Faith and Doubt
Tonight at 8pm EDT, and again on Mar 28th & 31st
Hello and a very happy Saint Patrick’s Day!
I hope you have all mostly avoided coffee-cup-sized hail and are in good spirits with the pending arrival of Springtime.
I’m delighted this month to introduce (by way of tonight’s show) musician and producer extraordinaire Andrew Hughes, who has graciously offered his time and talents to help bring new episodes of Acoustic Blend into the world. I know Andrew through the Songwriters Association of Mid-North Indiana (SAMI), and I’m so grateful to SAMI and REC Room Recording for their support.
As an aside, the submission deadline for SAMI’s Shirley Martin Scholarship for Young Songwriters is fast approaching! If you know a young songwriter ages 14-19 please encourage them to apply.
This Month on Acoustic Blend 🍀
It’s easy these days for life to move at what feels like a million miles an hour, and when that happens I lose touch with the hidden fears and longings that are secretly pulling the strings. These words from Jess Ray have arrested me more than once over the past month:
Why are you so afraid to fail
What are you so afraid you’ll lose
If all of the love that you’ve ever dreamed of
Already belongs to you?
This playlist on faith and doubt feels like what I need this time of year. Many of the songs come from a Christian perspective, and even if that’s not your cup of tea I hope that the underlying message of belief in the face of uncertainty is uplifting.
One of my favorite moments is Brooke Poindexter’s “Patient Trust,” where she puts the encouraging words of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to music. It’s a reminder I pretty much always need:
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.
Acoustic Blend airs Saturday and Tuesday evenings at 8pm EST on WBAA (105.9 FM and AM 920) and streaming online at wbaa.org. You can catch this episode on Mar 17th, 28th, and 31st.
What’s a song that reminds you to be grateful?✨
I wrote last month about how we need things that we can give our attention to slowly. One of the things that helps me slow down is gratitude. So, what are you grateful for? And I would love to hear if there’s a song that takes you there!
It may be too good to be understood, but it’s not too good to be true.
- from Jess Ray’s song “Too Good”
Playlist: Faith & Doubt 📻
01. Jess Ray - “What If”
02. Carrie Newcomer - “You Can Do This Hard Thing”
03. Seth Carpenter - “Page By Page”
04. Jess Ray - “Too Good”
05. Alexander Moss - “In the Wilderness of Sin”
06. Benjamin William Hastings - “Faith Is”
07. Andy Gullahorn - “Any Less True”
08. Zach Winters - “Seek & Find”
09. Luke Spehar - “Be still”
10. Wilder Adkins - “Leave It There”
11. Joshua Leventhal - “T H E M E A N T I M E”
12. Josh Garrels - “Fear Thou Not”
13. Brooke Poindexter - “Patient Trust”
14. Josh Garrels - “Canyon Variation”
15. Taylor Leonhardt - “Poetry”
Dynamic always-current playlists: Spotify | YouTube
You can catch Acoustic Blend with Barrett Myers on the second Saturday of each month (and the following Tuesday) at 8pm on WBAA. Listen online at wbaa.org or over the airwaves (105.9 FM and AM 920). My hope is that you’d find in the music a space for reflection and the peace that comes from a word spoken (or sung) at just the right moment. From time to time I’ll also share some of my original compositions and the work of other local artists. Take a load off and settle in, and thanks for your support of this creative effort by sharing and subscribing.