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A Beginner’s Dream

I have two sisters. Melissa is exactly ten and a half months younger than me. Spare yourself the math and do not think about how that happened. Every year Melissa and I are the same age from October 6th until my birthday on November 17th. Irish twins.

My other sister, Sarah, is five years younger than me. She was the best little sister ever. She wanted to be friends with Melissa and me so badly that she would let us use her for all our childhood experiments. I think this type of loyalty goes a long way in a family.

Every year around Easter, we crucified Sarah.

We wrapped her up in bed linens and tacked her to the wall with thumbtacks. She was a little thing, but the thumbtacks eventually gave way. So when that no longer worked, we ensconced her with couch cushions and pillows, and sometimes got away with tying her hands to a link of sweaters and then bound her to the bedroom door handle. She was completely okay with this. Then came the teasing of her hair and the lipstick that doubled as blood on her hands and feet. We might have been slightly confused by the Madonna video, but whatever. My little sister Sarah was an epic Jesus, always so stoic and sad looking. She never fought back. I think that’s because she knew Melissa would beat her up.

After Sarah was properly in place for the crucifixion, I popped my Michael W. Smith i 2 (EYE) cassette tape into the player and fast-forwarded to song number two, “Secret Ambition.”

While Michael sang about nobody knowing that Jesus came to give His life away, Melissa bounced back and forth from being a Roman soldier who had to stab Jesus, to the grieving Mother Mary, and sometimes an angel. She made that angel part up herself. She always thought there should be an angel included in the crucifixion. When she was a Roman soldier she would wear a belt around her head, which I thought was an ingenious use of household supplies. While she was a crying Mother Mary, she put a bath towel over her head. And for the angel role, she would switch to fairy wings we had left over from a Halloween costume. All the while, Sarah thrashed about in sorrow and played an award-winning Jesus.

And me? I was Michael W. Smith, of course.

Because somebody had to look good, hold the microphone, and belt out the passion of the Christ while baby sister was being crucified.

After our performance was perfect, we did what all normal kids do (because so far, we are really tracking with normal kids): we invited our parents and whoever else happened to be in our home that day to the performance. We charged money at the bedroom door and introduced ourselves. Then my parents videotaped and cheered us on as we crucified our little sister.

Completely. Normal. Upbringing.

Sometimes people ask me when I first started singing, or how I knew I wanted to be a musician, as if you can name when you started existing. I tell them I have always sung. I have always created. I have always been a Jenny. This wasn’t a career choice or a strategy. It was, as my mom says, present at birth when I ate ferociously at her breast and created melodramas between my dolls and wept through Sesame Street. Perhaps the best answer to the question when or how lies in the small moments that I decided to stop fighting myself. Fighting who I was. The when and how happened after I surrendered to the who. I had to surrender to who I was before I could fully step into the when or how of what I would become. I spent a lot of years listening to the whispers in my head that told me I was talking too much or in the spotlight too often. I spent too many years fighting myself, telling myself to be quiet, to be normal. My road to becoming started when I finally told the whispers to shut up. My road to becoming started when I wasn’t afraid of my own voice anymore. And that was a good moment, because as it turned out, I was the kind of girl destined to use my voice.

I got my first microphone in the fifth grade. On Christmas morning my sisters woke up with board games, a tea set, new clothes, dolls, and other toys that make little girls happy. I only know they got those gifts because I have since studied the pictures. That morning I was oblivious to their gifts and their presence because that morning I got my first karaoke machine. Complete with a microphone, a double cassette tape deck, and three songs on an accompaniment track: “Straight Up” by Paula Abdul, “Crazy” by Patsy Cline, and something else long forgotten. I sang for days, for months, for years.

That same year our school’s choir teacher, Mrs. Theiboux, taught us the song “Thank You for the Music,” and I nearly cried every time we got to the chorus. “Thank you for the music! Your gift of friendship rare!” I can still sing that song, word for word, note for note. Fighting back tears in fifth grade choir class because the song so captured my tender heart makes perfect sense to me now. But back then I was sure there was something slightly abnormal going on inside of me. Every day in my public school choir class my heart soared. (And no, it wasn’t because I had to be in the tenor section. A real source of middle school insecurity.) We sang Michael W. Smith’s “Go West Young Man,” “Get Along, Little Doggies,” “The Wabash Cannonball,” and some Whitney Houston songs. My love for music was solidified. I was head over heels.

During those years, I sang into hairbrushes, paper towel rolls, at the top of my lungs in my garage, and sometimes into real microphones. In the sixth grade, I dressed up as Princess Jasmine for the Daniel Intermediate School talent show and sang “A Whole New World” alongside the cutest boy in the entire school. My life was complete.

In the seventh grade, Mrs. McFerrin, the eccentric theater teacher who welcomed you into junior high like you were her long-lost Broadway star, encouraged me to sing loud and proud and with animation. I still remember her waddling around the front of the class with her blazing red hair, funky outfits, revered vibrato, and intense eyes. In theater class we did songs from the musicals Newsies and Annie. In eighth grade, we did a full-blown production of The Wizard of Oz. I wasn’t Dorothy. In fact, I can hardly remember if I was anyone important at all. When I try to recall those seasons, I remember very few specific details about my daily life, but I remember the songs that marked those days.

Music became my everything. Not because of the fame and fortune: it was rare that I actually knew who performed a song. Not because of the history behind it or the mechanics of it: from an early age I disdained learning how to read music and faked my way through sight-reading in every music class I ever took. I still don’t know how to read music. Not because I was a song junkie, diving into an artist’s catalog and trying to understand their story and reasons for writing: I didn’t care about any of that stuff.

No, music became my everything for the most guttural of reasons. It spoke my language. Finally, someone spoke my language. It was brutal and beautiful all at once. Brutiful, as my secret best friend, Glennon Melton, says.1 Deep and devastating, real and raw, life-giving and love-inducing, music gave words to everything that was exploding inside of me.

In high school, I would leave concerts with the friends in my church youth group and I would make sure I sat in the very back row of the van because I knew I would cry—ugly girl cry. Every show left me a weepy mess. It was as if I had just discovered myself, the beauty of the world, and love all over again. We had been at the same show, but I walked away from the experience different than the rest of the group. I wasn’t just moved; I was tormented. Something ached within me.

I knew I was supposed to be on stage. Not for the fame and fortune of it. Not for any reason except the most unrefined, obvious one. I was born speaking the language of music. Looking back, I think I left shows with tears running down my face because I realized I was not alone. Artists were living, breathing proof that other people spoke the same language I did.

Years later, on my first trip to Nashville to meet with record labels about signing a recording contract, one music executive asked me how I knew I was made for this.

Should I tell him that I left concerts a weepy mess and spent most of the fifth grade begging Jesus to give me vibrato? Or that I spent eighth grade pleading for the angelic voice of a soprano, reminding Jesus that being a girl and being a tenor was social suicide. Should I tell the Nashville music guy that? There was no litmus test for knowing whether I was normal or insane, or if all artists cried after they went to concerts and prayed such trivial prayers.

I told him the truth. That my ending up in his office was just a blip on the timeline that unfolded over years of singing in my bathroom, garage, church choirs, school choirs, and in my closet. I told him about my recurring experiences after concerts and how music was birth, death, life, and everything that lived inside of me exploding in one singular experience. Music was a secret code shared between people living, breathing, and seeing the world with different eyes. Knowing the language existed, knowing it was mine, and yet not quite belonging to the family was torture.

My soul was laid bare in that office with walls covered by platinum albums and pictures of fellow code-talkers. I held my breath and waited for him to call security or politely escort me back to the nice lady who buzzed me into the building. To tell me that I didn’t quite fit the rock-star bill and that I might be better suited as an elementary choir teacher. Should I tell him I didn’t really like kids and couldn’t read music? I waited for his judgment to fall.

Finally, he looked at me knowingly and smiled. “Every artist I have ever signed to this record label has shared the same sentiment. The true artist feels tormented by the music, by the innate desire to be on that stage. You said exactly what they have said too.”

My fears melted. I was a code-talker and there were others and this was good because I had a lot of history riding on this dream.

Don’t we all? Dreams rarely just appear out of thin air. They are built over our lifetimes, taking root inside of us when we first begin to walk, talk, tinker, and explore. They grow, stretch, develop, change shapes and sizes, and bubble underneath us—springs of living water yet to be fully unearthed. We are the guardians of our dreams. Those long-festering voices that continue to ring out from deep within us and are woven into the fabric of our stories; we care for them as only we can. And as they are initially taking shape our biggest fears for those dreams are often graciously short-sighted. We fear loneliness, what type of work will be required of us along the way, and whether we will actually ever arrive and simply begin getting our feet wet. Rarely do infant dreamers fear the unraveling, or even imagine such a thing! In the beginning, we fear our own voice. We do not yet know to fear the end of our voice. And this lack of knowledge is one of life’s sweetest gifts. We go on code-talking. We go on dreaming. We conquer our voice and live from beginning to end, not end to beginning. And one day we step into a moment and realize it is upon us—the realization of the dream that we have so carefully guarded and lived with since we were young and crucifying our sister. It’s an important moment, the blossoming of the dream. Treasure it.

In that office ten years ago, the music executive’s words rang triumphantly through my heart. That the dream had somehow coursed a path of its own, survived junior high, and made it past my eighteen-year-old self, seemed like a miracle to me.