Saturday I was blowing leaves off of my chicken coop roof, when my left ring finger got caught in the mulcher end of the blower. It crushed and mangled it a bit--I found out in the hospital, after the X-ray, that I lost some bone.
It was terrifying to think about my future! Consider how much depends on the use of one's finger, especially as a musician! I struggled with anxiety as my daughter's boyfriend Ian rushed me into Emergency.
I prayed the whole way in, and felt like God was reminding me that I am His, as He is mine. I trust Him, and I laid myself in His hands to use however He sees fit. With or without a finger, I will choose to worship Him and seek His glory.
It was so curious and providential that the scripture song I had recorded that week was All Things Work, from Romans 8. I kept reciting that verse all the way in.
Fortunately, I was seen quickly, and only lost the tip, and about 3/4s of my nail. I won't be able to play for some time. The pain is pretty bad, even three days later. I am typing with one hand, which makes things clumsy and annoying.
But I was still able to lead worship at my church, and felt full of praise for the God who loves us so much!
My wife has gone to Saskatchewan again. She's there for two weeks, helping her dad recover from his knee surgery yesterday.
I love that we're in a place in life where we can give back to our parents, but it's always a challenge surviving without her. She completes the picture around here, balancing my extremes, adding love and warmth to my life...
But there is one positive. I'm forced to find things to do with my time, and so take opportunities I might otherwise not.
For example, yesterday afternoon I decided to go to Gould Lake Conservation Area, via the back exit on Wagon Trail Road, and record some video with one of my long lenses. I really missed the woods this winter! Unlike past years, I hadn't made many forays into the forest in the cold months!
I sat on the grass, letting the sun shine down on my back, looking for pretty in the nature around me. I hope you like the video I've included above. If you want to see more of my nature recording (some of which is not in the lyric video), it's available at this link.
Another example of me pushing a bit out of my comfort zone is going out for dinner with Grace, my oldest daughter. My son Lucas and his wife Sorieda came along, and after a burger, we went to Home Depot to buy some electrical boxes, switches, lights and outlets for their home renovation. Good fun!
Thanks to my friends here, who have been so sweet and generous. It's good to meet the community on Patreon, and I appreciate everyone very much!
This week I dusted off an old recording from John 15, and remixed it, added some more instruments including another acoustic guitar and a drum kit.
If I recall correctly, all or most of John 15 has been written, and then recorded poorly, so over the next few weeks I may do this for the rest of those tracks.
It hadn't been released to stores yet, so I created an album cover for it as well.
Years ago (2013, actually) I signed up for GodTube thinking it might generate a new audience for my music. Today I did a password reset, logged in and uploaded a couple of my recent videos. I have no idea if there are any real people using the video site, but I suspect there are a few!
If you have an account at GodTube, I'd love a follow!
Lady Wisdom has something to tell us: if we want to really live, we should eat at her table.
In my research for this video, I discovered that scholars often look to the Epistle of James to see what the "seven pillars of wisdom" are, mentioned in the Proverbs.
I tried to demonstrate some of those seven pillars, such as purity, peace-loving, gentleness, submissive reasonableness, good fruits, impartiality, and sincerity.
These are hard things to describe in picture only, but I hope you'll find the pencil crayon drawings peaceful and moving.
Lyrics:
Wisdom has built her house;
She has set up its seven pillars.
She has prepared her meat and mixed her wine;
She's also set her table.
She has sent out her servants, and she
Calls from the highest point of the city,
Let all who are simple come to my house!
To those who have no sense she says,
Come, eat my food
And drink the wine I've mixed.
Leave your simple ways and you will live;
Come, eat my food
And drink the wine I've mixed.
Walk in the way of insight.
Instrumental
Let all who are simple come to my house!
To those who have no sense she says,
Come, eat my food
And drink the wine I've mixed.
Leave your simple ways and you will live;
Come, eat my food
And drink the wine I've mixed.
Walk in the way of insight.
Lately I've been feeling kind of burned out, and so I've decided to not record a song and video today.
It's hard for me to make this decision, and to interrupt my consistent schedule, because of the responsibility I feel to you, a financial supporter of this work. I hope you understand.
For the free level members, I hope you'll consider upgrading and supporting what I do.
Your support is a way to affirm the value of my work. Lately I've felt like the quality of my music and production is increasing but the interest, views, and listens are diminishing.
Thanks to all my brothers and sisters who have so faithfully been there over the years!
I've now completed the video for this new song based on Job 23:8-12. I tried to do something a little different this time, creating a style that is popular with my daughter Grace, who loves Studio Ghibli and other Japanese anime.
The videos shows a young man travelling east, west, north, and south, city and country, among many people and all alone. In each of these scenes he is seeking God. Like Job, the young man finds that even when God is hard to find, he is right there with him and knows his footsteps.
When I was trying to create this video, I kept running out of "credits" with Grok Imagine. Fortunately a few people donated their credits to create some of these scenes.
This week I decided to record Job 23:8-12, the verse in which the man Job describes his relationship to God. He explains that although he can travel all over the earth and not see God, he knows that God is with him wherever he goes.
It's weird sometimes how these songs kind of grow and evolve while recording them. It just felt like it needed to sound like this, sort of a synthy style, reminiscent again of the 80s.
The video that accompanies it is nearly done, and I'll probably get it uploaded by Monday. It's sort of Anime-animation in style.
I hope you like it!
Here are the lyrics:
If I go east,
He is not there,
And if I go west,
I can't perceive him.
When he is at work to the north,
I cannot see him;
When he turns south,
I cannot find him.
Yet he knows the way I have taken;
When he's tested me, I'll come out pure gold.
My feet have followed in his footsteps and
I have kept to his way and not turned aside.
Instrumental
I've not departed
From the commands
From his lips;
From his lips.
I've treasured the words from his mouth
More than my daily food.
Cause he knows the way I have taken;
When he's tested me, I'll come out pure gold.
My feet have followed in his footsteps and
I have kept to his way and not turned aside.
Here's the lyric video I put together for this song. Sorry it wasn't ready to go last Friday, but I know you lovely people don't really get bent out of shape over these things! :)
I just like to be responsible to you for your generosity.
I'm really enthusiastic about my newest song, right in time for Good Friday and Easter! It's such a profound prophecy written 800 years before Jesus was born!
Imagine that! 800 years before Jesus the prophet Isaiah wrote many details about the nature of his life and ministry!
I've included both the mp3 and the video here. I pray it's useful for you and your devotional life, that it inspires you in your love of Jesus, and your desire to proclaim the Gospel to everyone you interact with!
Let us remain in Him and devote ourselves to His glory! He truly is the Name above all names!
My newest album just dropped today, my collection of Colossians songs.Recent Release: Colossians Songs
Yes, I have been releasing them as singles as I recorded or remastered them, but now the entire group is packaged in a single album.
It's available on all the major streaming platforms from Amazon to Spotify to Apple Music, so I would really appreciate if you took some time to check out these songs, listen to them, share them, playlist them.
All such interactions will let the algorithms know that this music has potential to be enjoyed by other people.
God bless you, and thanks for your support! Maybe you enjoy Him forever!
I'm really excited about my next song, from Isaiah 53. It started out kind of weak, and for a while I was wondering if it would work at all. I managed to stay with it, tweak it, add some instrumentation, sound effects, etc., and now it's one of my favourites!
Be sure to sign up to my newsletter if you haven't already, so you are alerted when it comes out! Right now I'm planning for the week before Good Friday.
This is later than usual because I struggled so much with the video this week. I tried using AI again to generate the Apostle John. I pictured him listening to Jesus teaching these spiritual truths, and then writing it out for us to read generations later, but it wasn't meant to be.
In the end I settled on a simple lyric video with a sun spreading light across the screen. I hope that it communicates what is essential and important from this scripture.
In any case, the words stand on their own!
Oh Lord, help us to live in the light, as YOU are in the light.
My kids are often complaining about AI, and I understand. It's so hard to know what's real and what's not real nowadays, and AI is potentially putting so many people out of work.
But I've wanted to be able to create story videos like this for a long time now, and haven't been able to because 3D animation takes SO long. But no I spent about 8 or 10 hours collecting short video clips from Grok Imagine AI and splicing them together. I needed to be clear and descriptive with every prompt I used to ensure that weird artifacts weren't introduced, but it was fulfilling and even fun!
I hope you aren't offended by my use of AI for this video. I'm not certain I'll be doing a lot of this in the future, but it was so helpful as a tool to tell a story on a shoe-string budget (it only cost me my yearly X membership fee).
If you're curious about the imagery, you might notice that often Jonah is portrayed as a type of Christ. Jesus himself referred to his life in light of Jonah. Jonah also sacrificed himself for the men on the boat, drew non-Jews to God, and was in the whale for three days and three nights, referring to his time as "in the pit."
God bless you patrons, thank you for supporting my effort to share the Kingdom with everyone!
Beautiful-wife and I just celebrated our 32nd anniversary. A happy life making babies, laughing, loving, even some tears along the way. 4 kids later, we look into each other's eyes and see the hope of many more adventures! Here's to future grandkids, future dreams, future love!
I finally decided to upgrade my Internet. I had a conversation with a new friend recently who had Starlink by Space X, and while we chatted, I looked up the price. They were now offering free hardware rental, and so I decided to buy it on-the-spot!
Unfortunately, it wasn't as simple to get things set up and working, because there are a lot of trees and other obstructions on my property. The device has to have open sky in order for optimum performance as it connects to satellites in space.
I was going to put it on my roof as soon as the snow melted, since it can be a bit treacherous climbing up! I figured it could be left on my back outside stairway until things thawed. Yesterday it snowed quite badly, and the built-in heater didn't do a good job of keeping the ice and snow off of it. Not a good sign, especially once it's on the roof and out of reach!
Nevertheless, things seemed to be going along fairly well. I decided to call Worldline and cancel my DSL. They asked me if I would rather switch to fibre optiic, an option which wasn't available to me before! The speed is even better than Starlink, and it's nearly the exact price I'm paying now for DSL (nearly $90 a month)!
It cost $200 to buy the modem outright, or $10 a month to just rent it.
I can get monthly unlimited fibre optic at 500Mb/s for $89 a month (upload AND download)
...or 1Gig/s speed for $99.95 per month (up and down)
Compared to the Starlink's $140 a month, and dealing with snow and ostructions it's tempting to just go fibre.
Here's the kicker though... apparently Worldline dropped monthly DSL prices to $60 but didn't bother telling me! In my opinion, it's bad business to treat a loyal customer this way. I understand that they want to make as much money as possible, but this shows such a disdain for public-relations.
I asked them to "make it right," and apparently I'll hear back within two business days. It remains to be seen whether I stay with Starlink or switch to fibre-optic.
For those of you who are supporters and patrons, I'm sorry this didn't get out to you earlier. Although I see from stats and analytics that only one or two patrons ever watch my content before it goes live, I still feel responsible to give you a return for your hard-earned money.
Thank you.
This is my video for "Ministry of Reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:16-21)" which came out in stores today. I tried to find stock footage of a foot-bridge, as the idea of a bridge can be a metaphor for the job Christ has done for us in reconciling the world to God. In a similar way, we are to be a bridge like Jesus was, helping the world to see Him and find Him.
I pray this scripture-song is a blessing to you, and useful as you grow in him!
I didn't manage to get a video done for next week yet, but I have found the time to finish writing and recording my next song taken from 2 Corinthians 5:16-21. It's called "Ministry of Reconciliation," and I've slated to release it for January 9th, only 6 days from today! In fact, I just uploaded it to my distributor, so hopefully all goes fine.
God bless you, and thanks for your help in spreading the word on my ministry!
~Jason
The next Colossians song has now been reworked, re-recorded, and remastered! This is a powerful scripture reminding believers to put on love in all interactions.
As a personal reflection on this scripture, I love the reminder Paul is giving us: we all once walked in the bad habits of the flesh, and we've been set free from the bondage that holds us captive! It's almost like we need to think of the characteristics of our faith as clothing-- we "put on" the new self, which is in process; it's "BEING" renewed.
5 Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. 6 On account of these the wrath of God is coming. 7 In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. 8 But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. 9 Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. 11 Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all.
12 Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, 13 bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. 14 And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.
Recently I noticed that if I'm viewing my discography on the streaming sites, my singles don't show up unless you click the "Singles and EPs" button.
Rather, my albums get the primary focus, and that's a bit of a problem since my last two albums ("Christmas 'Round the Piano" and "HYMNS one") are not very good and don't get very many plays.
Nowadays musicians don't really release albums, but rather singles, as it is easier to get attention on individual songs rather than groups of songs. After finishing with Galatians, I've released twenty-two singles since July 2025.
So I have decided to re-release all of my Galatians songs as an entire album, so that they get more visibility. That's 28 songs on one album, which is kinda crazy! But it continues in the pattern I set with Love the Psalms, Songs to the Church in Ephesus, and Hey! Philippi.
When I'm done with Colossians (only three songs away from completion!) I'll do the same with that collection.
Thanks for all you do to support me and spread the word! God bless you!
Beautiful-wife and I just celebrated our 32nd anniversary. A happy life making babies, laughing, loving, even some tears along the way. 4 kids later, we look into each other's eyes and see the hope of many more adventures! Here's to future grandkids, future dreams, future love!
