May 30, 2024 • 30 mins
This is such an important Podcast! In this episode, we have a special guest who has profoundly influenced our lives—Ray Hughes. Known as a prophetic music historian, poet, and artist, Ray has been a guiding voice for us, offering wisdom and revelation to explore God through the arts.
Join us as we uncover the mysteries of sound, the song of the land, the importance of creativity, and the need to restore wonder in our lives.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:07):
Hey everybody, welcome to the Song Lab Podcast. Today, I've got a special treat for you.
Someone who's near and dear to Meredith and I. Unfortunately,
my wife is not with us today, so I have someone just as cute.
The indomitable, the legendary, the one and only Ray Hughes.
And for those of you who don't know who Ray Hughes is, he's someone who's been
(00:28):
just a tremendous influence in my wife and I's life.
I mean, early days, upper room, and we didn't know what we were doing.
And we were looking for language to try to figure out this thing around worship.
And, man, Ray just gave us permission to go after God and not to,
like, I'm already getting emotional talking about it because it was the voice
of a father that was like, hey, you don't have to have it all perfect.
(00:50):
Try this or just try that. And he gave us permission to experiment with God
and get out of the box a little bit.
And so Ray was just a very influential person in our lives. I've he's a he has
a he's a music historian.
He is got some kind of doctorate in there somewhere. He's a prophetic music historian.
He's a poet. He makes these beautiful pieces of art, these pens.
(01:15):
The way I like to describe Ray is this. I said, if you were to mix Jeff Foxworthy
with a quantum physicist, fill him with the Holy Spirit and give him a guitar, you got Ray Hughes.
Welcome, Ray. Ray, that's almost, I've had one other introduction that's kind of like that.
They call me a cross between Albert Einstein and Gomer Powell.
(01:38):
I think I'm probably a whole lot more Gomer than I am Einstein, though.
You know, my journey has been a bike of grace.
And, you know, there really was a grace thing that happened to me when I got
saved. And I didn't even realize it, but it goes way back to all these little
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moments in my life that were just so much the hand of God.
And I didn't even know it when they were going on, you know.
But really, it's been a...
Somewhere along the line, I discovered very quickly that my job was to marry
truth and beauty and awaken wonder again.
(02:21):
Yeah. And what I believe is going on today is there's not enough wonder in the world.
You know, no one even wonders who God is anymore.
We've got so many pacifiers that have robbed us from so many of the beautiful
things that God set in motion for us.
But anyway, I didn't mean to jump off on all of that. I just had a—with the
(02:45):
question you asked just before we went live was about my journey,
and that's compelled me to go to a place very quickly that I didn't plan to.
Yeah. But I've got an old pair of binoculars sitting over there on my shelf.
And when I was four years old, my dad, he was a well digger.
(03:08):
We were up in the mountains of West Virginia, and I was a four-year-old little boy.
And he reached in the truck and got those binoculars out, and he handed them to me.
And he says, we were standing on this mountain looking down in this holler there
on top of a helicopter over these gas wells.
And he handed me these old binoculars, and he said, here, look through this.
(03:31):
Here, take this. Take this.
It'll make you see far away. And I still have them.
And that was high tech for us pair of binoculars.
Yeah. But also I realized that
a gift came to my life from my father that enabled me to see far away.
If I would pay attention, if I would be aware.
(03:53):
And he instills some beautiful sensitivities and sensibilities in my life.
I think they came through my blood. my blood and
i was always one that just kind of
majored in paying attention and when something
would touch my life in such a way that i would feel even till this day something
comes alive and quickens my spirit might be a thought it might be a word it
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might be a song it might be a sound it might be um an ocean view or the sound
of waves the crickets in the night whatever whatever,
just the sounds always alert something in me.
And I remember being repulsed by people when I was a little boy when people
(04:38):
would say, oh, that's just your imagination.
And we do that today. Why do we tell our kids, oh, it's just your imagination,
as if imagination is something that's wrong.
Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, you don't want one of those in your life.
Shut that thing off yeah shut that down
(04:58):
i think the lord wants to raise up holy
spirit imaginators totally that are that are full of wonder that are that are
compelled to believe that god wants to speak to them in every way that we'll
listen and all of creation is revealing him if we just listen if we just look
we'll just pay attention you know i think we have a generation that does that
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does use their imagination.
They just use it in a negative way and they get bound in anxiety and fear.
They're using their imagination to project,
You know, a future scenario, and it's causing all this anxiety.
And I talk about what happens if you flip that, you know? Yeah.
Instead of like being validated. It's kind of like saying, well,
do you know how to meditate?
Well, have you ever done meditation? Do you know how to worry?
(05:42):
It's the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. Same thing. It totally is. Just in the wrong kingdom. Yeah.
So what, tell me this. What, so I love that. I love the, obviously,
the prophetic DNA was laid in there, being able to see far off and not just
look here, restoring beauty and wonder. I love all that.
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And as it relates to music, how did you, what made you do such a deep dive into
music and studying music history and wanting to know about all of that?
Well, I think what did it for me was realizing how deeply I was impacted by music.
And again, it might be that thing that I was born with, that sensitivity to
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sound and awareness of my surroundings and those kind of things.
But, you know, I can't remember a time when music didn't awaken something in me. And I dare say.
Everybody has that. Just some people give it a different priority or different place in their life.
Yeah. Because music is a force that God put in the earth.
(06:48):
Not only, let's imagine taking all the frequencies in the sound spectrum and
then bringing them down to a controllable or movable.
I hate to use the word manipulate, but you can manipulate those tones and frequencies
and create melody and rise and fall. And way back in the early days,
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I mean, they played the music of the land.
The sound of the land was important to a people in an agrarian or even a pre-agrarian culture.
Well, you know, for example, to play the song of the land, music is universal.
We always hear that musical is the universal language. Una is one, una, verse, song.
(07:34):
Song so music is universal sound and
song is also geographical but more than
that when you start walking into it then when you get to by
the time you get to melody that's topographical and so many of the old celts
or the first nations people and some of them still do they value land and value
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creation and creator enough that they want to play the song the sound of that
so they'd look at the mountain range,
and they would play that mountain range that they're looking at as if it were written, scored music.
Da-da-da-da-da-da-da. You're playing the melody of the land.
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Also, even to this day, it's very well known in the First Nations culture that
the young brave, when he was falling in love with the maiden down by the water,
the brave would would hide every morning waiting for her to come to the river
to get water, and in his hiddenness he would play the sound and the song of the river.
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And if you look at the edge where the water laps against the shore,
he would use that to determine the notation.
He would play that. And if she experienced the emotion, the passion,
the beauty, the power of his song, she would call him out.
And that's the way they would fall in love, to the sound of the land that they
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both carried in their spirit and their heart and their DNAs.
You know, it's a beautiful picture of overlooked.
You know, we're so bombarded by surface chatter and noise and next.
We're so bombarded now by next that we never slow down enough to look back at
the beauty of these things.
And you don't make music. Music is something that occurs.
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And when music occurs, there are those that have the sensitivities and sensibilities to be alert to it,
capture it like the brave did down there by the water or like the old Celt who
would be walking across the land that he considered to be so beautiful.
And there's an old bird, you know, lands on the limb, and he stops and honors
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the song of the bird because they believe that the bird carried the sound of
heaven. That's why God gave them the ability to fly.
And so if he's carrying the sound of heaven, I'll honor that sound coming from
creation that's revealing the nature of God.
They also believe that every color and tone and texture in heaven could be found
(10:11):
somewhere on a bird's wing.
And on the feathers so it was a he
was carrying that so it would stop honor the
song and then many times they would cut the fork
out of the limb where he was sitting and they would make a harp or
a small harp called a tympan and now they
would be able to carry the sound of heaven and they would
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be able to touch that sound see so there's
there's so many of these wondrous and deep and
beautiful things that just got overran by with progress and and next and i you
know i think i got some of that your question is where did i start i think i
got it from the from an understanding that i didn't have is my father was a well digger.
(10:59):
He was a well digger? Yeah, he was a well digger. And I remember when I was
a child looking over into an old well that my father dug.
And I return to this all the time.
Michael, you know, anytime I become a stranger in my own life,
I find myself compelled to look into that well again.
What I did is I looked down into a well and I saw the sky.
(11:23):
And I've sort of been looking for heaven and old wells ever since.
Yeah. And I didn't know it. Or I remember laying my head on the side of that
well and listening to the world's oldest music.
And little did I know that those kind of thought processes as a child would
shape the journey that I would take.
So when I came into the kingdom out of darkness and poverty and all kinds of
(11:46):
dysfunction and abuse and all kinds of things were in our bloodline.
But when I came into the kingdom, those things made their way over time,
made their way back into my life in a beautiful, redemptive way.
You know, thankfully, the dark stuff had to start submitting or yielding to
(12:08):
the beauty of who God became in my life.
And so now I look for that beauty every chance I get.
And everything to me everything's a story and it tells me who he is,
Yeah. And then it's like, how do you play that story? You know,
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play that story back to him.
I love that imagery of that you're still doing what your father did.
You know, you're digging old wells, you know.
And I think what you've been able to do in our lives is looking back as you've
dug these wells of history and music and it's brought such life to us,
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you know, and gave us inspiration to keep digging.
And the weird thing for me is I'm not, I have no musical bone in my body, right?
I don't play an instrument. I don't sing. I can't hit a note.
But I'm like, I know the power of music and how it's shaped and influenced my life.
And even now, my gift set really functions a lot with music and sound.
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And because I think I listen a lot as well. I'm listening, you know,
for those divine inspiration moments constantly. Constantly.
I also listen with my eyes a lot, with how I see.
I'm looking for God constantly in art and music and film and people and in the nature of my backyard.
I stare at these windows all day and just look outside. I'm like,
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God, thank you for where I live.
The beauty of what you've created around me, I didn't get overwhelmed by it, just talking about it.
And I love that music, I think helps restore that wonder again.
It really opens the eyes of of our hearts to see in a different way.
And what's crazy about it is how it seems like it can be such a beeline,
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so to speak, into another realm, into the realm of God.
When we get stuck in these like the mundane of having to clean the house and
cook and the repetitive things where there can be beauty in that.
Obviously, there's Brother Lawrence who can find good in washing dishes.
I haven't found him there just yet.
(14:15):
But there's something about music and song that, man, it takes you to places
that I can't get to on my own.
Yeah. Well, you know, when music touches you emotionally, mentally...
Spiritually, even on a cellular level, even our nervous systems,
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everything that is us, all of our senses.
And we know we have five senses. Well, no, we don't. Aristotle said we had five
senses. We don't have five senses.
Some rattlehead years ago came up with the idea and put that in motion,
and we believe it for hundreds of years now.
But they've acknowledged now and recognized at least 21 senses.
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Senses and every one of those sensory systems we
have can alert to music even down to us on a cellular level our our brains and
our bodies we respond to music we're musical beings we think that this world
is supposed to be understood therefore logical this world's not logical,
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there's no logic you know this world is musical put this little seed in the
ground and then it's going to become this massive thing, this little thing. It's not logical.
There's nothing logical about that. Yeah. And so we're now trapped in that deal
where, since it's logical, we need facts.
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You know, Jesus was not moved by facts. Jesus could care less about facts.
Imagine being those theologians and Sadducees and Pharisees and all those people
in his his day, walk up and challenge Jesus on his facts and on his history.
You know, our father on a certain mountain on this day who did such,
he didn't care about the facts and he wouldn't stand around and argue with them
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either. You know what he did?
He would just, they wouldn't tell a story. He would just say,
well, consider the lily and walk
off or consider the Raven. And then he'd just check out and walk away.
Consider that. You know what's crazy about this is I've been thinking about
this is, is how many parables he told, right? He was in this story mode,
and I started thinking about how many parables I've heard in church.
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And I don't think I've heard a parable in church before, outside of someone
trying to explain Jesus' parable.
I've never had someone teach their own parables. Let's bring logic to this.
So let's bring logic. Let's understand it. Yeah. And if we can grasp it and
understand it, then we get to believe it. And, you know, that chain of events
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starts happening in our lives, and pretty soon we wonder where the wonder went.
Jesus would say, consider the lily. Well, that guy, three days later,
he walks up on a lily, and he thinks, you know, I wonder what he was talking
about. There's a—and then—,
Then God would begin to reveal himself through creation.
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Or like you say, Jesus would just go off on some story. It wasn't even facts.
If it had been facts, he'd have told the guy his name. But a certain man on
a certain day in a certain place. You know, it's a story.
He was accessing his own sacred tuition and listening to the desires of the
Father, and he added to his creative process.
And as he was telling the story, heaven was singing and awakening the spirit
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of those that would hear the truth.
But they may have to go look at a star to get that or look at a river or a grain of sand.
Yeah. You know, you were talking about music affecting us on a cellular level.
I've heard and you were talking about the birds.
I've heard you talk about the purpose of the songbird in the morning. Could you explain that?
(17:56):
Yeah, well, you know, that's one of those cool things that I ran across way
back in the 90s, and it was actually called Sonic Flood.
Sonic Bloom. Sonic Bloom. No, that's the band.
Sonic Flood was a band that was in one of my meetings when I was speaking in
Brownsville, and I was talking about the sound of many waters and all this,
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and they walked away with that name.
No way. out of the sermon and later called me and said, hey,
would you meet with us and a bunch of wonderful guys and they just wanted to
know that their band and their whole ministry thing wound up being drawn out
of that, which is a picture of creativity.
Everything that God ever created creates.
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So that's why wind makes more winds, fire makes more fire, grass makes more
grass, flowers make more flowers, water makes more water, it goes on and on and on.
And so should not The out overflow of our lives and our encounters with the
Lord, should that not also be creating as it's going forward?
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Because those guys having a creative ear, sensitivity.
I didn't say sonic flood. I was just talking about the sound of many waters.
And I got into the sonic stuff around that as it relates to the life of Jesus,
the sound of the heart of the Father, the sonic.
Anyway, that's a whole other thing. But what happened, though,
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is years ago, I happened onto this thing where I heard about,
what was his name, Carlson.
I think was his last name. He was a young guy in the Korean War anyway,
and he was stationed in a situation where poverty was horrid.
And he was exposed to a mother taking her little child, a small child,
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and laying him and letting the half-track run over his legs so that he would
become a more pitiful beggar.
And he knew that the only way that he would be able to live is to be able to,
in that horrid condition, that he would be able to live.
I don't even know how to go there mentally. Yeah. You know, I'm a father and
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a grandfather, so I don't know.
How dark has it got to get? Yeah, really. But he saw this, a young man in the
military. It crushed his heart.
He committed that day. If this kind of poverty and famine will cause that to
happen, I'm going to give myself to riding that. And so that became his mission.
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And so his mission was to correct that. And he was a bright young man, real studious type guy.
Came back and he gave himself to that as his vision to find the remedy for that,
to break famine off of lands.
And when he hired scientists and the whole bit and he did all the research and
pretty soon he said, well, you know what was going on in the beauty of the Garden of Eden?
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And that's when he started to do a study and research of what dew does to the
horticulture or does to plant life.
And then does dew come from the sky and fall on the earth or does dew come up from the earth?
And they realized neither.
Dew does not fall and dew does not rise. when the atmospheric relationship between
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the heavens and the earth are just right, dew just becomes.
And then they discovered that the dew would actually a few milliseconds or whatever
right before dawn that the birds were singing a very different song.
And it was not a mating song, not a territorial song, and not any of that determined
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that it was a pre-dawn song.
And when they would sing these songs, it would create a soundscape,
and those frequencies that they released was actually opening the little pores
or the stomata open in the plant life,
causing the dew then to go deeper into that plant to the point that it would produce purity.
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And and so anyway through
these studies they determine which frequencies and how
to project those frequencies toward plants and and sure enough man these guys
kept but now they're doing it in cornfields and gardens are getting ears of
corn you know like 18 20 inches long watermelons you can't get on a truck big
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old pumpkins larger than the bed of a truck they're getting they're They're standing,
you know, I've got pictures of them standing on ladders to try to reach the top of the cornstones.
And then they started realizing that...
This acceleration of harvest was what they were after.
And that there was a song that was welcoming an accelerated harvest.
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And I think that's one of the reasons there's so much emphasis now being given
to those who are finding the pre-dawn song is because we got a harvest coming.
And it's going to be an acceleration of harvest. It's not going to be a long,
drawn-out preparation.
Preparation preparation they can have four harvests
in one year or one season because of
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this these principles that they discover wow and his name
is dan carlson wow and and
we've been having these discussions around music and missions and because i
think so much of you know what music has become because like when david was
out playing on the harps you know in the fields with the lambs he's not thinking
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about Spotify hits and likes and making money off his songs, right?
He's just doing what he was just responding to God, worshiping.
And within that context, because I think we were just trying to talk about what's
the focus of what we're doing in our creation.
And I think that having a missional aspect to music, that there's a greater
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purpose for it than just making money or just getting followers and likes that,
man, maybe it is to awaken the harvest.
Maybe it is to open people's hearts up in such a way that they can receive the
dew of heaven in their hearts to become pure again.
And I love that idea that's the sound, that sound in the song that creates purity.
And I think when we see beauty, it purifies in some way, like your mind and
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your heart from all the junk that we see and that tries to get in,
there is a purification process that takes place. Yeah. Yeah.
I think that's one of the reasons. I've noticed there's a lot of folks that
are leading worship that are supposed to be playing bars.
There's a lot of people playing in the bars that are supposed to be leading worship.
There's a lot of people that are missing their purest calling as musicianaries
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because once they give their heart to the Lord, they feel confined to religious
systems and lose their wonder.
And now they live their lives for the 20-minute opener in a church service somewhere.
And they don't carry a deep understanding of their own life as it relates to
music because that's when they begin to create musical surface chatter.
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Better and yeah and but real musicianaries
said but again let's go back to the old days when when
the musicians and the poets you know
one third of this one third of scripture is poetry by the way and you have all
this music and sound and art that fills the word of god and and we miss so much
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of it by not understanding what david really did set in motion and there were
times in in history where every culture,
and we still do to a degree, but it's different now, every culture had the uniqueness of their bards.
They were called bards or minstrels. In some cultures, they were called Goliards.
In the French culture, they might have been called troubadours.
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In the German culture, minesingers, excuse me, troubadours and minesingers.
In the Viking culture, they were called skulls. Who were these people?
These were the people that carried the sound of the song of the land.
So they had the voice to speak to everybody and tell them who they were.
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Not that much unlike on this side,
like with Scots, Irish, those Celtic cultures, their songs came down.
When we came across, we carried that. On this side, we still sung the songs
of the highlands because there was longing in us.
We still sing the songs of Wales because we long for what is lost.
Yeah. And then the mothers would lilt, though they maybe not know all the songs
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or the lyrics, while they're doing their chores, they're lilting.
They're singing melodies and creating that musical soundscape of the home that
not only tells the child that mother is there, she's not going away,
not just tell where she is, but who they are.
So they grew up and sang the high
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lonesome sounds and the sounds of the Monroes and the sounds of those.
But also there was a time, Michael, when those bard, minstrel,
singer, poet, troubadour, and in some situations hobos that were carrying the
sound of the Song of the Land.
And back in the old, old days, a king would send out one of his minstrels to
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sing in all the villages and everybody in the realm.
And one of the things that they would do is they would carry a story.
And they would also carry song, and what was called praise songs were directed to the king.
So some peasant living in some holler somewhere in a little village in poverty
is never going to get to be in the presence of the king.
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And the only way they'll ever even know their king and know who he is,
anything about him, is how those creative ones would come and creatively reveal who he was.
And so all they know now is the greatness
and his beauty and his power and his and his
ability to fight and battle and all these regal
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and noble things that they would learn about him they would learn through
the creatives the musicianaries if you will
the ones that were carrying the sound carrying the song
and if you ever had an opportunity to actually go to the king's palace when
you walk in the door walking through the gate it's as glorious and wondrous
as you ever dreamed even more so because those creatives had also been the ones
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that knew the right seed to plant the right grass,
to plant the right flowers, to draw the right birds that would sing this beautiful atmosphere.
So when you walked into the presence of a king, you realize this is who he is.
Who are we as musicianaries? People that are never going to know him,
never going to see him, never going to experience him until we present him in
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such a way with such beauty and creativity that they begin to long for one they've never seen.
And right now, nobody's longing. The world's not longing. They're finding pacifiers and counterfeits.
And look at what's happening to even the minds and mindsets of our culture today.
We're not looking for the king. We're not looking. And so it's our job.
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Job yours and mine and meredith's and
everybody else's we've got to get real and we've
got to get authentic we've got to get back to a pure enough place
that those kind of songs can be heard that will awaken the wonder in people
again and they will start to wonder who god really is rather than they got him
figured out oh they're late you know so it's a it's it's a very different thing
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when you start looking at it from that creative perspective like that and david david's one
of the ones that really accelerated that into God's people and into the Word
and gives us all permission to be far, you know.
Isn't that something, how most of our life is just looking for permission, you know?
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It's true. There's a lot of musicians and songwriters out now that are trying
to write according to clinics.
And I think we need to have more songwriting clinics.
I don't know what I'm talking about. But if we make it so clinical,
then we should not be wondering why our church services sound so clinical.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Song Lab Podcast. Today, I've got a special treat for you.
Someone who's near and dear to Meredith and I. Unfortunately,
my wife is not with us today, so I have someone just as cute.
The indomitable, the legendary, the one and only Ray Hughes.
And for those of you who don't know who Ray Hughes is, he's someone who's been
(00:28):
just a tremendous influence in my wife and I's life.
I mean, early days, upper room, and we didn't know what we were doing.
And we were looking for language to try to figure out this thing around worship.
And, man, Ray just gave us permission to go after God and not to,
like, I'm already getting emotional talking about it because it was the voice
of a father that was like, hey, you don't have to have it all perfect.
(00:50):
Try this or just try that. And he gave us permission to experiment with God
and get out of the box a little bit.
And so Ray was just a very influential person in our lives. I've he's a he has
a he's a music historian.
He is got some kind of doctorate in there somewhere. He's a prophetic music historian.
He's a poet. He makes these beautiful pieces of art, these pens.
(01:15):
The way I like to describe Ray is this. I said, if you were to mix Jeff Foxworthy
with a quantum physicist, fill him with the Holy Spirit and give him a guitar, you got Ray Hughes.
Welcome, Ray. Ray, that's almost, I've had one other introduction that's kind of like that.
They call me a cross between Albert Einstein and Gomer Powell.
(01:38):
I think I'm probably a whole lot more Gomer than I am Einstein, though.
You know, my journey has been a bike of grace.
And, you know, there really was a grace thing that happened to me when I got
saved. And I didn't even realize it, but it goes way back to all these little
(02:00):
moments in my life that were just so much the hand of God.
And I didn't even know it when they were going on, you know.
But really, it's been a...
Somewhere along the line, I discovered very quickly that my job was to marry
truth and beauty and awaken wonder again.
(02:21):
Yeah. And what I believe is going on today is there's not enough wonder in the world.
You know, no one even wonders who God is anymore.
We've got so many pacifiers that have robbed us from so many of the beautiful
things that God set in motion for us.
But anyway, I didn't mean to jump off on all of that. I just had a—with the
(02:45):
question you asked just before we went live was about my journey,
and that's compelled me to go to a place very quickly that I didn't plan to.
Yeah. But I've got an old pair of binoculars sitting over there on my shelf.
And when I was four years old, my dad, he was a well digger.
(03:08):
We were up in the mountains of West Virginia, and I was a four-year-old little boy.
And he reached in the truck and got those binoculars out, and he handed them to me.
And he says, we were standing on this mountain looking down in this holler there
on top of a helicopter over these gas wells.
And he handed me these old binoculars, and he said, here, look through this.
(03:31):
Here, take this. Take this.
It'll make you see far away. And I still have them.
And that was high tech for us pair of binoculars.
Yeah. But also I realized that
a gift came to my life from my father that enabled me to see far away.
If I would pay attention, if I would be aware.
(03:53):
And he instills some beautiful sensitivities and sensibilities in my life.
I think they came through my blood. my blood and
i was always one that just kind of
majored in paying attention and when something
would touch my life in such a way that i would feel even till this day something
comes alive and quickens my spirit might be a thought it might be a word it
(04:17):
might be a song it might be a sound it might be um an ocean view or the sound
of waves the crickets in the night whatever whatever,
just the sounds always alert something in me.
And I remember being repulsed by people when I was a little boy when people
(04:38):
would say, oh, that's just your imagination.
And we do that today. Why do we tell our kids, oh, it's just your imagination,
as if imagination is something that's wrong.
Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, you don't want one of those in your life.
Shut that thing off yeah shut that down
(04:58):
i think the lord wants to raise up holy
spirit imaginators totally that are that are full of wonder that are that are
compelled to believe that god wants to speak to them in every way that we'll
listen and all of creation is revealing him if we just listen if we just look
we'll just pay attention you know i think we have a generation that does that
(05:20):
does use their imagination.
They just use it in a negative way and they get bound in anxiety and fear.
They're using their imagination to project,
You know, a future scenario, and it's causing all this anxiety.
And I talk about what happens if you flip that, you know? Yeah.
Instead of like being validated. It's kind of like saying, well,
do you know how to meditate?
Well, have you ever done meditation? Do you know how to worry?
(05:42):
It's the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. Same thing. It totally is. Just in the wrong kingdom. Yeah.
So what, tell me this. What, so I love that. I love the, obviously,
the prophetic DNA was laid in there, being able to see far off and not just
look here, restoring beauty and wonder. I love all that.
(06:03):
And as it relates to music, how did you, what made you do such a deep dive into
music and studying music history and wanting to know about all of that?
Well, I think what did it for me was realizing how deeply I was impacted by music.
And again, it might be that thing that I was born with, that sensitivity to
(06:25):
sound and awareness of my surroundings and those kind of things.
But, you know, I can't remember a time when music didn't awaken something in me. And I dare say.
Everybody has that. Just some people give it a different priority or different place in their life.
Yeah. Because music is a force that God put in the earth.
(06:48):
Not only, let's imagine taking all the frequencies in the sound spectrum and
then bringing them down to a controllable or movable.
I hate to use the word manipulate, but you can manipulate those tones and frequencies
and create melody and rise and fall. And way back in the early days,
(07:10):
I mean, they played the music of the land.
The sound of the land was important to a people in an agrarian or even a pre-agrarian culture.
Well, you know, for example, to play the song of the land, music is universal.
We always hear that musical is the universal language. Una is one, una, verse, song.
(07:34):
Song so music is universal sound and
song is also geographical but more than
that when you start walking into it then when you get to by
the time you get to melody that's topographical and so many of the old celts
or the first nations people and some of them still do they value land and value
(07:56):
creation and creator enough that they want to play the song the sound of that
so they'd look at the mountain range,
and they would play that mountain range that they're looking at as if it were written, scored music.
Da-da-da-da-da-da-da. You're playing the melody of the land.
(08:17):
Also, even to this day, it's very well known in the First Nations culture that
the young brave, when he was falling in love with the maiden down by the water,
the brave would would hide every morning waiting for her to come to the river
to get water, and in his hiddenness he would play the sound and the song of the river.
(08:37):
And if you look at the edge where the water laps against the shore,
he would use that to determine the notation.
He would play that. And if she experienced the emotion, the passion,
the beauty, the power of his song, she would call him out.
And that's the way they would fall in love, to the sound of the land that they
(09:03):
both carried in their spirit and their heart and their DNAs.
You know, it's a beautiful picture of overlooked.
You know, we're so bombarded by surface chatter and noise and next.
We're so bombarded now by next that we never slow down enough to look back at
the beauty of these things.
And you don't make music. Music is something that occurs.
(09:26):
And when music occurs, there are those that have the sensitivities and sensibilities to be alert to it,
capture it like the brave did down there by the water or like the old Celt who
would be walking across the land that he considered to be so beautiful.
And there's an old bird, you know, lands on the limb, and he stops and honors
(09:51):
the song of the bird because they believe that the bird carried the sound of
heaven. That's why God gave them the ability to fly.
And so if he's carrying the sound of heaven, I'll honor that sound coming from
creation that's revealing the nature of God.
They also believe that every color and tone and texture in heaven could be found
(10:11):
somewhere on a bird's wing.
And on the feathers so it was a he
was carrying that so it would stop honor the
song and then many times they would cut the fork
out of the limb where he was sitting and they would make a harp or
a small harp called a tympan and now they
would be able to carry the sound of heaven and they would
(10:32):
be able to touch that sound see so there's
there's so many of these wondrous and deep and
beautiful things that just got overran by with progress and and next and i you
know i think i got some of that your question is where did i start i think i
got it from the from an understanding that i didn't have is my father was a well digger.
(10:59):
He was a well digger? Yeah, he was a well digger. And I remember when I was
a child looking over into an old well that my father dug.
And I return to this all the time.
Michael, you know, anytime I become a stranger in my own life,
I find myself compelled to look into that well again.
What I did is I looked down into a well and I saw the sky.
(11:23):
And I've sort of been looking for heaven and old wells ever since.
Yeah. And I didn't know it. Or I remember laying my head on the side of that
well and listening to the world's oldest music.
And little did I know that those kind of thought processes as a child would
shape the journey that I would take.
So when I came into the kingdom out of darkness and poverty and all kinds of
(11:46):
dysfunction and abuse and all kinds of things were in our bloodline.
But when I came into the kingdom, those things made their way over time,
made their way back into my life in a beautiful, redemptive way.
You know, thankfully, the dark stuff had to start submitting or yielding to
(12:08):
the beauty of who God became in my life.
And so now I look for that beauty every chance I get.
And everything to me everything's a story and it tells me who he is,
Yeah. And then it's like, how do you play that story? You know,
(12:28):
play that story back to him.
I love that imagery of that you're still doing what your father did.
You know, you're digging old wells, you know.
And I think what you've been able to do in our lives is looking back as you've
dug these wells of history and music and it's brought such life to us,
(12:50):
you know, and gave us inspiration to keep digging.
And the weird thing for me is I'm not, I have no musical bone in my body, right?
I don't play an instrument. I don't sing. I can't hit a note.
But I'm like, I know the power of music and how it's shaped and influenced my life.
And even now, my gift set really functions a lot with music and sound.
(13:11):
And because I think I listen a lot as well. I'm listening, you know,
for those divine inspiration moments constantly. Constantly.
I also listen with my eyes a lot, with how I see.
I'm looking for God constantly in art and music and film and people and in the nature of my backyard.
I stare at these windows all day and just look outside. I'm like,
(13:32):
God, thank you for where I live.
The beauty of what you've created around me, I didn't get overwhelmed by it, just talking about it.
And I love that music, I think helps restore that wonder again.
It really opens the eyes of of our hearts to see in a different way.
And what's crazy about it is how it seems like it can be such a beeline,
(13:53):
so to speak, into another realm, into the realm of God.
When we get stuck in these like the mundane of having to clean the house and
cook and the repetitive things where there can be beauty in that.
Obviously, there's Brother Lawrence who can find good in washing dishes.
I haven't found him there just yet.
(14:15):
But there's something about music and song that, man, it takes you to places
that I can't get to on my own.
Yeah. Well, you know, when music touches you emotionally, mentally...
Spiritually, even on a cellular level, even our nervous systems,
(14:35):
everything that is us, all of our senses.
And we know we have five senses. Well, no, we don't. Aristotle said we had five
senses. We don't have five senses.
Some rattlehead years ago came up with the idea and put that in motion,
and we believe it for hundreds of years now.
But they've acknowledged now and recognized at least 21 senses.
(14:58):
Senses and every one of those sensory systems we
have can alert to music even down to us on a cellular level our our brains and
our bodies we respond to music we're musical beings we think that this world
is supposed to be understood therefore logical this world's not logical,
(15:20):
there's no logic you know this world is musical put this little seed in the
ground and then it's going to become this massive thing, this little thing. It's not logical.
There's nothing logical about that. Yeah. And so we're now trapped in that deal
where, since it's logical, we need facts.
(15:43):
You know, Jesus was not moved by facts. Jesus could care less about facts.
Imagine being those theologians and Sadducees and Pharisees and all those people
in his his day, walk up and challenge Jesus on his facts and on his history.
You know, our father on a certain mountain on this day who did such,
he didn't care about the facts and he wouldn't stand around and argue with them
(16:04):
either. You know what he did?
He would just, they wouldn't tell a story. He would just say,
well, consider the lily and walk
off or consider the Raven. And then he'd just check out and walk away.
Consider that. You know what's crazy about this is I've been thinking about
this is, is how many parables he told, right? He was in this story mode,
and I started thinking about how many parables I've heard in church.
(16:29):
And I don't think I've heard a parable in church before, outside of someone
trying to explain Jesus' parable.
I've never had someone teach their own parables. Let's bring logic to this.
So let's bring logic. Let's understand it. Yeah. And if we can grasp it and
understand it, then we get to believe it. And, you know, that chain of events
(16:49):
starts happening in our lives, and pretty soon we wonder where the wonder went.
Jesus would say, consider the lily. Well, that guy, three days later,
he walks up on a lily, and he thinks, you know, I wonder what he was talking
about. There's a—and then—,
Then God would begin to reveal himself through creation.
(17:09):
Or like you say, Jesus would just go off on some story. It wasn't even facts.
If it had been facts, he'd have told the guy his name. But a certain man on
a certain day in a certain place. You know, it's a story.
He was accessing his own sacred tuition and listening to the desires of the
Father, and he added to his creative process.
And as he was telling the story, heaven was singing and awakening the spirit
(17:34):
of those that would hear the truth.
But they may have to go look at a star to get that or look at a river or a grain of sand.
Yeah. You know, you were talking about music affecting us on a cellular level.
I've heard and you were talking about the birds.
I've heard you talk about the purpose of the songbird in the morning. Could you explain that?
(17:56):
Yeah, well, you know, that's one of those cool things that I ran across way
back in the 90s, and it was actually called Sonic Flood.
Sonic Bloom. Sonic Bloom. No, that's the band.
Sonic Flood was a band that was in one of my meetings when I was speaking in
Brownsville, and I was talking about the sound of many waters and all this,
(18:17):
and they walked away with that name.
No way. out of the sermon and later called me and said, hey,
would you meet with us and a bunch of wonderful guys and they just wanted to
know that their band and their whole ministry thing wound up being drawn out
of that, which is a picture of creativity.
Everything that God ever created creates.
(18:38):
So that's why wind makes more winds, fire makes more fire, grass makes more
grass, flowers make more flowers, water makes more water, it goes on and on and on.
And so should not The out overflow of our lives and our encounters with the
Lord, should that not also be creating as it's going forward?
(18:58):
Because those guys having a creative ear, sensitivity.
I didn't say sonic flood. I was just talking about the sound of many waters.
And I got into the sonic stuff around that as it relates to the life of Jesus,
the sound of the heart of the Father, the sonic.
Anyway, that's a whole other thing. But what happened, though,
(19:21):
is years ago, I happened onto this thing where I heard about,
what was his name, Carlson.
I think was his last name. He was a young guy in the Korean War anyway,
and he was stationed in a situation where poverty was horrid.
And he was exposed to a mother taking her little child, a small child,
(19:46):
and laying him and letting the half-track run over his legs so that he would
become a more pitiful beggar.
And he knew that the only way that he would be able to live is to be able to,
in that horrid condition, that he would be able to live.
I don't even know how to go there mentally. Yeah. You know, I'm a father and
(20:06):
a grandfather, so I don't know.
How dark has it got to get? Yeah, really. But he saw this, a young man in the
military. It crushed his heart.
He committed that day. If this kind of poverty and famine will cause that to
happen, I'm going to give myself to riding that. And so that became his mission.
(20:27):
And so his mission was to correct that. And he was a bright young man, real studious type guy.
Came back and he gave himself to that as his vision to find the remedy for that,
to break famine off of lands.
And when he hired scientists and the whole bit and he did all the research and
pretty soon he said, well, you know what was going on in the beauty of the Garden of Eden?
(20:54):
And that's when he started to do a study and research of what dew does to the
horticulture or does to plant life.
And then does dew come from the sky and fall on the earth or does dew come up from the earth?
And they realized neither.
Dew does not fall and dew does not rise. when the atmospheric relationship between
(21:20):
the heavens and the earth are just right, dew just becomes.
And then they discovered that the dew would actually a few milliseconds or whatever
right before dawn that the birds were singing a very different song.
And it was not a mating song, not a territorial song, and not any of that determined
(21:43):
that it was a pre-dawn song.
And when they would sing these songs, it would create a soundscape,
and those frequencies that they released was actually opening the little pores
or the stomata open in the plant life,
causing the dew then to go deeper into that plant to the point that it would produce purity.
(22:07):
And and so anyway through
these studies they determine which frequencies and how
to project those frequencies toward plants and and sure enough man these guys
kept but now they're doing it in cornfields and gardens are getting ears of
corn you know like 18 20 inches long watermelons you can't get on a truck big
(22:28):
old pumpkins larger than the bed of a truck they're getting they're They're standing,
you know, I've got pictures of them standing on ladders to try to reach the top of the cornstones.
And then they started realizing that...
This acceleration of harvest was what they were after.
And that there was a song that was welcoming an accelerated harvest.
(22:50):
And I think that's one of the reasons there's so much emphasis now being given
to those who are finding the pre-dawn song is because we got a harvest coming.
And it's going to be an acceleration of harvest. It's not going to be a long,
drawn-out preparation.
Preparation preparation they can have four harvests
in one year or one season because of
(23:12):
this these principles that they discover wow and his name
is dan carlson wow and and
we've been having these discussions around music and missions and because i
think so much of you know what music has become because like when david was
out playing on the harps you know in the fields with the lambs he's not thinking
(23:32):
about Spotify hits and likes and making money off his songs, right?
He's just doing what he was just responding to God, worshiping.
And within that context, because I think we were just trying to talk about what's
the focus of what we're doing in our creation.
And I think that having a missional aspect to music, that there's a greater
(23:53):
purpose for it than just making money or just getting followers and likes that,
man, maybe it is to awaken the harvest.
Maybe it is to open people's hearts up in such a way that they can receive the
dew of heaven in their hearts to become pure again.
And I love that idea that's the sound, that sound in the song that creates purity.
And I think when we see beauty, it purifies in some way, like your mind and
(24:19):
your heart from all the junk that we see and that tries to get in,
there is a purification process that takes place. Yeah. Yeah.
I think that's one of the reasons. I've noticed there's a lot of folks that
are leading worship that are supposed to be playing bars.
There's a lot of people playing in the bars that are supposed to be leading worship.
There's a lot of people that are missing their purest calling as musicianaries
(24:43):
because once they give their heart to the Lord, they feel confined to religious
systems and lose their wonder.
And now they live their lives for the 20-minute opener in a church service somewhere.
And they don't carry a deep understanding of their own life as it relates to
music because that's when they begin to create musical surface chatter.
(25:03):
Better and yeah and but real musicianaries
said but again let's go back to the old days when when
the musicians and the poets you know
one third of this one third of scripture is poetry by the way and you have all
this music and sound and art that fills the word of god and and we miss so much
(25:24):
of it by not understanding what david really did set in motion and there were
times in in history where every culture,
and we still do to a degree, but it's different now, every culture had the uniqueness of their bards.
They were called bards or minstrels. In some cultures, they were called Goliards.
In the French culture, they might have been called troubadours.
(25:46):
In the German culture, minesingers, excuse me, troubadours and minesingers.
In the Viking culture, they were called skulls. Who were these people?
These were the people that carried the sound of the song of the land.
So they had the voice to speak to everybody and tell them who they were.
(26:06):
Not that much unlike on this side,
like with Scots, Irish, those Celtic cultures, their songs came down.
When we came across, we carried that. On this side, we still sung the songs
of the highlands because there was longing in us.
We still sing the songs of Wales because we long for what is lost.
Yeah. And then the mothers would lilt, though they maybe not know all the songs
(26:33):
or the lyrics, while they're doing their chores, they're lilting.
They're singing melodies and creating that musical soundscape of the home that
not only tells the child that mother is there, she's not going away,
not just tell where she is, but who they are.
So they grew up and sang the high
(26:54):
lonesome sounds and the sounds of the Monroes and the sounds of those.
But also there was a time, Michael, when those bard, minstrel,
singer, poet, troubadour, and in some situations hobos that were carrying the
sound of the Song of the Land.
And back in the old, old days, a king would send out one of his minstrels to
(27:19):
sing in all the villages and everybody in the realm.
And one of the things that they would do is they would carry a story.
And they would also carry song, and what was called praise songs were directed to the king.
So some peasant living in some holler somewhere in a little village in poverty
is never going to get to be in the presence of the king.
(27:40):
And the only way they'll ever even know their king and know who he is,
anything about him, is how those creative ones would come and creatively reveal who he was.
And so all they know now is the greatness
and his beauty and his power and his and his
ability to fight and battle and all these regal
(28:00):
and noble things that they would learn about him they would learn through
the creatives the musicianaries if you will
the ones that were carrying the sound carrying the song
and if you ever had an opportunity to actually go to the king's palace when
you walk in the door walking through the gate it's as glorious and wondrous
as you ever dreamed even more so because those creatives had also been the ones
(28:25):
that knew the right seed to plant the right grass,
to plant the right flowers, to draw the right birds that would sing this beautiful atmosphere.
So when you walked into the presence of a king, you realize this is who he is.
Who are we as musicianaries? People that are never going to know him,
never going to see him, never going to experience him until we present him in
(28:50):
such a way with such beauty and creativity that they begin to long for one they've never seen.
And right now, nobody's longing. The world's not longing. They're finding pacifiers and counterfeits.
And look at what's happening to even the minds and mindsets of our culture today.
We're not looking for the king. We're not looking. And so it's our job.
(29:14):
Job yours and mine and meredith's and
everybody else's we've got to get real and we've
got to get authentic we've got to get back to a pure enough place
that those kind of songs can be heard that will awaken the wonder in people
again and they will start to wonder who god really is rather than they got him
figured out oh they're late you know so it's a it's it's a very different thing
(29:37):
when you start looking at it from that creative perspective like that and david david's one
of the ones that really accelerated that into God's people and into the Word
and gives us all permission to be far, you know.
Isn't that something, how most of our life is just looking for permission, you know?
(29:59):
It's true. There's a lot of musicians and songwriters out now that are trying
to write according to clinics.
And I think we need to have more songwriting clinics.
I don't know what I'm talking about. But if we make it so clinical,
then we should not be wondering why our church services sound so clinical.
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