A Day Off

We had another welcome Monday off from the studio.

Recording is in many ways the closest we come to having 9 to 5 jobs (though it's usually more like 10 to 6:30). When I leave in the morning the kids always ask where I'm off to and I can say with a bit of pride, "I'm going to work." I come home in the evening and Jamie usually has some scrumptious meal whipped up, after which we get the kids to bed. We watch a bit of TV before she zonks out, which is when I write or read for a few hours and I, too, zonk. (Zonk? I just looked it up: to fall or cause to fall suddenly and heavily asleep or lose consciousness. I can't believe that's a real word.)

While it's nice to have this day job, so to speak, all the other responsibilities that usually take up our time are still waiting for us. The emails and bills and busy work and writing pile up fast, and Mondays off only means Mondays off from the studio. Today I attacked and cleaned the pile of CDs and CDRs that were piled up all around the computer desk. I wrote exactly 19 emails. I walked in the woods behind the house and smoked the pipe my dad gave me, praying for someone dear to me who I just found out has cancer. I jogged for exactly 25 minutes. I renewed the registration on my giant, silver, gas-guzzling, touring van (named "Jill Phillips"). I mailed a copy of the registration along with the fine for the ticket I got last week.

I have two interviews tomorrow, so Ben and Andy will be working without me for a few hours. (These will probably be the most inspired and productive few hours of this whole process, mark my words.) Wednesday promises to be an exciting one. We wrote a new song called "Hosanna" that'll probably be the opener for the record, and we need to track it. This is what some of us would call "a pain in the neck". (Those quotation marks take me way back to Chris Farley.) Tracking is "expensive" and "fairly intense". It's "nice" to get it all over with at the beginning of the "process". But when a new "song" comes along that needs "to" be on the album, it's totally worth it, and what makes it even sweeter is that we get to see and work with Paul, Matt, Ringo and Andy Hunt again. "Hot dog".

I'm not sure why I'm recounting the details of the days to you fine readers, except that I feel an odd and surprising sense of accountability to you. If you're taking the time to read, to listen to the music, to spend your hard-earned money buying records (and books, soon, I hope), I want you to know I'm not just sitting around. I'm trying my best, and sometimes not trying my best, to be obedient to Jesus, to attend to the work he has for me and the work he is doing in me and, when it's appropriate, sharing that journey with you. There are swaths of my life both shameful and victorious that I choose to keep private; other episodes I am compelled to lay on the table for public scrutiny in the name of light and honesty and encouraging you in the midst of your own either shameful or victorious moments.

Resurrection Letters is a part of that encouragement, I hope. It's a record about what it means for us in the year 2007 that Christ rose again and put the nail in Death's coffin. This new song "Hosanna" is my own exclamation of praise, and is at the same time my own cry for salvation, though I'm saved already.

AP

P.S. I found THIS PICTURE on one of my readers' blogs, and thought I'd share its hilarity with you.