Hi. I’m Katie. I’m 26 and living Minneapolis, MN with my best friend and husband, Nick. These past few years have been so refining. Lots of correction, lots of being confronted with the things in me that have needed to come to the surface. Lots of my mind being changed, and my heart slowly following.
After graduating college and realizing the great lengths that God came through to reach me in the chaos of my life, I guess the most natural way to walk through my life was through writing and music. Through Campus Outreach Minneapolis, women came alongside me as a student and discipled me. I am ever thankful for these sweet friends! Since being truly reconciled to God as a junior in college, there’s a lot worth singing and writing about. College was such a journey of fear, loneliness, broken relationships and despair. Restless cycles of putting my hope in escaping to things that could not remain able to save me or fulfill me, or truly change me.
I was exhausting my every effort to hold up an image of this really good person that inside I knew I really wasn’t. I hid under a false shell. Underneath the shell was a girl who was dying. A girl who didn’t have the strength or ability to love God at all. It began to make sense to me that I needed to have someone who was good on my behalf and it became real to me that my sin deserved a punishment. And when you come to those two realizations, there just simply and plainly is not better news to such a broken and lost person than the news of Jesus and the absolutely FREE gift he gives us. Nothing feels more humbling than lying at his feet with nothing to offer. So poor beneath the cross of Jesus that all we can do is receive. Receive his grace, his righteousness, his healing, his power to overcome addictions and lifeless patterns.
Being married to my adoring husband, Nick, has been a huge catalyst to my writing throughout the past few years. Marriage has been such a raw and exposing avenue to grow through. I’m learning that its ok to be known by the people in my life for the ‘real’ me. In every weakness, my reward is people who wrap their arms around me and a tender-hearted God.
Previous to this point in my life, I use to hope so much more in my own obedience, in my own performance, in my own pursuit of God. But its all been changed. Through falling so short of the glory of God, my hope can only be in HIS righteousness. I hope so much more in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ rather than the performance of my own life. What this means for me is unbelievably freeing. I am enjoy God's mercy so much more fully.
“There is so much healing, freedom and peace in the heart of Jesus- music has just seemed to flow out of that. His life, death and resurrection have paid for me in full. At the end of the day, it’s not these songs that are going to do anything for anyone. There is nothing special about me that is worthy of worship or remembering. Its God's word- the simple truths of God's mercy to us in Jesus Christ and the inviting nature of His heart towards us when we are so lost that will last. Its what the Holy Spirit does inside of us that will last."
It is so satisfying to be loved by a God who forgives all my sin and imagines someone completely different than when I first believed. A God who loved me, pursued me and died for me when I was his enemy- He really has gone to great lengths to win my soul. Sometimes I still can’t believe that he gave me all his righteousness and that I will spend eternity with him.
“But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” (Gal. 6:14) Beyond the hype of music, what’s really satisfying is having real/authentic relationships in my every day life while wrestling through it all, and in turn the expressing and giving of music. My biggest hope is that listeners would be captivated by who Jesus is, not me. Just as John the Baptist felt he was not worthy to baptize Jesus, I am not worthy to sing of him... yet he is so worthy to sing of. I echo (with an incredible plea for help) John when he said of Jesus in John 3:30, ‘He must increase, but I must decrease.’ I’m still trying to understand what that really means.
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- Katie