Songwriting and the Ministry of Presence - Voices In My Head (The Rick Lee James Podcast) - Episode

Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer, songwriter, author, worship leader, an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene, and most recently, a hospital chaplain. The Voices in My Head podcast is where I discuss things that are on my mind, the voices in my head. Music, movies, books, pop culture, theology, and more are all on the table as I discuss them here with friends, colleagues, and sometimes just by myself, processing what I'm learning in the moment. Make sure to let me know what you think of today's episode by leaving me a review on iTunes, tweeting to me @RickLeeJames on Twitter, and by joining my mailing list at rickleejames.com where you can receive an email every time a new episode is released. By the way, in case you are interested in a daily a dose of kindness and encouragement beyond this podcast, I also run the Twitter account @MrRogersSays where I post daily quotes from Fred Rogers, one of the loudest voices in my head, which is ironic because he was such a quiet person. Also, if you do want to be notified about all of my latest releases, not just this podcast, sign up for email notifications on my Substack page found at rickleejames.substack.com. Well, I guess that's That's it for the intro, so let's get to the latest episode of Voices in My Head, the Rick Lee James podcast.

Welcome back to Voices in My Head, the Rick Lee James podcast. As always, I'm your host, Rick Lee James, and I am with a group of wonderful songwriters today at a place called Cedarville, Ohio, at Cedarville University. We are at the Worship 424 conference. And so today I'm actually doing a workshop called Songwriting and the Ministry of Presence. So if you're listening to this today, maybe you were at the workshop. Does anybody want to say hi to themselves? So when you're listening, it's like, hi, future self. Anybody want to do that just real quick? Hi. All right, there you go. So when you're listening, you can go, that was me from the past talking to the future. All right. So it'll be coming out hopefully here in the next week or so. So thank you everybody for coming today. Before we got started, we had a couple people who were brave enough to come up and share some of their original music, and I think that's wonderful. I love it when we create. It takes time to write songs. It takes energy. It just doesn't happen by accident. There are very few songs that just come from inspiration, you know. We wait for the lightning to strike and go, boom, oh, that was it, God gave me this song. And sometimes I think when I hear those songs, I go, oh well, maybe God didn't like it, that's why he gave it away. Because they don't always, you know, sometimes I just wonder, you know, like, what was it, you know? Maybe it was, but But maybe sometimes it just needed a little more time to incubate, a little more time to dwell on it, to spend some time with the lyrics. One thing about it that I didn't realize, you know, when I was younger, just learning how to write songs— I'm still learning how to write songs, by the way, we're always learning— is it's okay to take some time. It's okay to not put it out right away. But it's also okay to, when you're working on it, share it with somebody you trust, get some pointers, get some tips. Today, well, before I get into that, let me just kind of introduce myself to you really quickly. In case you've never been in one of my workshops or you've never listened to my music, I've got a booth over there in the, in the conference hall. So please stop by. This is the thing, everybody who stops by the booth, you get one item for free. Okay. The second one you have to pay for. That makes me sound like a drug pusher. I'm not, it's music. Okay. The first one's free, but you can get, now you don't have to go there to get this today. But actually everybody, if you want them, I'm not going to force you to take them. I'm going to give you a copy of this vinyl. Okay. If anybody likes vinyl, even if you don't give it to somebody who does like it, I'm going to lay this on the desk right now. But I found you don't go around giving to people. Okay. So even if now, if you want to take one and pass it around, that's fine. If you don't want to take it with you, I've already got the recording started, so we're good. So thank you. I appreciate it. So if you don't want it, that's fine too, but feel free to take one, pass it around. If you run out, I'll pass most out. I am a singer and songwriter. I live in Springfield, Ohio, which is not too far from here. A few years ago, I did an album with Lifeway Worship called Hymns, Prayers, and Invitations. And it, I just opened up kind of a whole new space for me. I got to write with some wonderful people. I got to interact with new people I had never done before. And it led to this other album called Thunder. So the opportunity from the first album, I became friends with a man who was Rich Mullins' very first publisher. So anybody know the song, sing your praises to the Lord, come on everybody. Okay. My friend Randy, he published that song. He was the first one to like reveal Rich to the world. So he knew Rich all the way back when, and he has like 20 songs from Rich that never got released. And Thunder, the title track, what became the title track, is one of those songs by Rich Mullins that he never published, never released. And so this is the first time the song has really ever been kind of published in this form. Lowell Alexander, who was one of Rich's co-writers, went back and kind of did a little bit of rewriting on it. So it was almost like a co-write after the fact, but that album to me, it's a very special thing. I made it just before COVID happened. COVID happened. I had all these albums. I was ready to tour and start selling them. Didn't get to go anywhere. So, but it was a big endeavor. They're all paid for now. And if I don't get them out to people, who's going to listen, right? So I'm just going to share them with you guys today. I find you don't go wrong by just sharing music with people. And if you don't like it, share it with a friend. If you do like it, especially share it with a friend, you know? Something like that. But I hope you'll enjoy it. If you don't have a record player, you can stream it on Spotify. But that's the thing today, come by my booth. We've got CDs, we've got t-shirts, we've got albums, we've got maybe a few copies of my book. I wrote a book a few years ago called Out of the Depths: A Songwriter's Journey Through the Psalms. But that's that. So please, my gift to you today, if I ask you to— and then we have guitar picks too. So if you want to come and get hopefully just one pick, because I'm running out, they cleaned me out yesterday. And we have mints. So anyway, advertisement over.

I, I'm a songwriter.

I've got the I'm sure that proves I'm a songwriter, right? No, I wrote it just to be fun today. But what I'm actually going to be focusing on this morning, it's not going to be your regular kind of songwriting class. Okay. A couple of years ago, God called me into something that I never expected God was going to call me into. Matter of fact, I had never given it a second thought. God called me into hospital chaplaincy. All right. I am currently a full-time graduate student through Loyola University. I'm in my last full-time semester. I am so tired. I work at a hospital. I've done about almost 2 years working full-time, and then now I'm part-time finishing up my school. And it has been the most rewarding experience I have ever had a chance to be a part of. It has been, it introduced me to what is called the ministry of presence. Okay. That's what chaplaincy is. And I found that my songwriting began to change. As I learned to be present, as I learned to listen to people's stories, as I learned to not only listen to people's stories, it was most important to start listening to me first. You know, songwriters, we're often very self-absorbed. I mean, I just did it. I told you all about the stuff I have going on at the beginning. We love to talk about ourselves, but a lot of us don't really know ourselves because we haven't taken time to listen. And we come before God being a false person, and God doesn't see that person because God only sees the real person that's there. One of my favorite lines, speaking of a wonderful songwriter, Jason Gray, he has a song called The Golden Boy and the Prodigal. If you've never heard it, it's one of the best songs ever written. I'll go to my grave saying that. And he says, take a good look in the mirror and tell me who you see, the one who Jesus died for or the one you'd like to be, you know. Can you find it in your heart to have mercy on the one the Father loves so much he gave his only son? You know, not powerful. Like, would you rather be the one who Jesus died for or the person you'd like to be? Wow. I think I'll go for the one Jesus died for, you know, who's imperfect and flawed and doesn't have it all together, but is so loved by God. So this morning I want us to look first at a picture. It's going to be a little bit songwriting, but I'm going to tell you this, you can apply this to anything. Doesn't just have to be a songwriter. We're going to start quickly with some songwriting tips, but it's going to roll us into the idea of being present. Okay. So that it'll make sense as we go on to it. Okay. So let me go to this first slide. Maybe. I thought all I had to do was, oh, sorry, everybody listening. There it is.

All right.

So what is spirituality is the question I want you to think about. If you can't see the picture, it's a picture from a Toad and Frog book. It's Toad sitting next to Frog on a rock. And the caption just simply says, "Toad sat and did nothing. Frog sat with him." That to me captures presence. All right. We're going to talk about what spirituality is in a second, but I want you to just think for a moment. If I had to answer that question for somebody, what is spirituality? I have a feeling in a room this size, we might get as many answers as we have people in the room. Because it's one of those terms. It's like, what does that even mean? Spirituality? Is that the same as Christianity? Is it different? Is it part of Christianity? What does it have to do with the Ministry of Presence? Well, just think about that picture for a second there. Toad sat and did nothing. Frog sat with him. You know, we're going to come back to that in a little bit. So much of our ministry, so much of our songwriting If you're listening to this, you're not a minister, you're not a songwriter, maybe you clean houses for a living. Your houses, your cleaning will be better if you can figure this out. Okay. We're going to get into it a little bit more. If we can figure out how to sit and do nothing, and then just sit with that, sit with those others. So let's look a little bit deeper into this. Okay. So spirituality, they teach you when you go into becoming a chaplain, this is where the chaplaincy part comes in. There are, I thought up this, these, these letters together, MVP. I thought everybody can remember MVP, right? And then I couldn't figure out a CT at the end. I was like, Christianity Today?

I don't know.

CT. So we've got MVP and CT. Okay. So if you can remember those, it may be a help to you. But when chaplains, when people in hospitals and hospital ministry and things like that, when they're talking to somebody in a room, you've got people coming from all walks of life. You have people who have been Christians their entire lives and they love the Lord with all their heart and they just want to talk about Jesus. You meet people who have never darkened the church a day in their life. You meet people from other faiths. You meet people who are atheists who used to have faith and don't anymore. You have people who used to be atheists and now are Christians and you have them all. And your job as a chaplain is to go in and be present to that person and find out these things. Where does this person in front of me find meaning? Where does this person in front of me, what do they value? What are their values that they hold? What's their purpose? Are they able to explain? Can you, in listening to this person in front of you, can you hear what their purpose is? Connection. Where do they find connection? What are they connecting with? And then do they have any sense of transcendence at all? Transcendence being something bigger than us, something divine. So does that make sense to everybody? Those things together. It sounds like it should be simple, but it's kind of difficult when you're listening. And it's interesting when, think about this for just a moment, okay? I promise we are getting to songwriting, okay? We're coming to it. But think about this for a moment. If you've ever been in the hospital, probably all of us have at some point or another, or we've been with a loved one. When you're in the hospital, it's always a bad day. Like, nobody was like, oh yeah, I get to go in an ambulance to the hospital today because yippee, you know, I get to pay those bills and worry about that. Yes. You know, it's, it's just a bad day. All around when you go in there. What a person wants to tell you on the worst day about themselves is probably the deepest part of who they are. And if you come in as a stranger, like I do sometimes as a chaplain and I sit with them, there's this anonymity where they're like, oh, I don't even know you. I'm going to start sharing. And we start hearing. What people don't realize, sometimes people, they're vehemently even against it. But they don't realize that thing that they're connecting with, that place where they're finding meaning. Sometimes it's fishing. They want to talk to you about fishing. Why would you right now? You've got a heart problem. You talk to me about how much fishing means to you. Say, dig a little deeper. Well, when I'm out fishing, you know, sometimes I do it with my son and it's just the best day and I love him more than anything. And then you start finding story after story. You hear what I'm saying here? Listening to each other and you start hearing that story. That person may not even realize it, but I think it's the divine longing inside of them. And God is somehow connecting with them, whether they've realized it or not, that, you know, I love that scripture verse, there's nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Christ. Love of God in Christ is always reaching out to us. He's reaching out to us in those hospital bed situations and those places. So a person that can, if we can help listen to where we are, with another person, what they're going through, it really opens us up to who they are. Mr. Rogers, one of my favorite people on the planet. I have my Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood hat, if any of you know that show. I run the Twitter account @MrRogersSay where I just put quotes from Fred Rogers up every day. He said there's practically no one, I'm gonna get the quote a little wrong, but he said there's no one you couldn't love once you've heard their story. And I've thought about that and I thought, I don't know, maybe there's a couple people, but still, once you hear their story, a lot can happen. Happen. So that's kind of where we're going to start from today when we're talking about this idea about spirituality, Christian spirituality, what it means as Christians. We might have a different answer than a lot of other people, and I, I would hope we would as Christians. But our meaning, our values, our purpose, our connection, where we find transcendence, it may be different from those around us. But what do we really know about it, you know, when we say those things? So let me see, what is presence? That's what we're going to talk about real quick too. So presence is this vaguely defined word often used by chaplains like me to describe their work with patients, families, and staff. Okay. It's about creating a non-anxious, non-judgmental atmosphere for the compassionate sharing of another's story. Okay. So creating the presence has no apparent agenda. All right. Now, this is the thing where you might go, well, as a songwriter, I've got an agenda. Right? I want to have something in mind. Yes, you want to have an idea of where you're going. But what if you started with just no agenda? What if you started with God and you just sat for a while? Okay? What this is is prayer. You're sitting and listening. Like, I need to have something to say. What if instead of charging in, like, you ever have somebody that takes the Bible and they know what they want to say? Okay, now where can I find a verse that says what I want to say? Instead of going to the Bible and saying, oh, the Bible says this, how can I say what this is saying as me? You know, figure that out. We're kind of doing that with Psalms. Okay. Does that make sense? Like it's a different place to start. What if we started sometimes with no agenda and we started and we just sat down and we asked the Lord with no apparent agenda, with a lot of flexibility, with emotional vulnerability, coming before God with our songs and saying, Lord, what could you share? Today? What do you want to share with me? What do I need to hear? And then these are the 4 things that I want us to focus on today. Being present means first being present to oneself. We've already talked about that just a little bit. If you're not the real person you are, not even God sees that person, right? God sees the real you. Do you see the real you? You know, I wore this shirt to be funny today in a little bit because You know, it says songwriter, right? So everybody will know I'm a songwriter. But you know what? Deep down, that shouldn't be my identity, right? If I could just learn to be, get real with self, and understand who God has made me to be. God didn't first and foremost put me here as one of his creations to have the identity that, oh, I'm a songwriter. Now that may be a part, that may be an aspect, but there's something deeper to me. Can I learn to just be? What if I never wrote another song? Could I just be content with that? Could I just be and allow God to be who he is? So we want to be present to self so that then we can truly be present to the presence, to God's presence. That's what that means. Personal prayer, spirituality. And then as we are present to God, after we've been honest with ourselves about who we are, Maybe we can then be present to others. You ever done a co-write session before? Okay. It's fun. I'll tell you, sometimes it's more fun than others because that other person tells you, I don't like what you wrote. You play it for them and you've just opened your heart and poured it out. And it's like you've just revealed your baby to someone and they go, your baby's ugly. You know, hopefully nicer than that. But sometimes if we can be present to others in honest ways, it's not it's not for your bad that they're doing it for you. If you're with a good co-writer who cares about you and cares about the song, they're actually being present in a way that says, I think we can make this better. It's not great right now, but it could get great. You know, and it's not in a way to say like, that's bad. You ought to quit. It's in a way to say, you know what? It could get so much better. Not even to say it's bad. I don't think you should ever tell somebody that song's bad. That's just, that's just, you know, it came from a very important place, but some people will do that. If you're going to be a songwriter, you have to get used to that a little bit. But then finally, helping others be present to the presence, you know, being present to others so that we can help others be present to God's presence. The big part of what we mean by the ministry of presence. So those are 4 important things. So songwriting today, as we look at it real quick, it can be a sort of diary that journals your life in song.

Okay.

Can you think of anybody that writes really good songs about themselves? Like just storytelling, or can anybody come to mind when you think of that? Andrew Peterson. Andrew Peterson. Yeah, we sang one of his songs last night, didn't we, with Shane and Shane? "Is He Worthy." I know Andrew, and Andrew is who Andrew is, you know. I've had him on my podcast a few times, and I've just always been so impressed by the person that he is and the way that he puts himself into a song. I already mentioned Jason Gray. Jason will— one of his new songs, 'Wasn't I Worth Staying For.' If you've never heard it, my goodness, it is like this autobiographical song about when his dad left when he was a child, and that's when his stutter started. And he says, 'My voice broke the same time as my heart,' you know, when he was young and dad left. And then when his marriage ended years later and all this, and he's singing about 'Wasn't I Worth Staying For,' you know, and he's singing all these deep, deep things and puts himself into the song. And I listen and I just weep, and I'm like, wow, that story is All of us can relate because we've all been there in some way. So if we can figure out a way, not everybody does that in songs. Some people are great worship songwriters, but they still, even when you're writing for a congregation, sometimes you can put yourself into it. We sang a great song this morning, Fighting a Battle You've Already Won, you know, and as Shane was sharing about different stories, they go through battles that they've been through. I immediately thought, my son, by the way, he's 11 years old. He came home one day and he said there's a little boy in his class. Everybody picks on this kid. Everybody. Not my son. I said, you don't do it. He said, no. And he said, but I just feel so terrible for him. He said to me today, I don't want to live anymore. 11 years old, you know? And it just crushed me. I heard that. And I heard that song. You know, we've been singing that fighting a battle you've already won. I don't know this kid. I don't know his home life. I understand it's not great. And I've just been praying that as I listen, I'm like, oh God, somehow, you know, and my son, my 11-year-old son, get this. I don't know where he gets this from. I hope from me, but probably from God more likely. He said to this kid, he said, you have immeasurable worth. You know, an 11-year-old that talks that way. His mom and I both were like, you said what? Did you— where did you hear the word immeasurable, you know? Or did he understand?

Did he?

Exactly.

Yeah.

And you know, in the kingdom of God, you've got to enter like a child, right? Brought tears to my eyes. And so I've just been— well, every time I hear that song now, I'm fighting a battle you've already won. Who knows where this little kid is at, right? Let him know his immeasurable worth. Lord, fight this battle for him, you know? Sorry, I'm getting teary now thinking about those stories and they're powerful. So then all of a sudden that worship song that you thought was just for congregational use, now it has new meaning to you, doesn't it? You know, you're now, now you may be thinking of that person in your church who's battling cancer so hard, they might not make it. You know, they're fighting a battle that he's already won, you know? So you've got lyrics like that. When you put yourself into a song, It has to come out in some way or another, and it's universal. Everybody's going to get the appeal to it. Okay, so sometimes we can be so focused on the mechanics of it, which are very important, that we sometimes miss the heart of the song. So what does God want to speak today? What is God speaking to you today as we go through this? And then the message— what do you have to say, you know, as you come to this? I said before, if we could come without agenda, that's a really good thing. But once you're sitting there like writing, you know, it's a good practice to write even when you don't know what to write. But it does help at some point to narrow it in and say, what is this message that I want to tell? Do I have too many messages happening in the song at one time? Should I take one of these and put them in a different song? You know, because if I'm— I don't want to be too clever and put too many things in. But then, like, what style am I writing in? Is it pop? Is it rock? Is it rap? Is it worship? You know, country, you just name it. What kind of style do I want this to be for today? And then, you know, good songs kind of transcend style, so you can hear them in a lot of different ways. It was interesting. I don't know how many versions I've heard of Bob Dylan's song, You Gotta Serve Somebody. You know that one? I almost never listened to Bob Dylan's version because there are so many versions of that song. There's some great, like, amazing blues electric guitar versions.

You gotta serve somebody.

And they got like choirs backing them up and stuff. And then you'll have like indie songwriters and they're doing it with just an acoustic guitar in this dark room somewhere. And, you know, you may be a businessman. Being Little Friends, you know, but you're gonna have to serve somebody. It's done, it's been done in so many different styles, so many different ways. A good song can kind of transcend those things, but when you're first writing it, you, you got to figure out kind of too, what do I want this to be? What fits my personality? You know, I, I'm the person God made me to be, so I can only really be me when I come to this song. I gotta tell you, I want to be Andrew Peterson. Like, if I could write songs like Andrew Peterson, Wow. Although a friend of mine, I don't know Stephen Curtis Chapman. I've never met him, but I have friends who are friends of his because he and his wife, his wife is from my hometown in Springfield. And so there's just mutual friends in the area. And one of my friends was out on the lake with Stephen Curtis Chapman one day on a vacation. And he said, you know, I was with Stephen and he said to me, if I could just write like Chris Tomlin, you know, that would be amazing. So we all do it, don't we? You know, we all do that. But the fact is, God didn't make Stephen Curtis to be Chris Tomlin. God didn't make Shane to be Chris Tomlin or Stephen Curtis or whoever they might want to be them. God didn't make me to be Andrew Peterson. I can only be me.

And then let's do this.

And if I stop trying to be me, I am depriving the world of something God gave, you know. It's, it's a, it's, I'm not saying like, hey, you're God's gift, but in some way you are God's gift. God has given you this gift and he's given you something to say in your voice. So we need to figure out how to say that. So the style, the atmosphere, atmosphere. You want to think about like, where does the song take place? Does it happen in heaven? Does it happen in Pittsburgh? You know, I mean, there's different places that it could be. The mood of the song, is it happy? Is it sad? Is it nostalgic? Is it worshipful? So these are just some different kind of mechanical things you want to think about when you're writing songs. Okay. You want to also think about like the form of a song. Usually, you know what I mean when I say AAA, like a song with all verses like a hymn or something. In Christ Alone, that's a good example of of an A song and like every verse, it's just verse, verse, verse, verse. So B would be the chorus. So is this song going to be an A, B, verse, chorus, verse, chorus? We're going to throw a bridge in, or sometimes it seems like there's 2 or 3 bridges in songs anymore. And this is going to be A, B, A, B, C, D. Maybe depending on who you're writing for audience-wise, you might have a different approach to this. Sometimes just that A, A, A, A is really good for congregations, you know, if you're writing out songs in that way, if you're going to try to do it So again, we talked about it before, but sometimes we try to be too clever in our lyrics, and that's where we end up like, maybe, maybe this lyric should go in a different song because I'm trying to say too much at one time. Some of the best lyrics, if you've ever listened to Andy Gjulahorn, who is Andrew Peterson, he played guitar for him for many years, has several solo albums. One thing that Andy is really good, if you've never listened to his music before, he's really good about just making it sound like you would talk. Like you're just having a conversation. Like, oh, if he was just talking to me, I feel like he would say it this way, you know? But somehow he crafts it into like this beautiful artistry and the stories that he tells. In fact, I believe he co-wrote the song I was telling you about before with Jason Gray about "Wasn't I Worth Staying For?" But the songs, you know, it just feels like you're having a conversation. So, you know, clever lyrics are great, but don't be too clever. That's kind of one of the mechanical things about it. When you're thinking about a song, does the melody, does it match the other elements of the song? There's been a lot of— this week, you know, we're singing worship songs. There's a lot of good melody in there. But then authenticity. Is it the real story? Is this the real you that you're writing about? If not, why? What can I not put into this song because I don't want to be the real me? You know, I'm of the mind that Christian music is a little bit stunted sometimes because we don't sing about the really hard things. Sometimes we think it all has to be happy clappy or just certain things that everybody has, you know, kind of put out before. But when I was just telling you guys about that song that Jason Gray, "Worth Staying For," I mean, how many songs do we hear telling the story of like, the day my dad walked out and abandoned us, and the day that my marriage ended, and the day that, you know, just one thing after another. I was contemplating ending my life at one point. You know, we're going through this. How many Christian songs do we hear like that, you know, that really deal with that kind of honesty? There is hope that comes from it, but sometimes we're scared to put all that out there. Now, Is every worship song supposed to be that? No. But I think there's a place for that. You know, there's a place for those songs. You hear them, you're like, boy, I'm glad I heard that today. I thought I was the only one going through that. And if we aren't authentic, then sometimes we aren't able to help anybody else because we're not helping them be authentic in who they are. So we want to, if we're going to be present to oneself is what we're dealing with right now, we want to be very aware of our own inner world. Okay. What is your motive? And we're going to talk about your stuff today. Okay. It's not misspelled. I promise it says S-T-U-F. Okay. S-T-U-F. Do you know your stuff? All right. And you're all wondering, what does that mean? Well, a friend of mine who is a chaplain, he wrote this great book and he includes this in his book. And I just have found it immeasurably, immeasurable value to use my son's word. Do you know your stuff? And this is what that means. Stuff is this. Your sensations, thoughts, urges, feelings. Can you even distinguish the difference in those things? I'll give you an example of how disconnected we are from these things. If I was to see you walking along today, I'm going one way, you're going the other. I'm going to say, how you doing? What are you probably going to say?

Well, good.

Fine, good, well, okay, you know, and we go on. Is that necessarily true though? I mean, sometimes people say that when they're going through some real storms, you know, and they just, we didn't take time to stop and hear it. But if they were going to be authentic about it, expressions, thoughts, urges, and feelings, it might tell a completely different story. You know, you go to other cultures sometimes in other countries. I was in Africa several years ago. And it's interesting because you ask a person there, how you doing? Well, you get the whole story. Stop. That's why they're late everywhere they go, because they're always talking. They don't live by a clock, and they want to hear about your family. They want to hear about what you're going through, and they give you a chance to share, and you talk about it, and you go on. They're much more connected to things like this. In our society, we're rushing. We're going one thing to the next. Got to do this. Got to get to the next workshop. I hope I'm not running too late. But if we ever took time, it takes courage. You know, you guys showed some bravery today coming up and sharing your song. This takes some real courage to get honest with yourself sometimes and just be the person God made you to be. I want to go a little bit deeper in this. Okay. When we talk about sensations, if you can't see it on the screen, there's just a list of common sensations that we might have. Things like, you might use a word like shaky, trembly, fluttery. When you say those words, wobbly, you know what I mean? When you hear those things. When I'm talking about sensations, the brightness of the room, the light that's there. If I was to ask you what sensations you're having in this place, you might have to think about it. Are you present enough to realize the color of the carpet or the, the what's on the ceiling? Is it tile? Is it the, that spackle stuff or whatever they put on? Then you had to look. Oh, I've been sitting under here, didn't even notice it. Did I notice the turkeys on the wall that looked like like, I don't know, it looks like something that they would make in elementary school, but we're in a college classroom. So they're beautiful turkeys all around the room. Did you notice the turkeys? Why are the turkeys there? You know, what sensations does that give you? Are you relaxed? Are you released? Are you energetic? Are you excited today? You're feeling all these different things going on. That's what I mean by sensations. So just stop for a minute and ask yourself, what sensations am I, am I feeling today? You know, what, what am I tight. Yeah. You find that these things sometimes will manifest themselves in your body. All right. Sometimes you carry things. Now, I'm going to tell you this, and I'm being 100% true. I'm not making this up. It's going to sound like a wild story. But when I entered my chaplaincy training and I started being forced to confront some of these things we're talking about, I used to have migraines between 3 and 5 days every week. I got serious about figuring out what I was sensing, what I was feeling, what I was going through. Found out that I had some things going on I needed to deal with. I remember the day it unlocked finally. I have not had a migraine in a long time. They just almost completely left. And it's partially because we have these sensations, we don't know how to deal with them, or we don't even know they're there, and we will carry them around in us. They cause harm to us. Half the time, the people I see in the hospital, when they have a chance to just sit and tell you their story, sometimes even confess some dark parts of their life— they've been there for a long time, they've been really sick— the next day they go home. Maybe the Lord is on to something when we talk about confession. Maybe God doesn't need it as much as we need it, you know, when we talk about this release, because it does unlock something in your body too. Who knows how many illnesses and sicknesses we have because we haven't been able to just let some things go in our lives. Okay. I'm going to go to the next one. When we talk about thoughts, so I don't run out of time, thoughts are the tea of the stuff. Your ideas, attitudes, perceptions about things. They have creative energy that drives our behavior. So like, imagine it and you can do it, but you have to think of it first, right? You have to kind of, kind of get that in mind. Now your thoughts can go different places. I could say a word and two different people can have two different thoughts about the word. If I said the ocean, water, you know, let's go swimming. Somebody who loves the ocean, what are they going to do? What are they going to react to that? If I said, let's go swimming in the ocean, it's a beautiful, hot, sunny day. Let's pretend we're someplace tropical and beautiful. If you like the water, what are you going to say to that? Hot diggity dog. Hot diggity dog. I like that one. All right. Now, what if you can't swim and you're scared of the water? And I say, let's go to the beach and swim. What's going to be your reaction? Oh, maybe terror. Like, I don't know. So you see how that, like, one image can evoke different things in different people, and it can be the same thing that you're talking about. One person goes, yes, this is the greatest day ever. The other person goes, I'm going to die. You know, so it's interesting to think about our thoughts. Are you able to identify, like, the difference between thoughts and sensations. Usually we're up here in our head and we're thinking, and I ask somebody how they are, they go straight to their head and they can't tell you in their heart what they're really feeling. Sometimes, sometimes we live up here instead of in our whole self. So let's go a little bit further into this. When we get to urges, the urges that we have, the you of stuff, your urges, your feelings, could be an intense desire for something like ice cream. Anybody want ice cream today? Maybe not. Maybe hot cocoa today. I Hands. I see that hand. Amen. So, so our urges, right? They can— you can think of all kinds of urges you have. If you drank a lot of tea or coffee this morning, you're going to have a different kind of urge, but they are there. Okay, some can be healthy, some can be harmful depending on if you indulge them. Some that we indulge are very healthy for us. If you, if you have an urge to eat healthy food, good for you, go eat some healthy food. But if you eat too much even healthy food, food, it can be bad for you. A lot of the, a lot of the illnesses that we see come from people having too much or too little of food that's good or bad for them. Okay, so I want you to think about like, what urges am I having right now? Is, is my urge to— I want to get up and walk around, or I wish this session would end, I, I wish it would go on longer. I don't know, whatever the urge was, but I want to get up and walk around and move. I want to jog. I want to go outside and swim in that icy lake because I'm in the Polar Bear Club. I don't know, whatever it might be. But you're going to have these different urges that come up. And then F, finally, is feelings. I know that's not going to show up well on the screen, but if you can't see it, I'm going to try to describe it to you. There's a wheel, okay, up here on the screen. And on this wheel, right in the middle, we have these feelings. It's bad, fearful, angry, disgusted, sad, happy, surprised. These are kind of everybody's base feelings that we have, okay? If I If somebody asks you how you're doing and you said, I'm disgusted, you kind of know what that means, right? You kind of get that. If somebody said, oh, I'm feeling angry today. Oh, well, then you want to like dig in. Well, what are you feeling angry about? Well, then it branches out and you see different ways that this comes up. So anger might come from like we see let down, humiliated, bitter, mad, aggressive, frustrated. So sometimes when you get into the anger, by the way, none of these are anything that you weren't supposed to have. Anger can be your spiritual ally, okay? If you give over to it, it's not a great thing, but anger can sometimes be an indication of there's something going on that I need to deal with, or maybe I need to deal with somebody else. It doesn't mean it has to control you, but anger is, is there. It's, it's built into us, okay? So I don't— sometimes we feel like if I'm angry, oh, God's going to be mad at me. So wait, what does that mean? God's going to be angry? Oh, see, it's there. So we have anger, we have disgust. I'll tell you where I where I am a lot. There's the one fearful. Okay, I'm in grad school right now. I always feel like I'm gonna fail the class. Okay, so I live in this place of where fearful breaks his attitude is insecurity, and then inferior. You know who else often feels like that? Songwriters, singers, creative people. Almost every creative person I have ever met feels inferior They feel like they're not worthy. They feel like somebody else is better. They always feel like somebody's going to find out that I'm not the real thing. You know, we just talked about it today. Stephen Curtis said, I wish I could write like Chris Tomlin, you know, and different people that you could go on and on. The best writers that I have met always seem to have this feeling of insecurity. I don't know why it's there, but the thing is, I feel that way all the time. So in school, it actually helps me. I have a 4.0, not because I'm so smart, 'cause I'm smart. Okay, I promise you it's not 'cause I'm smart. It's because I work so hard because I'm fearful that I'm not going to be enough, that I would be inadequate for the test. And so I try extra hard before the class starts. I buy all the books and I read them in advance and I take notes and highlight. And then in class I go back and look at those things. It's not because I'm smart, it's because I'm scared. And the fact is that's not always healthy. It's not always a good thing to do that. I will over-function. And when I over-function, you know what that does to other people? Causes them to under-function because I do things for them and they otherwise— sometimes you find this in a co-writing situation. If you try to write with another person, you want to do everything in there. You don't give the other person a lot of space to do things because you over-function or you over-prepare. Sometimes when you go in, all of these things I have found to be so helpful for me. If I will sit down in my prayer time, and sometimes my prayer time is, this is what has been a big help to me. I start by just sitting and checking out what I'm feeling. And I, I literally, I bought this wheel, like, as a metal tin sign, and we have it hanging on the wall in our kitchen. I spend a lot of time in the morning and cooking in there. And I kind of check in with myself with, as I'm checking in with God. And there have been so many times I get so anxious. For me, it's school. It's that thing. It's like, I'm gonna fail. I'm spending all this money. And, you know, I've got a family. If I fail, I'm not going to get to keep this money that's been given to me by the school that I have to keep this pre-grade koya. And I just, if I'm not careful, the anxiety gets the best of me. Maybe some of you feel that. So for me, that's my— when I acknowledge it though, there is something about sitting with God and just saying, Lord, I can't hide it today. I'm not going to act like I'm not fearful. I am fear. I'm anxious, I'm nervous. If you were to go around this wheel, chances are you might see yourself on it right now and go, oh yeah, that's me. Feeling inferior, feeling fearful. Maybe you're feeling happy and accepted and respected. I hope everybody's there. But the thing is, two of these things can't exist at the same time. I can still feel inferior and also accepted and valued at the same time. It's weird. It's, it's strange how we do You can't be that. So when you're songwriting, maybe sometimes don't be afraid to just acknowledge you're at a place where you're having trouble writing right now. You know, you're anxious about it. Sometimes acknowledging it unlocks some new things. Have you ever thought, what if I wrote a song about my anxiety? You know, there's, I believe there's a hymn, All Your Anxiety. You know, somebody wrote that at one point. What if you said, I'm going to write about what I'm going through? I don't know what structure the song's gonna take yet, but I can start brainstorming about what I'm feeling. I'm feeling that, yeah, I'm anxious, I'm overwhelmed, I'm nervous, I'm frightened. I wonder if I could think of some adjectives to go along with that today. So first of all, it's the idea of becoming present to yourself, to your sensations, thoughts, urges, feelings, so that again, you can be present to God. And then you can be present to others and maybe then help others be present to the present, that the Holy Spirit, to God, be with you in those things. All right. So 3 questions that I want to ask real quick, and then we'll do some more songwriting type stuff here in a minute. But this is kind of important. This is kind of the crux of today. 3 questions and an affirmation, okay? When we talk about all those things, our stuff, that we just talked about, your sensations, your thoughts, urges, feelings. I ask this question, how does this experience of, I'm just going to put mine in, okay, insecurity. How does this experience of insecurity feel inside of you? If there is a feeling there, can you notice where and how you sense it in your body? Like sometimes I can tell, Oh, my stomach starts getting nervous and then knots, you know. Anybody ever have that sensation? Sometimes I think it's where my migraines were coming from. I was holding things in sometimes, and when I learned to release it, it helped a whole lot. Sometimes it's a pain in our back, you know, that, that we get, and it's like, oh, where'd this come from? So does this feeling want to say anything to you? Maybe God's speaking something to through this as you're getting it out. So there's an affirmation that I really like that says, "All shall be well." It's Julian of Norwich. "All shall be well. All manner of things shall all be well." I have spoken that to so many people over the years, and I speak it to myself every time. Sometimes I'm in a hospital room, sometimes I'm in a church, and I have to pray it and be reminded, "All shall be well," because he's fighting a battle. You know, we're fighting a battle he's already won, as the song we just said. That all is going to be well. All shall be well. All right, so one other thing, when you're writing songs, which better describes you? And this is not just for songwriting, this is for every part of life. Does it better describe you to say, I want people to see Christ in me, or do I want to see Christ in others? The answer to that's very important. Now, I was asked that question and I thought, whoa, I want people to see Jesus in me, right? And I was met with the answer when I was asked that question. I said, well, yes and no. You ever read Matthew 25? Sheep and the goats passage. It says, whatever you've done to the least of these, you've done it unto me. But maybe our goal was less about me, and maybe it's more about me seeing Jesus behind the eyes of that other person in front of me every day. What if your ministry and mission, what if the people you wrote songs for, It's because you see Jesus there. Does it change anything in your ministry perspective to think, "Hey, it's not about me. It's about every soul that I will meet today is a soul that Christ adores. Every living human document is a letter from the Lord. And in the sickness and suffering, we can find the face of God. So give me eyes to see the holy ground I'm on as I walk these halls." That's one of the songs I wrote about being a chaplain. Give us eyes to see the holy ground we're on as we walk. Now, for you, it's a different context, but it's the same thing. Wherever you go in your day, are you looking? One of my favorite Rich Mullins songs, "Everywhere I go, I'm looking." You know, it's a pretty simple line, but it's not always true, is it? Sometimes we go and we're not always looking. Maybe some of us, like our friend Sam here, can't see and he's using other senses. Everywhere you go, you're still looking. You're still looking and hearing in different ways. I think sometimes, in my experience, people that I've met along the way who don't have sight have so many other senses and other ways that see things so much better than I do. Sometimes, and I'm always amazed by that. I'm like, how did you know that? When I go through, it's powerful. So as we look to the other and we see Jesus, it's an important thing. So just a couple things, but we're going to kind of rush through this because I want to have a chance to share here today. But if you don't have a daily prayer discipline, I just want to recommend that to you as part of your songwriting routine. Maybe you came hoping for a lot of mechanics today, and I'm sorry if you wanted more of that, but I want to give you this today. I think one of the best things you can do is learn to listen. Sometimes songwriters are the worst listeners because we always want to share the next thing. It's like in the conversation where you're waiting to say the next thing, you know, you're not really listening to that person. What if you sat down with, "Speak, Lord, your servant is listening," and try not to have a preset expectation about what may arise out of that? You know, you may think, you know, like, "Man, I wish I would have written that song. It's so good." But yeah, guess what? God may want to say something something brilliant through you today. And it's not like that song at all. And somebody's going to hear that song one day and think, wow, I wish I wrote that song. Why? Because maybe that person got very present to God and just let God speak through them. Just experience to be patient and just pay attention to what God may be speaking to you through yourself— through your stuff, sorry. So do you have a spiritual community? I loved when you were talking about your community at church. You're trying to write songs together and, you know, you're, you're not quite there yet, but you're getting it and you're working it together and you have this spiritual community where I trust you're going to get it. Like, it's going to keep coming and you're going to keep trying and you're going to do that together. Having that community is so important and you bounce ideas off of each other. And that's where co-writing is so important. Honestly, co-writing is all about listening to the other person's song and thinking, how can we make that better? Don't have ownership over the song. Just be like, man, this song could be great. What if nobody got the credit and we made it as good as we can get it, and we'll worry about credit later, you know, in this community type thing. So getting back to it again, are you going to be a witness to people or a witness of people? Jesus says, "You will be my witnesses," Acts 1:8. I found out that the Greek is ambiguous on this. When it says witnesses, it can mean witnessing, sharing something with someone, but what witness really means is to be a witness to to something. You don't have anything to share until you've witnessed it, right? They don't go on the news and say, we have an eyewitness that's going to share. They weren't there, but tell us what you saw. You know, well, there was a fire 3 miles away. I didn't see it, but I heard it was bad. Okay, thank you. You know, that's not an eyewitness. That's somebody that, that heard something. Being a witness is first being witness to it, right? We've, we've put the cart before the horse. We want to go out and start proclaiming before we Sometimes we want to share that song before we listen or let somebody else listen to it as well, you know. But it was a brave thing to do and I applaud it. But it's so important that we listen and be present. So these few things: be you. False spirituality serves no one. And there are countless ways. Prayer, reverence, listening, spaciousness, humor, art, music, guidance. These are all different ways that we can be ourselves. Okay. And if, if, we open ourselves to them, the possibility is endless of what God can do. All right. That's a long quote. I'm not going to share it right now at this moment. But if you can remember those things about being present to self, and I want to end on this slide today. I'm not done with the presentation because we're going to talk a little bit and I'm going to share a song. Is it okay if I share one of my songs with you guys today? This is what I mean when you have this picture again, that's on the screen, toad and frog just sitting together. Together, okay? So Toad sat and did nothing, and Frog sat with him. When God called me into chaplaincy, I didn't want to do it. Didn't want to be there. I didn't know why I was doing this. I didn't know why I had to drive to Kettering every day, which was an hour trip each way. I wasn't getting paid. I had to have it, didn't want to do it. But then when God started working through I found myself sitting in hospital rooms with people who didn't have anybody else with them sometimes. And sometimes I would just sit with them while they were dying and I would just start playing a song, you know. And then I would write down notes afterwards of what their story was. There is an issue where I can't literally tell somebody's story, so I don't do that. That would violate medical ethics for me to do that, but I can still tell the story, you know, without telling you about this person and what they're from. So one night I was sitting in our ICU at Kettering in Dayton at the hospital, and I got a call. My pager went off, and whenever you have a shift when you're a resident as a chaplain, you get 18-hour shifts at night, and then you get 24-hour shifts where you're the only one there all weekend and you can't leave the hospital. You have to stay the whole time. So you go to a sleep area at some point. I was in the sleep area and I got the call and they said, "This person has got no family and got no friends that we're aware of. We can't find him. He's on a vent and I don't think he's going to be here long. Would you mind just coming and sit with him, maybe just praying with him in these moments?" I asked, I said, "Is it okay if I bring my guitar and just sit by him and just sing to him?" They said, "Oh, please." So we ended up just singing songs together. The nurses came in actually, and we just really didn't know this guy, but we prayed together and we said, "God, could you just speak to this man? We don't know who he is or where he's from. We've got a name, but we don't know if he has a family, and he's been fighting hard, and he's not gonna make it. God, would you just wrap your arms of love around him? God, would you just speak to him how loved he is? Because I don't even know if he can hear us right now. But then we just started singing, and we just sang him off to heaven. I'm convinced of that. As we finished the song, it just kind of faded, and we were singing songs like Give Me Jesus and When I Come to Die, and you know all these different things. Songs about the love of God and coming to the Lord and "You are my salvation," just different songs that went on. So all that is to say, coming out of that experience and several others like it, I started just writing hospital songs. I went from a place of where I almost exclusively wrote worship music to, okay, I've got a new context now. My context isn't just standing on the platform every Sunday saying, and I've got some stories to share, okay? So this is one of the songs, just as an example. If you open yourself up a little bit to where God may be speaking, he might have you in a completely different context than you ever imagined as you go on this journey. So this is one called Keep Watch, Dear Lord, okay?

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work or watch or O weep this night and give your angels charge over those who are saving others' lives. Let them be as Christ to the dying ones who draw their final breath. Let their hands soothe the suffering and bring the weary rest. Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work or watch or who weep this night.

Anybody recognize some of those words from the Compline Prayer that just says that? Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work or watch or weep this night. So I came to the prayer book and it came out.

So keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work or watch or weep this day. Your healing hands bring solace near to grieving ones whose lives have changed. With pure compassion, give them strength to lift the heavy load. Willing minds and open hearts, welcome every soul. So keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work or watch or weep this day. Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work or watch or weep in life. May they find you in the broken hearts, —those for whom you gave your life. Let your compassion give the strength to lift the head low.

Oh, I messed up the second verse and the third. Anyway, that's another thing. Be careful because you forget the words you write sometimes.

With willing minds and open hearts to welcome every soul. So keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work Work or watch or weep this day. Anyway, that's the gist of it.

Oh, thank you. Oh, thank you for being gracious on my mess up. I do that a lot. I'm at the age where I forget things often. But the idea though is I never thought I was going to be in a hospital context, even thinking about writing songs. Part of songwriting is being open to the journey that God is could be, okay? And, and not, as people say, shoulding on yourself. Don't say that you should be this and you should be that. I want you to be the person God made you to be, okay? So, so try not to be the person who shoulds on yourself, all right? Be the person who God wants you to be in the midst. If you want to sit down with a guitar and write songs, that's great, but I beg you, write songs that are worthy of who God made you to be. Imagine if your goal as a songwriter was not to be the next Shane and Shane or whoever, you know, fill in the blank. But what if your goal was, what if I really tried? I'm never going to achieve this fully. But what if I tried to write songs that were worthy of being sung when people are dying? Like, have you ever thought of that before? Like, that's a really lofty goal when you think about that. I've spent so many times in rooms with people who were passing away. Sometimes they were there for several days. The family knew they were passing away. You know, sometimes the person knew it just was inevitable. It was coming. And when I ask those people, you want to sing something? And they start singing songs. And you know what? They don't pick Tutti Frutti or Rudy or something like that that they want to sing. You know, they want to sing like How Great Thou Art. They want to sing And Can It Be. They want to, you know, songs from their childhood. When we all get to heaven, you know, There's songs that really are meaningful. And when we talked about before, places that MVP, where a person finds meaning, what they value, their connection, their purpose, their transcendence, you're going to find those things along the way. What if when you wrote songs, you just opened yourself to God and said, Lord, what does the church need today? What does that person in my context need? It could be that your song is never heard outside of your context. It's okay. Okay. It might be that your church only hears your song and that's okay. I mean, we'd all love to have our songs played all over the world, but it just doesn't always happen, does it? You know, I mean, you can put it on Spotify. It doesn't mean people are going to listen. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't. But if you write from a place of this, learning to be especially with God, to just sit and do nothing with God for a while, that can open you up to some amazing things. Some of those songwriter techniques that you'll get in any songwriting thing you go to, You can go online and find all those. You don't always find this though. This for me was key whenever I was trying to figure out how to write salt. All right. All right. Any, any discussion, anything anybody wants to add? We're at like 10:45 and we're at the end. I didn't realize I was going to talk slowly. Yes, sir. I was just curious how you contrasted the feelings of like the anxiety and fearfulness with that, because that looks like more opposite. Of fear and anxiety? Sometimes it comes from sitting in those places and just acknowledging the anxiety for me. Like, I really, there have been moments, I mean, very recently, like in the last 2 weeks, I'll sit in my kitchen. I'm a nervous wreck. I can feel it in my body. The shaky is a good name for it. And I'll sit down and I'll sit with those feelings in quiet. And I'll say, where am I on this chart today? And then I'll just start giving it to God. And I'll say, I mean, it doesn't make it go away completely. I don't want to give you the impression that you ever stop having these things. To have anxiety is to be alive. Sometimes it's good anxiety, sometimes it's bad. It's when it gets out of control. So for me, it's sitting with God and acknowledging, here's where I am today. Somehow in the acknowledging of it and releasing it to God and giving it to him, it doesn't mean it goes away completely, but it sure helps. It's been amazing the way that It helped me release some of those things. Sometimes when I sit in quiet, I realize I need to go talk to somebody and not an easy conversation. I've had something I've been holding against somebody or something I know they're holding it against me. What's the Bible say? Leave your gift at the altar, get up and go talk to them. You know, sometimes it means that, but sometimes it just means sitting with other people too. You know, we all probably have grieving people in our life. That don't need to hear another word about, "Well, praise God, they're with Jesus now, that loved one you lost." What they really need is just you to sit with them and go, "Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm hurting with you." Sorry if that was a rambling answer, but for me, that's how I do it. I just have to sit with it, acknowledge it, release it to God, and let Him have it, walk with it that way.

Voices in My Head. Music on the intro and outro of this show is from my single, "As I Walk These Halls," which can be streamed on any streaming platform, including Spotify. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com where you can find out more about me, get my music on vinyl and CD, schedule me for a concert, a speaking engagement, a podcast, or even a book signing in your neighborhood.

Also, it would mean a great deal to me if you could write a review of this podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts.

The more positive reviews we receive, the more visible this podcast will be. And now the benediction: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit You may abound in hope.