Category: Top articles

How storms shape our lives

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TEXAS GOSPEL VOLUNTEER

Life’s storms can either strengthen a believer or lead them away from God’s purpose, depending on how they respond. Difficult seasons have the potential to build faith, wisdom, peace, and devotion when placed in God’s hands.

Some challenges leave believers stronger than before. Through hardship, God can produce greater understanding, deeper commitment, and a renewed sense of joy. Those who trust Him during trials often discover a greater confidence that they are walking in His will.

Think of it this way: The outcome of a storm is often connected to the response given to it, making faith and obedience especially important during difficult times.

Consider it all joy, my brothers and sisters, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

James 1:2-4

You cannot commit to a God you do not know

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JEFF TURNER

Before God asked anything of Moses, he told him who he was.

Consider the order of that moment at the burning bush. Moses has turned aside. He has drawn near. And the voice from the fire does not begin with a mission or a mandate. It begins with an identity: “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. That fear was not weakness. That fear was the only appropriate response to suddenly understanding who was speaking.

God knew what he was doing. He knew that before Moses could say yes to anything, he had to know who was asking. You cannot give your life to an abstraction.

So much of the uncommitted Christianity we see around us, the half-surrender, the one-foot-in and one-foot-out discipleship, traces its root not to defiance but to ignorance. People do not fully give themselves to a God they do not fully know. To know him rightly is to find every excuse for reservation consumed in the fire of his holiness.

And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.

John 17:3

HighRoad brings the American road show to a Norwegian barn, and Sarpsborg sings along

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AMY TURNER / E.J. WILSON

The gardens outside a Nordic Lutheran church built in the 1850s do not typically host a gospel group from Nashville, Tennessee on tour. But that is where HighRoad found itself this week, walking the grounds of a 19th century sanctuary before an evening that would end with a sold out crowd in a converted barn.

The band is deep into a run of Norwegian dates, and the following they have built overseas is starting to look less like a novelty and more like a genuine relationship between a North American act and an audience thousands of miles from home. Vocalist Sarah Davidson has been chronicling the trip in real time, and her updates read like postcards from a tour that has wandered well outside the usual circuit.

Davidson described a day that started with the old church gardens and turned into an impromptu border crossing. “As we walked downtown we also walked over to Sweden,” she said, describing a bridge she stopped to admire before ducking into a small Swedish cafe for coffee and crepes. It is the kind of afternoon that does not usually make it into a tour itinerary, but for a band playing towns close enough to another country to walk there, it became part of the day’s rhythm.

By evening the group had made its way to Sarpsborg, where the venue was a barn with a history of its own. Davidson called it a beautiful, historic space that locals had converted into a music venue, complete with an old pump organ tucked into the corner. The hosts fed the band American style, with hamburgers and hot dogs on the menu, a small gesture that Davidson said made the night feel like a genuine welcome rather than just another stop on the schedule.

The show itself delivered. Davidson described the crowd as sold out and packed, an audience that showed up ready for HighRoad and made no secret of it. For a Texas gospel band a continent away from home, that kind of reception speaks to how far the group’s reputation has traveled.

The night closed the way a lot of the best tour stories do, with a view nobody planned for. Davidson described the drive home under a sunset around 10 o’clock, still bright at an hour that would be full dark back in Texas, calling it a stunning end to what she summed up simply as a wonderful day.

For a band whose name has occasionally landed sideways in write ups and transcripts, from High Road to Highroad, there was nothing lost in translation on this leg of the trip. Norway heard HighRoad loud and clear.

The Kingdom Heirs remind listeners that grace never runs out

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AMY TURNER

Southern Gospel has a way of turning heartbreak into hope, and few groups do it as naturally as the Kingdom Heirs. “This song really spoke to me,” says Andy Stringfield of the quartet’s new single, “Always get the grace.” “It not only has a beautiful melody, which usually is the first thing that catches my attention, but a unique and powerful message.”

The message is a simple one, though simple doesn’t mean easy. Written by Barbara Huffman and Marcia Henry, the song asks its listeners to sit with an uncomfortable truth; Prayers don’t always get answered the way you hoped. Sometimes the miracle comes exactly as planned. More often, life hands you something you didn’t ask for and can’t fully explain.

Sometimes you get the miracle Just the way you planned But often God does something different That you don’t understand But through it all He’s still loving, caring, and holding you No matter what you face Sometimes you get the miracle But you always get the grace

The Kingdom Heirs give the song room to breathe, building it into a fully orchestrated arrangement that shifts between Chris Bryant’s lead vocal and the full quartet’s blend. It’s the kind of production that lets a lyric like this land without needing much embellishment.

For Stringfield, the song’s honesty is what sets it apart. “When we’re in the midst of a storm in this life, we don’t always get the exact answer we’re looking for when we pray,” he says. “Sometimes you get the miracle, but as a child of God, no matter what you may be going through, you’ll always get his wonderful grace.”

That kind of steadiness has defined the Kingdom Heirs for decades. The group traces its roots to the mountains of East Tennessee, where Southern Gospel isn’t a genre so much as a way of life. They built a following playing churches and concert halls before landing a residency at Silver Dollar City in 1982, four years before the park rebranded as Dollywood. The Kingdom Heirs have been the park’s resident gospel act ever since, a run that now stretches past 40 years, matching Dollywood’s own milestone this year. Millions of visitors have passed through the park in that time, and for plenty of them, the Kingdom Heirs’ harmonies are as much a part of the Smoky Mountains as the scenery.

Kitchens, cathedrals, and the faith of a coal miner’s wife

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TEXAS GOSPEL VOLUNTEER

Chosen Road’s Jonathan Buckner remembers where he was standing the first time he heard “Kitchens & Cathedrals.” He was in his own kitchen, phone in hand, wife nearby, when he hit play on a demo written by Lee Black and Gina Bowe. He didn’t make it past the first verse before he was crying.

“I never will forget the moment that I opened that demo up and I listened to it,” Buckner says. “I was with my wife in our kitchen and I hit play, got through the first verse and I was in tears.”

The song pulled him straight back to his grandmother’s house. She was a preacher’s wife raising ten kids largely on her own, since her husband spent long stretches on the road as a traveling evangelist. Buckner’s grandfather had started out as a coal miner before answering a call to ministry, leaving his wife to hold the household together through faith alone.

“She was an amazing woman who just loved the Lord,” Buckner says of his grandmother. “She really had to lean into her faith.”

That instinct, leaning into faith when circumstances demand it, has defined Chosen Road for more than seventeen years. Formed in the mountains of West Virginia, the band built its sound the way bluegrass has always been built: on front porches and in small country churches, with harmonies worked out standing close enough to hear one another breathe. Their catalog stretches from traditional bluegrass into country, gospel, and Americana, resisting easy genre labels in favor of something the band simply calls honest.

Albums like Appalachian hymns and the newer American morning have carried that approach to a growing national audience, landing on bluegrass and gospel radio charts along the way. “Kitchens & Cathedrals” continues that trajectory, less a departure than a return to the values the band was founded on: faith, family, and music that means something to the people singing it as much as the people hearing it.

For Buckner, the song’s power lies in the way it collapses decades in a single verse, turning a kitchen table memory into something closer to scripture. It is a small moment made large, the kind Chosen Road has spent nearly two decades trying to write.