andi oakes

be encouraged

 

It was 2000, the first year of the 21st Century. 

I’ve always wanted to write a first line like that. It sounds as if it is going to be the opening to some grand tale; but no – this is not the beginning of an epic novel, but rather the story behind the first album I recorded, which I decided to call Whisper.  But before you switch of thinking that all I’ll be talking about is studio mixes and vocal settings…fear not.  This isn’t so much the story of how we recorded the album, but of what led me to make the decision to record it in the first place and where the inspiration for the songs came from.  I tend to feel that knowing a little bit more about the background of something like a piece of artwork or, in this case, music, helps to give it all just a little bit more colour and depth.

 

My story begins mid way through 2000.  Up until this stage I was still employed by a large, multinational food manufacturer as one of their salesmen.  Sales was not something I had actually planned to get into as a career choice, but somehow found myself there for over fifteen years, in various companies. I had come to faith in Jesus Christ at the age of sixteen, and had more or less been involved in some sort of voluntary service in my home church ever since and by the time 2000 had arrived, I was in my thirteenth year of leading our church’s youth work with my wife, as well as drumming for a local Christian Rock band.

 

 

But little did I know at that stage that God had a very different plan for me.

 

 

This was a significant year for our church as we were finally, after being housed for seven years in the temporary accommodation of an old and very cold factory complex, opening our brand new building.  I remember being so excited about what we would be able to achieve with the youth work in the new complex, and one of my most memorable moments was standing with a few of our youth leadership team on the exposed concrete base of the yet to be completed building, trying to imagine what it would all look like when it was completed and telling those around me, with much excited anticipation, that I could see myself effectively “living” in the church from now on.  But little did I know at that stage that God had a very different plan for me.

 

It was in the late summer of 2000 that I began to feel those unsettling winds of change beginning to curl around me.  A group of us from our youth group had decided to take a little trip to a theme park in England, and so Grace and I packed our car and headed off in convoy with the others.  It was while we were away, in the hotel room one morning, that I felt God speak to me from the Bible.  I was reading the Psalms and had just read Psalm 71 v 15:

 

My mouth shall tell of Your righteousness and You salvation all the day

 

I then went on to read Psalm 73 v 28:

 

But it is good for me to draw near to God; I have put my trust in the Lord God, that I may declare all your works

 

Here’s what I had written in my journal after reading these two verses:

 

Aug 21st 2000

 

“Felt that this is the beginning of the call of God to “tell of (His) righteousness”.

Drawing near to God is the key – “that I may declare all (His) works””

 

 

I knew something different was happening at that stage, but I literally had no idea of the impact that this was all going to have on me or the journey I was about to take with the Lord.

 

The unsettling had now begun

 

The unsettling had now begun in earnest within me as all of a sudden I began to feel very disconnected to those things that I felt, in many ways, were defining me as a person.  My faith in God was vitally important to me and the areas where I was serving Him were therefore among some of the valued aspects of my life.  My wife and I simply loved working with our young people and considered them part of our extended family, especially since we did not have any children of our own; and I lived to play music.  My Dad was a fantastic musician and I inherited his love and passion for it, which had increased exponentially in my own life when I discovered I could serve Jesus through music.  But now I was feeling increasingly restless about both these significant areas of my life.

 

I returned from the theme park very troubled.  I just could not escape the feeling that God was asking me to give up both my work with young people in our church as well as playing in the band.  It consumed my thinking day and night until finally, I found myself sharing with my band buddies all that was in my heart, and told them that I felt it was time for me to quit the band.  I will never forget that night because I just burst into tears.  There was I, a guy in a room full of guys, crying like the proverbial baby.  I had just not been prepared for what that decision would cost me.  It was so bad, that I still felt like crying for days after that night.  I remember being in my car the next day and calling one of our youth leadership team and a close personal friend of ours, and just crying down the telephone as I recounted the previous night to them. 

 

It was also around this time that I was sitting in my backyard, reading my Bible during a week off work that the Lord spoke to me and told me it was time to stop leading the youth work in our church.  Now this was something which had the potential to have an even bigger impact than leaving the band, because I would need to know who the Lord wanted to replace me, as this was the agreement that I had made with Him – that I would willingly step down from leading the youth work whenever He told me who it was that He wanted to take my place.  And so He did – right there and then.  But the acid test was yet to come; for every time I had previously floated the idea of giving up youth work to my wife, she would argue very strongly that now was not the time and that I couldn’t possibly leave the young people at such a crucial stage in their development – an argument that she would always win I hasten to add.  Grace stepped out of the house a few moments after I felt God had spoken to me, and I knew this was the moment to test the waters.  If Grace agreed, then this surely had to be God’s will; if she did her usual “But…” speech, then I would pass it of as another whim of my own.

“I think God has just asked me to give up the youth work.  And He’s even told me who He wants to take it over.”

I waited with baited breath.

“Ok.  If that’s what you feel.”  She replied without even turning from the washing that she was presently hanging on the line.

A miracle if ever I saw, or heard one! 

 

And so I began to make the more complicated plans in order to mentor the person that God had planned to take my place, and eventually hand over the reigns within the year.  

 

It was a few days after announcing that I was leaving the band however, that the Lord began to say some more things to me; only this time He was trying to get me to literally “sit down and shut up”.

 

I was sitting in our church's Tuesday night prayer meeting when I found myself, once again, reading the Psalms.  This time I was reading Psalm 37.  I remember reading verse 4:

 

“Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart”,

and thinking to myself “Lord give me that verse”, but not feeling anything special about it; but then reading verse 7 where it says:

 

“Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him.” 

 

Immediately, upon reading that verse, I felt the tell tale feeling that God wanted me to take notice of it. What ensued in my head at this point however, was a fairly desperate round of pleading from my behalf for God to give me verse 4 instead; because, quite frankly, it sounded a lot nicer and didn’t imply any of this “having to wait around patiently” business, which just did not sound like a whole heap of fun to me.  But the more I argued and pleaded, the more I felt drawn to verse 7; and so I did what any normal, “whole hearted disciple” of Jesus Christ would do in this circumstance – I totally ignored it.

 

That, however, was far from the end of the matter for if there is one thing that I have learned about God through my years of trusting in Him, it is this: He is very persistent, and a few days later He dramatically reinforced Psalm 37 v 7.

 

“You have no idea what you just said to me” I told her

 

I was visiting the house of a couple who have been close friends of mine since our school days.  I was in the middle of a brief synopsis of what had been happening in my life in recent days when my friend interrupted me and said something that I will never forget: she said that I had to just settle down and wait for things to happen.  I looked at her and nodded thoughtfully and began to make some, what I thought was a profound reply to her comment, when she got very agitated and told me that I “wasn’t listening” and that I had to “be quiet for a time!”  I stopped and stared at her in complete shock as I began to process the words that had just leapt from her mouth.  She looked at me in a slightly embarrassed expectation, as if she could quite believe what she had said herself and the way in which she had said it. 

“You have no idea what you just said to me” I told her, and went on to explain what I felt God had been saying to me about resting and waiting patiently for Him.  Upon hearing that what she had actually had some real significance for me, she relaxed into a state of, what I can only describe as mild shock.  You see, my friend does not claim to have any faith in God, and so for her to be used in such a way to convey a message  that I believed was directly from God, came as quite a surprise to her to say the least.  But that is not where her part in the story ends as you will soon see, but I am getting ahead of myself.

 

So, as a result of being told quite emphatically by God to rest and wait, I embarked on a new routine of getting up and hour earlier every morning before going to work.  Now that last sentence reads a lot easier than it actually was, because believe me…this really did hurt.  I am not a natural early riser.  I am one of those people who seem to need to get a full eight hours of sleep each night, and then some.  My friends used to laugh at me because of my obsession with having to get a daily “Power nap” of at least twenty minutes.  I used to go on ministry trips throughout the UK with a friend of mine, who would chuckle as he explained to the various hosts who would be looking after us, that he could tell when I needed to steal away for my daily nap, because I would adopt a strange “far away” look in my eyes and would begin to talk complete gibberish (not to be confused with the times when I look reasonably coherent and talk complete gibberish).  He also discovered that I was also highly susceptible to suggestion at these vulnerable times and would begin singing silly songs in an effort to get them embedded into my brain and therefore cause me to be singing them myself for the rest of the day.  A tactic, which I am sad to say, was all too successful.

 

Each morning the radio would buzz into life at 5:30am and I, after having the now routine petulant argument in my head, would bundle myself out of bed and straight downstairs, pausing only to switch the kettle on for my first religious observance of the day – my cup of tea.  And this was how I began to start my day before heading off to work; a routine that would prove to be crucial to what God was doing in my life and integral to what He wanted to say to me, especially with regard to the songs that I would write that would eventually end up being recorded for the Whisper album.

 

But the very thought of recording an album was the furthest thing from my mind as I began to respond to God’s call to “Rest and wait”.  It was early September when God spoke to me and prompted me to begin spending more time with Him; and by this stage, after making the mental decision to begin laying down all that I was active in with regards to voluntary church work, I was beginning to come to the conclusion that music was not the way forward for me. 

 

Late in August, as all these strange changes in my life seemed to be gathering momentum, I had the opportunity of speaking at our church’s Sunday morning service, something which I very rarely got to do.  I found out the previous week before the service and so spent the week running up to it thinking about what I should speak on.  It was while I was driving along one of the usual routes that I would take on particular mornings, that I felt my attention being drawn to a large embankment up ahead on the opposite side of the road.  As I passed it I felt God tell me to take a look at it and tell Him what I saw?  Now because this was late summer and we had had quite a dry few weeks (which in itself is very unusual occurrence for Ireland) the embankment was very distinctive its appearance.  Earlier in the summer a fire had burned away all the vegetation and left it blackened and scorched and so I glanced at it and recall thinking “Oh…it’s all burned.”  But then I felt the Lord say to me “Look more closely.  What do you see?” 

So I looked again and noticed that dotted all across that blackened piece of ground were shoots of bright green grass pushing through the charred soil. 

“Wow” I said, “New grass.”

Then I felt the Lord say something to me that I had never seen before.  He told me that this was exactly the same grass that had been there previously, except that now it was new and fresh.  The old grass was just the same as the new grass only it had become matted, tangled and dull.  He then said told me to speak from Ezekiel 20 v 45 – 48, where it talks about God starting a fire in the southern forest*, and that I was to tell the people that if they were willing to give up what they cherished the most and hand it back to God in faith, that He would burn it away in order to restore it again, only it would be new and fresh, just like the new grass on the embankment.  The other interesting thing was that this was the year when some really huge fires had broken out across many of the western states of the U.S. and the news reports were all over our television screens.  So that’s exactly what I spoke on, and there was a tangible reaction from our congregation with many people responding to God’s call on their own lives.

 

This led me to a conclusion – perhaps God is calling me out of youth work and music, so I can devote myself to speaking, or dare I even say it…proper preaching!   

 

I just didn’t believe that there was any real and lasting value in Christian music

 

 

This had now become my new desire.  I truly believed that God was calling me to preach.  I even went as far as to convince myself that Christian musical ministry could not possibly achieve as much as preaching could – I just didn’t believe that there was any real and lasting value in Christian music.  This belief of mine was highlighted to me just before Christmas of 2000, when my wife, who was watching me very closely as I was wrestling with these new changes of direction in my life, asked me what I thought I would end up doing as far as Christian ministry was concerned.  I was walking up our stairs at the time and replied that I didn’t know; though while I was answering with my mouth, my head was playing a movie of me standing up in front of a packed stadium of preaching my heart out while the wind gently tossed my impressively sculpted hair – I was going to be the new Billy Graham!  My wife, however, thought something completely different, but I was not to discover this until much later.

 

Christmas passed and my early morning routine persisted, even if my enthusiasm for it didn’t.  I waited for the invitations to speak to pour in, but nothing came. 

“What are you doing Lord?”  I would constantly complain. 

“Surely You didn’t call me out of all those important areas of service just to sit around did You?”

No reply.

Every morning I would get up, make my cup of tea, get myself comfortable in my “Holy chair” and read my Bible, make notes in my journal and pray – but still no direction from God.

What was I to do?  That’s all I wanted to know.  What did God want me to do?

As the days and weeks passed by, I became more and more frustrated with the fact that God wasn’t giving me my next assignment.  Everything I had learned about Christianity so far had taught me that in order to be an effective Christian, I had to get busy serving Him; but now He was just getting me to sit around without any real purpose.

What’s my job Lord?  Where’s my ministry?

 

For six months God said absolutely nothing to me.

 

Well…let me correct that, because He actually did say an awful lot to me; it is just that He simply seemed to be deliberately avoiding the issue of telling me what He wanted me to do - and yet all this time I was still getting up early, reading my Bible and making my journal entries.  I even began to refer to this time as my “Desert experience” thinking that this was a time of emptiness, but something began to dawn on me very slowly during this period as I became more introspective.

 

Here is one of my journal entries from that time:

 

Dec 12th 2000

 

I came out of the summer expecting a new era of service was beginning in my life, and this is what has happened.  I expected a promotion to grander arenas – God is bringing me to grandest arena – the arena where my heart is enlarged for Him.  I must go inwards in order for Him to work outwards through me.  This can only happen in the quiet place.

 

I still believed that I was going to receive a new assignment, but now I was beginning to think that God was making me depend on Him in order to release that calling through me.  So I continued my early morning vigils, continuing to read through the Old Testament, especially the writings of the old testament prophets and the Psalms.

 

Then, as if coming round in a full circle, I found myself once again reading Psalm 37 v 7, only this time I was reading from a different translation which put it like this:

 

Be still in the presence of the Lord and wait patiently for Him to act

NLT

 

Here is my journal entry for that morning:

 

Feb 6th 2001

 

This is what I need to cultivate on my wilderness journey.  Now I know for sure that this is what I am on.  I have been looking at Elijah again.  I didn’t realise that he had travelled to Mount Sinai, the “mountain of God”, and that it took him 40 days and 40 nights.  There he met with God, and this is my desire.  I can only hope and pray that my journey will culminate with me meeting my Saviour and God.  “Be still”

 

It’s still somewhat of a surprise to me even now to once again read this entry because, as I was about to discover, I was indeed about to have my encounter with the Lord Himself, and much sooner that I realised.

 

It was like a light had been switched on in my head.

 

February the 6th 2001 was a Tuesday, and that meant that it was Bible study and prayer meeting night at our church.  As usual I was perched on a seat on the front row of one of the smaller rooms of our church complex.  Our Pastor had just finished the Bible study and we were now concentrating on prayer.  Normally I love active prayer times, and often contribute, but this particular night I felt an overwhelming compulsion to remain quiet – to be still.  As I sat and thought about all that had been going on in my life over the last six months, and how I had been fighting the frustration of not being given a ministry to do, a profound thought floated across my mind: all this time I had been lamenting the fact that God had asked me to give up the very things that I felt defined who I was, but I had not seen the benefits of what God's request.  Yes He had asked me to give certain activities up and hand them back to Him, but He had also released me from the responsibilities of those jobs – the pressure was off!  Ever since I had given my life to serve Jesus in His church, I had lived with the constant pressure of “doing”, and with all this doing come all the usual suspects, like fatigue, criticism, fear, anxiety, doubt as well as the pressure of other people’s expectations as well as my own.  So it suddenly dawned on me – I was free!  The only responsibility I had was to spend time with Jesus.  It was like a light had been switched on in my head.

 

So, in my head, I began to talk to Jesus and I told Him that I didn’t care anymore if He didn’t want me to do anything for Him ever again.  I said that I wouldn’t even pick up a guitar and lead the worship in our little mid-week service if that was what He wanted, because all I wanted to do was be with Him and keep on enjoying these mornings we were spending together.  I told Him I didn’t care about a ministry because I just wanted to be with Him – and I meant it.

 

At this point a few things happened all at once.  In what must have been a mere nanosecond of time I suddenly, in my minds eye, was in desert; it was dark and I was crouching beside a small camp fire.  Crouching beside me was the Lord!  I just knew it was Him.  He was looking at me and giving me a wry smile as He nodded, reached out and placed His hand on my right shoulder as if to say “Now you’ve got it.”

 

Then I found myself thinking about Elijah and how he had panicked when Queen Jezebel had threatened his life resulting in him running deep into the desert.  I recalled in the story how he had fallen into a despairing sleep under a tree, only to be woken by an angel who had made him some food.  The angel told Elijah to eat because the journey ahead was long and he would need the strength.  This happened twice, and then Elijah continued on his journey.  Most translations of the Bible say that the angel prepared bread for Elijah, whereas one says that the angel baked Elijah a cake.

 

The Lord then spoke to me.  (When I say spoke to me, what I mean is this: it was like someone planting completely coherent thoughts into my mind – it was like having a conversation with someone in my mind.)  The Lord told me that He had baked me a cake!  He said that for the last six months He had been feeding me because the next leg of my journey would be a long one and that it would ultimately bring me home to Him.  He had baked me a cake!  This completely blew me away.  I was so excited, and rushed straight out of the church at the conclusion of the service so that I could go home and get straight to bed because I just wanted it to be morning again so that I could spend time with the Lord – just the King and I.

 

Here’s my journal entry from that next morning:

 

Feb 7th 2001

 

Only in the desert are distractions gone.  No choice but to wait on God.  Any water or nourishment must come from Him, so there is not even the distraction of searching for these things.  I need this if I am to know Him.  He is merciful – to lead me here, to meet with Him.  I’m starting to like it here!

 

The days that followed really caught me by surprise in many ways because I began to write songs again.  This may not seem that strange an occurrence for a musician and singer, but up until this point I had had absolutely no desire to be involved in any form of musical ministry up since the summer of the previous year, and to be honest, writing songs was somewhat of a sporadic occurrence for me at the best of times.  But now they were just flowing out of me on a daily basis.  I had never before felt so invigorated and renewed.  It had been many years since I had experienced such a high level of enthusiasm for music.

 

I can’t over state how much of a surprise it was for me to be writing so freely.  I had never had such a prolific time of song writing before and I really felt as though I was riding the crest of a wave that had suddenly come my way. 

 

Feb 13th 2001

 

Ever since writing that “I like it here” in this desert place, I seem to be moving out of it at high speed.  I have a new energy and enthusiasm….this is not the direction I expected, but lately, I hadn’t really expected any direction and didn’t mind either.  Perhaps that’s what opened the door for God to lead me?

 

It was a week or so after all these revelations that God provided the real finishing touch to what He had been doing in my life at this time.  I was again visiting my friend and bringing her up to speed on all that had been happening, when she shared something with me that had been on her mind.  She said that for the previous few weeks, each time we had chatted, she kept having a phrase run through her mind, and that she felt that she had to tell me.  She also confessed that she was afraid that in telling me, I would think she was slightly mad, but also if she didn’t then she herself was in danger of going mad because she couldn’t get it out of her head.  I told her not to worry and encouraged her to tell me what the phrase was; so she did.

 

“Scorched earth”

 

She looked at me hopefully and asked if it meant anything to me. 

 

I nodded thoughtfully and said “Well…I have been describing this journey over the last months as a kind of desert experience – very dry and barren.”

 

She nodded and said “Like a scorched earth policy?”

 

It was then that I got a bit confused, because although I had been likening my experience to time in a desert, a desert is a natural phenomena, whereas a scorched earth policy refers to a deliberate act of arson carried out on a piece of land.  It’s the kind of tactic retreating armies would adopt to hinder the advance of invaders.  When we parted I left with a strange feeling that there was something more to this that I was missing, but then quickly pushed it to the back of my mind, until a few days later.

 

Suddenly it all became clear

 

Grace and I were travelling back from Belfast from a resource exhibition that we had been visiting when the Holy Spirit let me in on a little secret.  We had just pulled of the motorway and were approaching a roundabout when God again switched that giant light of His on in my head.  I heard my friend’s strange phrase again “Scorched earth” and suddenly it all became clear.  I remembered the morning I had preached at our Sunday morning service the previous August, when God had prompted me to tell the congregation that if they were willing to let go of what they held dear, then He would burn them away in order to give it back again – new and fresh.  God then told me that He had taken my music and burned it away, so that He could give it back to me new and fresh!  God Himself had carried out an act of “Scorched earth” on me!  Wow!  

 

Upon returning home I hurriedly called my friend and told her what God had said, which resulted in varying waves of shock, surprise and bewilderment emanating from the other end of the telephone.

 

And so the new songs just kept coming; and the more I began to write, the more I couldn’t get away from the feeling that I needed to do something with them, that I just couldn’t leave them lying around in the back of some file somewhere.  I began to think that perhaps now was the time to record. Again this was a quantum leap in my thinking because I had never ever considered being a solo artist.  All my previous musical work had been with other people being involved, and so the thought of doing something on my own was quite a daunting prospect.  Where was I going to record?  Who was going to help me?  Who would play bass, keys, guitars? 

 

So I pitched my idea to a friend of mine who was the guitarist in Ascension, the band I was part of for many years.  We had recorded two albums as a band, the second of which was recorded in Mark’s house as he was beginning to experiment with recording equipment.  He agreed to help me bring the project to fruition and so we set about the process of recording.

 

The actual recording took place over the next year as, because we were both holding down full time jobs at the time, we were limited to a maximum of two evenings a week and the occasional Saturday.

 

Finally however, “Whisper” was completed and released a year later in 2002.  All of the songs contained in the album came as a direct result of that time I spent just waiting on God, and many of them reflect some of the things He was saying to me during those months. 

 

The album itself is essentially about the importance and necessity of listening for what God wants to say to us.  A close friend of mine who is now a Pastor tells me often that “Whisper” is like reading someone’s journal; which I suppose is completely accurate because it is basically my journal from that particular season in my life.

 

It was one of the richest times of my life with regard to experiencing the tangible presence of God on a daily basis, and a period that I often look back at and long to experience again.  One of the most important things that I learned through that time is the simple fact that God just loves to spend time with us and that we can’t truly serve Him properly until we just long to be with Him.  My mistake was that I was looking to spend time with Jesus so that I could be given a ministry, and that is completely the wrong motivation. 

I must always seek Jesus first. 

 

It is all about Him and Him alone.

 

Epilogue

 

As a kind of a post script to this whole experience God had one more thing to say to me and it happened in the May after Mark and I had begun to set about recording Whisper. 

It was my birthday and I was sitting at home reading when my Father-in-law arrived to give me my birthday present.  Wishing me happy birthday, he jumped back into his car and drove off as I closed the door and proceeded to open the card he had left for me - and nearly fell over in hysterics as I read it.  There, on the inside of the card, was printed a verse from the Bible…from Psalm 37…only this time it was the one God wouldn’t let me have the previous year – verse 4:

 

“Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.”

 

Who says that God doesn’t have a sense of humour?