Songwriting Retreat: Beginning

I'm re-posting these blogs about our recent Songwriting Retreat from Abbye Pates' blog (http://www.thewaywewander.blogspot.com) She is a great songwriter and friend. I'm glad she kept a little log of our time together! Hope you enjoy these next 4-5 posts. - Matthew

What is a Songwriter's Retreat? Who put this together for you? Where are you going? And what are you doing again? (And why do you need a whole week to... write?)

These were some great questions we received in the weeks leading up to our getaway to the tippy-toes of the Appalachian Mountains. These questions led us into some great conversations about why we write songs, why it's good to write together and especially how this week would be much more than just writing. We would write, sing, record, and above all that, pray, listen, and worship together. We decided to stop settling for, "Wouldn't it be so great if we holed ourselves up in a cabin for a week and wrote songs?"

This time, we did it.

And over the next several days, you can step back into last week with us and catch a glimpse of what it was all about, living in the Bear Cub Cabin, cooking meals, singing songs, reading Scripture, and laughing at Matthew's ridiculous clapping routines.

We hope you'll share the journey with us!

Family Worship Songwriting Retreat

Today I'm driving with Katie Heckel and Matt King up to a little cabin in North Mississippi to spend a week eating, praying, singing, writing, and recording as a little family. Abbye Pates will be there as well and Eric Papp. Sadly, Brian Mulder from Michigan and our friend Aislinn from Vermont are snowed in and too sick to make it this week! (Insert incredibly sad face)

Still, it will be a great time to retreat and create. I'm boxing up a little recording studio setup and hauling it to the cabin for the next few days. It will be exciting to write and record a worship album this week. I have no idea what will come of our time together! We're hoping for lots of collaborative creative coolness.

Should be fun, I better get to packing since I've waiting till now to get started! Hope to have a little worship CD available sometime later this Spring though. Pray that this week will be fruitful as we get together and seek Jesus and together work to 'tell the story and tell it well' in song.

Advent

I'm in North Carolina at the moment visiting my girlfriend. I'm hoping we can sneak out of a class requirement to go see Andrew Peterson's Behold the Lamb of God in Durham tonight! If you are not aware of Peterson's Christmas storytelling album please do yourself a favor and buy it immediately and listen to it a few thousand times this Christmas season.
(www.andrew-peterson.com)

Tis Advent time, which is really the Christian New Year season. I've been thinking alot this past half a year that so many of the things we in the Church take as metaphor, symbol, or illustration aren't metaphor, symbol, or illustration at all. Advent is certainly not a sweet symbolic idea about how we all get some vague new beginning. It is certainly not a moral metaphorical nicety about how everybody is just waiting for a new love, an inocuous hope.

No. No, it's a fact. It's a visit. It's a living, blood and bone, breath and sweat, life and death thing. And it's definitely not some self-willed discovery of internal human strength - it is the hope of a Saviour, a King, and a Kingdom from Heaven itself.

Jesus is not a metaphor, not a symbolic construct, not a sermon illustration.

And Behold He is coming.