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Gospel Insider Made for Eternity: Steven Curtis Chapman's New Album Reveals Tragedy and Healing
Gospel Insider Made for Eternity: Steven Curtis Chapman's New Album Reveals Tragedy and Healing
Made for Eternity: Steven Curtis Chapman's New Album Reveals Tragedy and Healing
By Deborah Evans Price, senior music editor, GospelMusicChannel.com
When Steven Curtis Chapman’s five-year-old daughter Maria Sue died in a tragic accident on May 21, 2008, many wondered – including Steven himself – if he’d ever write another song or even sing again. In the aftermath of such devastation, how does a creative soul continue on? For Steven, music became, and continues to be, a part of the process of grieving and eventually, healing. He chronicles it all from heartbreak to hope and every emotion in between on Beauty Will Rise, a new album due November 3 on Sparrow Records.
In a brief instant, the Chapman family’s lives changed forever when Steven and Mary Beth’s 17-year-old son Will Franklin struck little Maria in the driveway of the family’s home. Family, friends and the Nashville music community rallied around the Chapmans in the days and months that followed, and Steven describes the aftermath as an attempt to come to terms with a “new normal.”
“The last thing I wanted to do was turn any of this into a song,” Chapman tells GospelMusicChannel.com. “Then you realize ‘God, this is what has happened to us and now, what would you have me to do with it?’ Slowly songs began to just come out.”
Needless to say, Steven went through a barrage of emotions after the accident. “That first month obviously I was just in shock,” he says, adding that he also felt “that peace that surpasses understanding…and that comfort. We could not have survived if God hadn’t truly given us something that was supernatural. [Within a couple of months] the haze began to subside a little bit and I came to the reality of the pain and the longing – the incredible longing for heaven.”
During every step of his life and career, Steven has been able to channel his personal experiences into honest, vulnerable songs, and after losing Maria, he began writing as a way to work through the grief.
“Songs began to just come out as ways for me to try to process what I was thinking and feeling and experiencing, and what my family and I were walking through,” he says. “The first song was ‘Just Have to Wait’ and I think the next was ‘Questions.’ These songs were literally praying and wrestling with God and [asking] ‘what am I going to do with this? God, what do I really believe now? How are my family and I going to walk through the rest of life with these holes in our hearts? What is that going to look like?’”
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Steven Curtis Chapman's album Beauty Will Rise explores the aftermath of living after the loss of a child. His honesty is evident on songs like “Questions” where Steven sings: Who are You, God?/’Cause You are turning out to be so much different than I imagined/And where are You, God?/’Cause I am finding life to be so much harder than I had planned.
Steven admits this was a hard song for him to write. Does your perception of God change depending on circumstances in your life?
I think as children we just think of God as good. As we get older we realize that He is not just good but soverign. God has taken me through some struggles that have caused me to question who He really is. After the fear parts I realize that God was only leading me to the person He wanted me to become. A person free from strongholds and free to walk hand in hand with him. We may not understand our struggles but I always have to go back to knowing that He is in complete control. Just as Jeremiah 29:11 says, "For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future."
I don't know if it's perception as it is questions. The type of questions you have during great periods of grief or fear may never have come to you before. I had the honor of hearing Steven this past weekend at Women of Faith in Greensboro, NC, and hope that one day in my own grief I will be able to achieve the same level of faith that he shared with over 11,000 women.
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