Planting Trees (Intro)

[Spoken]
Thank you guys. Well my wife, Jamie, is, uh, is this really awesome lady. We uh, we used to travel together for years and years. Um, she uh, she never really wanted to be a singer, but she could- she could always sing, she was always very musical. In fact, we met because uh, because when I first went to college I went to this little Bible college in Florida called Florida Christian Collеge, and uh, and my freshmen yеar I did what all incoming freshmen musicians do, and that is, we started the greatest Christian rock band of all time. And uh, and we needed a keyboard player, and this was like the first month or so of school. And I remember thinking to myself, "well, there's this really pretty girl who plays piano in chapel, uh, I will volunteer to ask her to be in our band." And so I mustered the guts and I went and met the pretty girl and said "hey, we're starting the greatest Christian rock band of all time, would you like to play piano in our band?" and she said yes, but she uh, she warned me that she didn't play by ear, she only read music. And I was like "oh, it'll be fine, I'll teach you the songs, it won't be a big deal." So for like weeks, we would meet in the practice room after class and I would sit there and start to teach her our songs. And uh, and it ended up, um, being kind of a frustrating process, because after two or three weeks of working on these songs every day after class, she still couldn't play them correctly, and I started thinking that maybe um, looks weren't everything. And uh, and so uh, I started rethinking my whole game plan. But anyway, as things happened, we ended up getting married about a year later in the middle of my sophomore year and we've been married for 15 years now. And uh, and just a few years ago I was telling that story to somebody and Jamie was like "oh, I never told you? I knew how to play the songs all along, I just was pretending that I didn't so that we could go to the practice room together." All this time I thought I was in control! I was not. And so uh, anyway so whenever I graduated college and we moved to Nashville and I decided that this was gonna be this uh, career, uh, she was a schoolteacher, and we decided that we'd rather be together and be poor than for her to keep her job and have to stay home while I traveled. And so she kind of, by default, became the background singer of the band. Which is funny because she doesn't really like music all that much. Uh, and that makes her sound like a cranky person, she's not, she's just not like a music lover. She likes to listen to the radio and kind of like bouncy fun songs, but like, she's- as far as I know, she has never read like the lyrics to a song or like, pored over, like, who played on what, you know, she doesn't love music like that. So as a matter of fact she's only bought one CD in her whole life, and it was the Titanic soundtrack. And that wasn't even because of the music, it was because of, um, Leonardo DiCaprio. And so uh, anyway, hilarious. And the further irony of her kind of like, you know, the way she sees music, is that she is a piano teacher. So, I think that's funny. And she- so she uh, she doesn't often these days because we homeschool our kids, she works really hard, and uh, she doesn't often get to go with me on trips anymore. But last year I ended up going to this retreat and we worked it out so that she could come for the weekend, that was so nice to have her with me and singing with me and stuff again. But it was this retreat full of these like, heady people you know, and there was this famous author speaker there, and we'd break away into our breakaway groups and discuss the guy's topic, you know, and there were five, six of us sitting around talking. And we were discussing, for some reason this particular day, we were talking about what we're doing to push back the Fall. Like, what are you doing in a practical way to shed light in the darkness and to build the Kingdom? And uh, and you know, we're with these people who are authors, you know, and it gets to them and they say "oh, well I'm writing a book on the exegetical thesis of I-don't-even-know-how-to-say-that, all right." And uh, and then they would get to like the pastor there and he would say "oh, well I'm preaching, and that's all good and right." And then it would get to me and I knew my answer pretty clearly because for years I've felt like if God made me good at writing songs or stories or whatever then it was to tell the Truth in the most beautiful way that I can, and uh, that was my answer. But the whole time I was wondering what's Jamie gonna say? Because she's the first person to tell you she's not like, an artsy-fartsy person. I said that, on the recording. Just so you know. Whoops! She's an artsy-tootsy person. Awesome. She's an artsy-BEEP person. So uh, anyway, I was so curious to see what she would say. And it got to Jamie and she said "I'm shedding light in the darkness by raising these three children in the Lord." And it was a great answer. It was like, exactly the answer our little group needed because in that one sentence, she kind of you know brought low all of us and our fancy books and sermons, you know. Because if there's any- it's hard for me to imagine a more concentrated, specific version of what it means to shed light in the darkness by pouring the love of Christ into another human being than what Jamie does for our children or what a mother in a household does to her children. Anyway, I was thinking about how nice it is that as a songwriter I get occasional e-mails from people you know who say "I was driving through Punxsutawney and your song came on and it was a blessing" and it's always nice to get e-mails like that. But then I thought how unfair it is that moms don't often get e-mails from people who are driving through Punxsutawney and their motherhood was a blessing to them as they drove or whatever. And so I wanted to write a song that would be my e-mail to Jamie to thank her for the great work she's doing in the Kingdom. And for that matter, for anybody out there who's interested in doing work that really matters. Lasting work. And so uh, this is a song called Planting Trees.