Inland

When you join a band at 20 years old, you dont think much about what it might mean to still remain together almost 20 years later. To be true, its nearly impossible to imagine much after your 21st birthday. At the close of 2011, Jars of Clay celebrated its 17th year of creating together. Over 100 songs written, 10 studio records, international touring, and the genesis of a sustained work benefiting our neighbors in Africa, Blood: Water Mission. Is there still soil to turn in this plot of land? Is there something urgent, timely, even startling, left yet to create? In early 2012, we turned our chairs towards one another once again, and agreed that whatever grace of time we still had before us, we would spend finding this out. And so we headed Inland. The journey began like many before it. We wrote songs, and more songs, and when we typically wouldve stopped, we kept writing. We wrote close to 50 songs. We had little concern for what we were looking for. We simply showed up and wrote the song that the day required. We believed that along with us, there were others, faithfully showing up and doing the work of preparing for the opportunity to build something truly great. These are songs for the ordinary days -when life is weighty and uncertain, doubt is the necessary partner of faith; where we see mostly through a glass darkly. It is this middle space that we have inhabited over the years. Its where you and I do the gritty work of actually living. The space in between the way the world is, and even underneath the most cynical exteriors -the way we know the world ought to be.