy mixture of excitement and terror. My future is in the hands of a very good, always faithful, loving, absolutely unpredictable God--who wouldn't be terrifyingly excited?! Or maybe it's excitedly terrified... :D

Fast forward to January 10, 2009. Somebody on the EH&SS message board (see, I did have a reason for mentioning it earlier!) started a conversation about song writing, and I jumped in with a brief comment that I loved to write lyrics, but hadn't ever been able to put music to them. Next thing I know, I get a personal message from Raluca, a high school student from Romania.

She wanted me to send her my "favorite" poem that I had written (favorite? Who has a favorite poem they've written?! The most recent one is usually my "favorite"! :D). My curiosity aroused, I sent her one and asked why she wanted it. She told me that she wanted to try putting music to it. And I became excited. VERY excited. This HAD to be God!! I had not sought this out in any way, and here it was. From Romania!!!

A few days later, she e-mailed me sheet music and a beautifully done soundtrack to Desert Places. WOW!!! Let me tell ya, folks, Raluca is very gifted. The song is beautiful and her musical ability is impressive. And, I'm even MORE excited. :D What are we doing next? Well, beyond fine-tuning Desert Places and working on another song, we don't really know. We are convinced that this is a God thing, and it would be wrong to just keep it all to ourselves. But, we're still working on where we go next with all this.

I have just one more bit to say...a couple days ago Raluca and I were instant messaging (isn't technology great?! :D) and talking about the song and how amazing it was that we'd "found each other". Raluca said she'd tried many times to write lyrics and hadn't really been able to, and I laughed as I told her I'd tried to write music many times and had totally not been able to. Her response? "We match!" Perfectly put, Raluca. :D Only God could orchestrate things to where a girl from Texas and a girl from Romania (yes, I am still floored by all this!) could get together and write a song. God-sized dreams do come true!!

In that same IM conversation, I said something about how I'd hesitated over the lyrics to send her because I worry about my poetry being too "personal", too much "for me" and not really making sense or mattering to other people. She so sweetly pointed out the simple truth that that is the very thing that makes a good song. Then she made me cry. She said that when she got the lyrics from me, she had felt like she was kind of in a "desert place", and that the lyrics helped and blessed her as she was writing the music. And that, my friends, simply HAS to be God!