The God I Met in Albuquerque
The Land of Enchantment
The high desert
“Take me to the high desert, fresh mountain air. Red dirt on my hiking boots, wind in my hair.”
What was it about our family trip to New Mexico in 2019 that had such an impact on me? New Mexico is unlike any other state. It’s kind of like if Colorado and Arizona had a baby. First of all: you need to understand how unqualified I am to talk about this. I’ve been to the state exactly one time, and it wasn’t for very long. But that was my impression. The drive from Albuquerque to Los Alamos (which we were unable to complete because it started snowing as we got to the top of the mountain ancient supervolcano on which Los Alamos sits…) felt like stepping into a Looney Tunes cartoon from my childhood. Roadrunners! The red dirt and jagged cliffs made me think of Wiley Coyote and anvils and pianos falling from the sky. It’s a desert, so it’s kind of like Arizona, but it’s a high desert, so it’s not nearly as hot. There are mountains, but again, it’s a desert, so it doesn’t have the super dense vegetation you find in other mountainous states. You’ll encounter forests here and there, scattered around creeks and rivers, but many of the mountains are covered in plants that prick your eyeballs just by looking at them.
A budding music career
It was late October of 2019 when we drove to Crestone, Colorado, and then to Albuquerque, New Mexico, for a little mountain adventure. I was still a homeschooling mom at that time. Our oldest child was nine, and our youngest was four. We had been married for ten years — in fact, we celebrated our anniversary while we were in Albuquerque. And perhaps more notably, I had just released my first song, “I Have Peace” the month prior, and I was in the midst of promoting an Indiegogo campaign to fund my first album (and ultimately an EP as well).
Music was on my brain when we were on that trip. When we would drive from our Airbnb to the adventure de jure, I’d be taking videos of the scenery, hoping to pair them with songs I was working on; maybe I’d make them into a lyric video (pssst: I did do that). Songwriting was constantly on my brain, and I wrote a number of songs on those drives — Balance being one.
I had always been a musician, and even a songwriter… just like I’d been to mountains and deserts before. But this time in my life was different for me as a musician in the same way that the topography of New Mexico is different than the states it borders. This time, I was starting something. I wasn’t just writing songs that maybe I’d share with Matt or one other person. I wasn’t just performing a song I’d written at church one time, or even offering it to the congregation as part of the regular rotation of worship songs. I was an artist on Spotify. I was raising money to record my own songs. I was assembling a band and thinking through comp songs and arrangement ideas. I was dreaming up ideas for merch to sell. I was sending out emails to an email list, asking people to pre-save a song, or add it to playlists, or pre-order this t-shirt or buy my new CD. I had started something different, something new.
I was starting a music career, and this trip acted as a sort of childhood in the lifetime of my music career: it was early enough that most of my decisions were still ahead of me, but I was learning who I am as a musician, what are my goals for the future, and who do I want to become not only as a musician but also as a person.
Duty vs. beauty
Is this okay for me to do this?
In 2019, I was still steeped in fundamentalist-adjacent evangelicalism, but I was a few years into pulling at the loose threads in that sweater. I was still homeschooling our kids, but was starting to allow myself to ask questions like: is this really what’s best for them, and do I really want to keep doing this? Plus I was doing this whole thing with music. Writing and releasing songs? Devoting real time and energy AND MONEY to it? Who did I think I was, doing all of that?! I was constantly battling internal voices — some of which came from real sources, but most of which were characterizations of things I’d actually been taught mixed with my own fear of judgment and rejection — that told me I was selfish, and that having a desire to do something is not a valid reason to do it. That’s carnal. That’s of the flesh. These are worldly desires, and I need to lose my life to find it — screw my feelings and desires.
“I lived under the crushing weight of duty. He met me there and opened by my heart to beauty.”
If you never had a foray into this breed of religiosity (it exists in Christianity, yes, but other religions have their own versions, too), then maybe I sound insane. And perhaps I was insane. Maybe I am still insane. Truthfully, I have abandoned a lot of those old beliefs, but not entirely. That is to say, it is not as though I believe the complete opposite now. I really don’t. I don’t think that how we feel is a good reason alone to do something — other considerations must be weighed. I think most people would agree. If someone feels like having an affair, most people don’t give a whole-hearted thumbs up to pursuing that. I certainly don’t. Morals and ethics and wisdom and discernment all come into play. One’s values must be considered; the conscience would like a word. Yes, I have a desire to have a career in music, and yes, I’ve been pursuing that in various ways for the past six years, but I’m always doing the dance with my conscience and my own values — I prioritize being there for my kids, and I pursue opportunities with that in mind, I try really hard to see people as humans to be loved and not as a means to an end to getting what I want in order to advance my career, I write songs that are authentic to me rather than writing to fill a hole in the market. I could give lots of other examples, but you get the point.
“I came like a lawyer, and I left like I mystic”
A lawyer or a mystic?
These are tough needles to thread, especially when you’re freshly middle aged and still a relatively young mom who is trying to make sense of the world and of her faith. Where’s the line between selfish ambition and confidently being who God made you to be? Where’s the line between being certain of your beliefs and being rigidly dogmatic? Where’s the line between heresy and holding space for mystery?
Six years later and I’m still asking myself these same questions, and others just like them. I tend to think that life will continue to be like this: doing the best you can to walk confidently in the way in which you feel compelled to go, while also keeping in mind that it’s possible you are wrong in some ways that you don’t currently understand. Trying to thread the needle — or find the balance, if you will — between over-confident certainty and reasonable yet frightened doubts.
All that to say, a lot has changed in my faith in the last six years, and it looks a lot less rigid now than it did then. That trip to Albuquerque marked when I started gaining more internal fortitude to ask questions I had been afraid to ask before. And this journey I’ve been on has been one of music making, career building, and un-learning/re-learning things I believed about God. My music career has shown steady growth (for which I am truly grateful!) and although it doesn’t always feel like it, I think the spiritual side of this journey has been a story of steady growth as well.
