Here are two features on Steven Curtis Chapman. The first is Phil's take on his story, followed by an "Innerview" with Steven. Enjoy...and let us know what you think.

Desperate Hope

It is 5 PM on a Wednesday. May, 2008. In the playground just up the hill from the home of recording artist Steven Curtis Chapman, his five-year-old daughter Maria struggles to reach the monkey bars. Her sisters try to help, but can’t lift her high enough. If only 17-year-old brother Will were around; he always drops anything to play with her. “Here he comes!” shouts her sister. Maria takes off running toward the Toyota Land Cruiser and the brother she adores. Driving slowly up the long, gravel-lined driveway, Will simply does not see her coming around the corner.

For their father the next moments are still a blur. The screams and shock. Cradling Maria’s broken body. Will trying to run, trying to get as far as possible from the scene. Caleb tackling his brother and holding him down. “We love you,” Caleb consoles, then looks heavenward, crying out, “Why?” Sirens. The doctor’s numbing verdict. One child tragically gone, another battling unthinkable guilt and grief.

“I was about to drive to the hospital behind the ambulance,” Steven recalls, “when I saw Will crumbled up in a ball on the ground with his brother holding him. I rolled the window down and yelled, ‘Will Franklin, your father loves you.’ And I remember thinking, God, you can’t ask this of my family. This is too much. We can’t do this.

Maria Sue (pictured with Steven below), the youngest of six and one of three daughters the Chapmans had adopted from China, was dead.

Goodbye is not the end

Ten years ago, at the funeral of three teens killed in his hometown of Paducah , Kentucky , Steven sang, “We can grieve with hope. We can say goodbye with hope, because we know goodbye is not the end.” Now he found himself asking, “What does the hope of the gospel really look like in the face of death and despair?” He had lost a close friend and grieved the divorce of his parents but if that was the deep end of the pool of grief, this was the bottom of the ocean.

The story quickly traveled the world. Condolences poured in. But there were no words to describe the depth of their loss.

“In the first hours and days it felt like there was a black hole drawing me in to despair and utter hopelessness,” he remembers. “I knew if I went in there would be no way out.” In desperation Steven chose to say, “God, I trust you. You give, you take away, blessed be the name of the Lord. I’m putting my hope in you.” The words pulled him back from the edge. “I could breathe again. Then other moments would come and I couldn’t breathe and I didn’t even want to any more. So I’d suck in enough air to make those declarations again. That’s what’s kept us alive.”

As they gathered around little Maria’s body, Steven’s wife Mary Beth told her children: “This is something that destroys many families and we will not allow it to destroy us. We will trust God and we will walk through this holding onto each other.” They held hands and made an oath that they would honor their sister by honoring the One who gave her to them.

Survival became a daily process of asking, “Am I going to let this make me better or bitter?” With his customary honesty, Chapman admits, “There are moments and days when I’m not sure which one it is and I think, God, I’m so confused about who you are and your ways. I don’t know what to pray, how to pray or even why to pray. That’s when I have to decide all over again to declare my trust in God.”

Digging into the Psalms, he was consoled by the “schizophrenia” of David. “In the same breath he says, ‘How long, O Lord, where are you? What’s going on?’ Then suddenly he’s saying, ‘Soul, why are you so downcast? Hope in God.’ I used to wonder if he was crazy. But suddenly now, he’s me.”

The two ways of tragedy

Since releasing his first record in 1987, Chapman has seen faithful listeners propel sales of his 21 albums past 10 million copies while he has accepted 5 Grammys and 56 Dove awards—more than any artist in history. But nothing about success prepares you for tragedy.

Ten days before the horror of that Wednesday, Maria had blown out the candles on her fifth birthday cake. Hours earlier, the family celebrated the engagement of daughter Emily and were preparing for a high school graduation party for Caleb, not knowing that they were about to discover the truth in Oswald Chambers’ words: “Agony means severe suffering in which something dies. No man is the same after an agony; he is always better or worse.”

Steven understands the truth. “Someone once said that trouble and tragedy fall into our life in one of two ways: they either fall between us and God and push us away from him and deeper into ourselves in search of something else to give us comfort, or they fall outside of us and push us to God, into that place of hoping and trusting in him. If we are coming through this any better as a family, it is because God has carried us as we have declared our trust and dependence on him. You think you’ll never make another day. But the next morning his mercies are new again.

“I’ve never been more desperate to know that the hope of the gospel is true. Everything you thought you knew is called out into this place of pain and you can’t throw any of the answers from the past at it because somehow it’s deeper than words. You can only say, ‘God is faithful. God is with us. He knows the plans he has for us and they ultimately are to give us a hope and a future.’”

When someone commented, “I wonder what songs will come out of this,” Steven thought, Are you kidding? No song is going to come out of this. But as surely as David cried out to God in desperation, the grieving father found himself doing the same. The result was “Beauty Will Rise,” a CD Chapman calls his Psalms.

“These were not even intended to be songs. They were just me crying out, ‘God, I’ve never longed for heaven like I do now. I feel guilty because I know the joy of heaven is supposed to be seeing your face but you know what’s in my heart. You know I’m just desperate to see the face of my little girl.

“One song says, ‘I’ve dropped anchor in your promises and I’m holding on.’ I thought I dropped an anchor 30 years ago when I became a follower of Jesus, but now I’m dropping it daily, sometimes hourly, sometimes every 15 minutes. David keeps throwing out that anchor over and over again because the winds have blown and he’s smashing into the rocks. For me it’s a declaration, driving a stake in the ground, screaming it in the dark sometimes.

“I wondered about all God’s promises I’d sung through the years. Are they true? Do I believe them? Tragedy strips away all the illusions and shows us that our hope and comfort is not to be anchored in this world but in the promises of God for the day when he will wipe every tear from our eyes.”

Open doors

The tragedy has opened doors to share the hope of the gospel in unexpected places. After the family appeared on Larry King Live, Larry said to them, “I don’t know how you guys have this hope. I wish I could have it.”

“Mr. King,” young Caleb told him, “you can have this hope and I’m going to pray that you find it.”

“Because God in his sovereignty allows things that we would never script for ourselves,” believes Chapman, “we can tell these stories and see how he is in the process of lifting up his name.”

Six years ago, after adopting their first daughter from China, Steven and Mary Beth founded the Shaohannah’s Hope Ministry to help families reduce the financial barrier of adoption. They were just returning home from a visit to China two weeks before Maria’s death when a massive earthquake hit. After their lives were rocked by their own personal earthquake, they sensed the need to go back and share God’s comfort at the opening of Maria’s Big House of Hope, a medical center they had built for special needs orphans. Chinese government officials listened as the Chapmans shared their daughter’s story and the hope they had found in Christ.

Maria provided much of the laughter in the Chapman home and the family is learning to laugh again. “You wonder if you will,” says Steven, “and if you’ll actually feel okay about it. That’s another weird part of the journey, feeling bad when you have a really good time. But that’s where the hope of heaven comes in. We believe our little girl is laughing and we’re just on this side of that veil.”

Maria left a little reminder that he may be right. “The day after the accident, we went home to get clothes for the funeral. Sitting on the art table was a little picture Maria had drawn the previous morning. It was of a six-petaled flower. We have six children. One petal was colored and on it she wrote the word ‘see.’ She had never written that word before. I think she was saying, ‘See, I’m okay.’”

“Cinderella,” Chapman’s most popular song ever, was inspired by his daughters Maria and Stevie Joy. With its challenge to parents to seize the moments because “one day the clock will strike midnight and she’ll be gone,” it was Maria’s favorite. The first time he returned to the concert stage, he changed the ending and sang: “The clock will strike midnight…but the dance will go on.”

“Stevie Joy asked me if fairy tales are true. I told her the greatest fairy tale really isn’t a fairytale but there is a happily ever after. It’s where her sister is, where we’re going to be with her for ever and ever. We will finally really be happy and everything will be right.”

Visit Steven Curtis Chapman's site

Innerview with Steven below...

Like to see Phil's article syndicated in your magazine or newspaper? Email us for info. © 2009 Phil Callaway. Click here for reprint info. Read more of Phil's articles. Phil would love to know what you think. Email...

I N N E R V I E W

Beauty Will Rise

Steven Curtis Chapman: Hey Phil, sorry, I know I’m a little bit late because I just got off the phone with my dad who’s going in today for surgery and he’s a bit concerned. So I was just praying with him. Thanks for your understanding. How’s everything in the Great White North?

Phil Callaway: Doing well. Sorry about your dad. This growing old ain’t for wimps, huh? We just said goodbye to my mom, so everything changes, doesn’t it?

Yeah, Dad has had heart problems over the last few years and they tell him, “If you’ve got any sons they’ll need to watch for this.” This wasn’t emergency surgery, but after what we’ve been through in the last year and a half, if we’ve learned anything, it’s that you really don’t have any idea what’s around the next bend except you trust that God’s there and he knows and is somehow in charge and in control of it even though it’s hard to make sense even of that at times.

The doctors are probably telling you to eat broccoli and stuff that tastes like cardboard, aren’t they?

Yeah…you’re 46 and you’re going to want to watch this in the next few years.

There’s not much about life on the road or the stress of all of this that lends itself to having a heart that lasts 150 years, is there?

[Laughs.] For sure, but it’s an interesting new perspective, you know. My wife and I talk about how we’ve never experienced the longing for heaven to the degree that we’ve come to appreciate and understand it in the last season of life. I used to read how Paul talks a lot about dying being gain and all that and thinking I could sort of grasp the concept; at least that’s how I’m supposed to think and feel. And even on hard days here, life is still pretty good. But man, you start going through enough things, especially when you lose grandparents and people you love, but when you lose a child it sure changes everything about the perspective and your readiness to be there.

This is our 20^th anniversary edition of SERVANT, which is miraculous. I certainly never set out to see that happen. But I’ve seen—as I know you have—the faithfulness of God through the years. We were brainstorming and we thought, ten years ago we had Steven Curtis Chapman on the cover and it would be kind of cool to have you again. Twenty years ago were you recording yet?

Let’s see. My first record came out in 1987, twenty-two years ago. So 20 years ago it would probably have been my third album in 1989. I can remember what was going on in my life at that time and what brought about that record. My parents got divorced—that was a big deal. So Servant started 20 years ago?

Yeah. About the same time you did. You’ve been such a blessing in our home and it means a lot to see the way you have walked with God through the years. Thanks for your faithfulness. You know twenty years ago there was no email, no internet, we were a little younger. 17 years ago I interviewed you for the first time.

Really?

Ten years ago you were going through the death of Rich Mullins, friends had lost their 8-year-old daughter, and three teens were killed in your hometown. You told me you sang at their funeral, “We can grieve with hope. We can say goodbye with hope because we know goodbye is not the end.” You said, “I asked myself, ‘What does the hope of the gospel really look like in the face of death and despair?’” Are you better able to answer that now or are you at least thinking about it more?

Yeah. It’s crazy to remember all that was going on then. That was a crash course in the hope of the gospel, the anchor as Scripture talks about, we have an anchor for the soul. I had certainly needed an anchor with my parents’ divorce and my wife and I in a crazy, wild adventure of our marriage and the unique challenges and struggles that I’ve been really honest about through the years. It wasn’t the first season of being desperate but it was at a whole new level at that time in my life. Those verses about grieving with hope came alive for me then. But if I went to the deep end of the pool then, this has been the bottom of the ocean for me and my family losing our daughter and the trauma and the tragedy and the effect on the rest of my family. Part of the hard thing about this, Phil, is that we’ve been able to speak words of encouragement and truth to people; we measure our words; we’re wordsmiths whether it’s in songs or writing. But now we’re experiencing something that there are no appropriate words, no words deep enough, sad enough, hopeful enough to really capture this and as a result I’ve found myself really frustrated at the end of a lot of interviews and vowing that would be the last one. Because I’ve tried to put words to it and afterwards I realize it just didn’t do ‘justice’ to the loss and the depth and all of that. I heard myself one day putting together the words “desperate hope” and “desperately hopeful.” I’ve never been more desperate for the hope of the gospel. I’ve never been more desperate to know that it’s true and so that is what has taken us to the depths of the ocean, to stand there and find that the bottom is solid. There is that place of everything you know or thought you know being called out into this place of pain and confusion and not being able to sit there and throw any of the answers or words from the past at it because somehow it’s deeper than words, deeper than any understanding, being able to say God is faithful and God is with us. He knows the plans he has for us and they ultimately are to give us a hope and a future.

Anything practical that has helped you?

I understand the Psalms better than I ever did before, the schizophrenia of David. I used to think, “What is this guy going through here?” In the same breath, How long, 0 Lord, where are you? God, what’s going on? And then you hear him pounding on his chest saying, “Soul, why are you so downcast? Why are you so desperate? You know God is faithful. His love is better than life!” It’s like he’s crazy. But suddenly now he’s me. I’m there now. How long, when can I go see my little girl? And in the same breath saying, “Blessed by the name of the Lord; You give and you take away. I’ll trust you, I’m desperate for you in a way I never knew and as a result I have this anchor of hope that I’ve never known could hold in such a storm, such a hurricane.”

Tragedy often leaves us speechless. As a friend of someone who’s hurting we often struggle for words or just stay away because we don’t know what to say.

I’ve told a lot of people that the most comforting thing anyone was able to say to us in the early days following the accident and Maria going to heaven was not what I expected. It was when they said, “I don’t have any words. I’m just so sorry.” That was enough. But that’s such a terrifying thing for me to not have words, to not be able to say something and wrap a bow around it, when people are desperate. I encourage people with that because that was such a profound thing for me to discover, that the most comforting and encouraging thing was not people’s attempt to put words to it but just to acknowledge that this is beyond explanation, but I’m going to sit with you.

Tell us what it was like in the first few hours after Maria died.

At the hospital emergency room with my family in the first moments and hours after we let Maria go, I remember gathering as a family and hearing my wife, obviously complete shock and disbelief and feeling like you’re in a horrible dream. But she said, “This is something that destroys many families and we will not allow it to destroy us. We will trust God and we will walk through this holding onto each other.” Hearing these words come from the completely shredded heart of my wife, that was a decision at that moment for her. We’ve realized why many families and marriages don’t survive this kind of tragedy and grief. It’s such an unnatural thing, there’s no way you can be prepared for it. So it’s a daily process for us of saying, “Am I going to let this make me better or bitter?” There are moments and days when you’re not sure which one it is and I think, God I’m so confused about who you are and your ways and days that I just don’t know what to pray, how to pray or even why to pray. And yet even then to make that decision to take courage, to declare and say, and I think that been the thing above all else for us, has been to proclaim that I trust you, I bless you.

In the first hours and days it felt like there was literally a black hole drawing me in to despair and utter hopelessness and darkness. I knew if I went in there would be no way out but I would literally feel myself getting pulled in. It was very tangible. When I closed my eyes I would think about how we were going to get through this, the damage to my little girls who witnessed everything that happened, to my son who was driving the car, to my wife who was going to carry this as a mother. And I would try to think through this and it was literally pulling me into this black hole. As I would, just out of desperation begin to say, God, I trust you. You give, you take away, blessed be the name of the Lord. I’m putting my hope in you. And as I would say those words it was like I was literally being pulled back away from that black hole. I could sense it and I could begin to breathe again. Then other moments would come and I couldn’t breathe and I didn’t even want to any more. So I’d suck in enough breath to make those declarations again. That’s what’s kept us alive as a family. If we are coming through this any better it is because God has carried us and as we have declared our trust and our dependence on him, his daily mercies have been made new for us every day. You get to the end and think I’ll never make another day. But the next morning his mercies are new again.

Oswald Chambers wrote: “Agony means severe suffering in which something dies. No man is the same after an agony; he is always better or worse. And always the first thing that opens his mind to understand the need of redemption worked out by Christ.” What separates the one who is better and the one who is worse? Was there a moment following this tragedy when you thought of “being worse?” Was there a conscious decision that, no, I am going to turn toward Christ and not toward despair?

Someone once said that when trouble and tragedy fall into our life they fall one of two ways: they either fall between us and God and push us away from him and deeper into ourselves or our despair in search of something else to give us comfort, or they fall outside of us and push us in to God, into that place of hoping and trusting in him. I wrote in one of the songs on this album, “I will trust you.” Pretty much all of the songs were written in moments of desperation, not even intended to be songs as much as just I’ve got to cry this out right now to God. One song says, “I’ve dropped anchor in your promises and I’m holding on.” I realized in this that the dropping of that anchor is a daily, sometimes hourly, sometimes every 15 minutes. Maybe I had sort of an idea that you drop an anchor one good solid time and we’re done. I dropped anchor 30 years ago when I became a follower of Jesus. When I read the Psalms I hear David throwing that anchor over and over again because the winds have blown and I’m drifting, I’m smashing into the rocks again. Recently I heard something on Jesus’ command to ‘take courage’ and the way it was presented was interesting. He’s offering courage, holding it out, it’s there but we have to take it. There’s an act involved. For me it took a singing through the words God is God—I’ve pretty much sung it at every concert since May of 2008 just because it’s become a declaration for me, driving a stake in the ground, screaming it in the dark sometimes. I’m not going run, I’m going to sit in this dark place with you.

Several people have told me that they are praying for your son, Will. How is he doing?

Really, really well. He is a walking miracle in many ways, to see the healing God has done in his heart. He’s touring with me, he’s my drummer and his older brother Caleb plays guitar. He’s been able to share his story with friends. God has done a lot in his heart over the years, but he’s never been one to share it much. I’ve watched in amazement. In some of those moments when you say, “Where are you in this, God? How are we going to hold on another season?” Then we’ll see something that’s going on in him and realize that God is there. There’s no other way to explain that. We’re always quick to say that we’re not out of the woods, with counseling for our kids, and my wife and I just spent three days, the first chance we’ve really had ourselves to just go away and sit with somebody and ask them to help us navigate through this a little further. We won’t really be out of the woods until Jesus calls us home, but it’s amazing to see how Will is doing.

I put your CD in last night, so thanks for making me cry. I was reminded of Eric Clapton who lost his son in New York years ago and went on to write “No Tears In Heaven.” Some of these songs really smacked me in the best of ways. At what point did you decide to sing about this and how hard was that?

Someone commented after the accident, I wonder what songs will come out and honestly my first thought was, are you kidding? No song is going to come out of this. I wouldn’t even attempt it. This is something so much deeper that I didn’t know if any songs would come out of me again ever. I’m going to desperately sing David’s songs, they’re the only ones I can get out any more. A few months later I did do a concert and kind of felt like what I was talking about—the power of standing and saying, this is our hope and this is what we believe. I don’t understand it but this is our anchor and what’s keeping us breathing and alive. And the more I sang it and said it and worshipped with people to say we bless the name of the Lord and we trust him, there was a healing and a strength that began to come. When Michael W. Smith and I began to do the tour together, that was a gift that God brought us together to worship every night. I didn’t have to be the guy who led it, but just to stand with my brother and make those declarations night after night. Those were just important moments to survival for me. And out of that, I never sat down and said I should write a song now. But on this CD are my Psalms. I’ve thought of David many times and I’m sure he never thought, I wonder how this is going to translate into the NIV.. He was just crying his guts out to his God in desperation. And that’s what started to happen for me. These songs were really just me saying, “God, here’s what’s in my heart. I know what heaven’s supposed to be. I’ve never wanted more to know what heaven looks like, what’s going on there, but you know my heart and I know heaven is supposed to be seeing your face, but you know I’m just desperate to see the face of my little girl. I’ve never longed for heaven like I do now and there’s part of me that feels guilty because I know I’m supposed to long for it for other reasons.” And in the process of that these songs began to sort of write themselves. Eventually I realized that it was important for me to share them with people who needed them in their own journey. And if I was going to record them it had to be really honest and as raw as the experience was. It didn’t make sense to go in and do big, slick productions on songs about the pain and nitty-gritty stuff of life. So I didn’t even go in the studio. I started recording them while I was out on the road with Michael with my friend Rick Milligan, bass player on that tour. He’s done some records that I felt were real honest and I thought, if this guy can help me capture what’s going on in my heart and my soul in recorded form, whatever it is, for better or for worse. We did things all in one take, not going back and doing it 15 times to get the right performance, just letting it kind of be what it was.

Thanks for asking honest questions. I think it’s an entirely cliché-free CD, like the words, “How could you be so good and strong and make a world that’s so painful?” Sometimes we believers hide behind easy answers and I think it’s so important that the world sees our face in the midst of suffering. And there’s so much on this CD about heaven. I think sometimes that the hope of heaven is missing from many of our modern songs because we don’t know what it is to suffer as our ancestors did when they faced death much younger and so many children were dying. I guess we don’t think about heaven until we don’t know how we can survive without that hope.

Yeah. Shortly after the accident I remember saying to my wife, “I don’t know how, if I ever do any more concerts, I don’t know how I’ll ever sing the song Cinderella again.” It was such a special song, my daughter’s favorites, inspired by Maria and Stevie Joy, and not only singing it with Maria now being in heaven, but the sadness for Stevie Joy and all that she’s now dealing with. Literally half of her was gone in a moment because she was like a twin with her sister. They did everything together. I thought it would just be so painful. But the first time I did a concert after the accident I was just getting through one song at a time and I got to where it would normally be in the set. I kept preparing myself, saying truths like “God is God and I’m not, we see only a part of the picture he’s painting but I’m going to trust his heart.” All the promises I’ve sung about all these years, are they true? Do I believe them? Paul said if our hope is only for this life we are of all men to be pitied, we are fools. I think this is where we walk a dangerous line of missing this because we have so much of our hope here and our comfort here and we get things all together here, but the reality is that if our hope is only for this life, we’re to be pitied. Our hope is not to be anchored in anything we’re going to get in this life. Our hope is anchored to the promises of God for the day that’s coming. He’ll wipe every tear from our eyes, he’ll restore everything, he’ll make everything new. Creation gets it a lot better than we do because the Bible says all creation is groaning for that day, longing for that day when redemption will finally come. But I live such a comfortable life until something like this comes and strips away all the illusion and shows you, in this world you will have trouble, but our hope is not in this world and of this world. I think I have begun to understand and if I’m preaching anything in my concerts this is it. Martin Luther said there are only two days that matter. It’s that day that’s coming that we are to be living with our eyes fixed on and our hearts anchored to, when we’ll know fully the love of God and he will make everything new, and then it’s this day. And what we believe about that day, about heaven and the hope that we have in him, that’s what we bring into this day. That’s where we have the hope to live this day with purpose.

I was doodling in church recently and wrote out an acronym for HOPE—having one purpose—eternity. You’re right, we’ve insulated ourselves against needing it. There’s an old saying, “when opportunity knocks, don’t complain about the noise.” What opportunities has this tragedy opened up for you?

It’s given us the opportunity to share the hope we have with people in places that we never would have planned, certainly not to the depth and the level that we have, whether it’s the Larry King Live interview that my family was asked to do or Good Morning, America. Larry King said to us off air, “I don’t know how you guys have this hope. I wish I could have it.” As we were walking out my son Caleb said, “Mr. King, you can have this hope and I’m going to pray that you find it.” God opened some doors. We’re wired to think that this happened so that we could have opportunities, but that’s how a lot of bitterness can begin in your heart. You think, wait a minute, God, we didn’t sign up for this, but because God sovereignly allowed things that we would never script for ourselves, we can ask what is God doing and what will he do to bring glory to himself? And we can sit and tell these stories and watch these things unfold and see what he’s been in the process of for the glory of his name.

What practical gifts has God given you over the last 18 months?

Many times I’ve said I think we were the most prayed for family on the planet. We’ve been so lifted up and at times I could almost feel the funneling of all these prayers into us and you feel guilty because there’s so much else happening in the world. And I think, how do we take all this now that’s been poured into us in love and support and prayer and share that and pour it out into the lives of others. That was one of the main reasons why we went to China this summer and went to the earthquake zone—we were there when it hit, actually. It was just two weeks before Maria went to heaven and we’d been there as a family doing some work with the special needs orphanage that we built over there. We were sitting in the airport when the earthquake hit. And when we got home and started to hear the news reports, our hearts were broken for the people of China. I can remember tucking my girls into bed at night and reminding them that we really needed to pray for China because we knew so many people there. Then, when our personal earthquake hit I had a sense that we needed to go and share God’s comfort with people. That was part of understanding that since we were prayed for by so many people, now we could go and literally share this comfort. We actually had a chance to do that this past summer. We did a concert and we’re making plans to go back and do more there. And we opened Maria’s Big House of Hope. We already had it in process but we renamed it after our daughter and it’s a place that now has such an even more profound story, even in a Communist country. We did the opening with government officials all around and we shared the story of our daughter and why we have the hope that we have. I had a chance to sing and worship there with all these government officials present and sing the song “Yours—it’s all yours.” So those are some of the things that have come.

What about friendships?

Yes definitely. And we’ve been able to laugh again. You wonder if you will and if you’ll actually feel okay about it. That’s another weird part of the journey, feeling bad when you have a really good time at something, because is it okay to laugh and enjoy? That’s again where the hope of heaven comes in. If we believe our little girl is laughing and we’re just on this side of that veil—but those are the things that have kept us breathing.

When my son Steve was five we were driving past a graveyard and there was a hole dug in the ground and a big pile of dirt and he said, “Dad, one got out.” I laughed but as I look back on it, I realize that’s our reason for hope and joy. One got out. Jesus Christ is risen. A friend of mine lost his only daughter in a car crash and she’s buried right close to my parents. And on her tombstone it says: Warning: site of future resurrection. So that’s what I think of when I think of the Chapman family. You have been beacons of hope to so many and I can’t wait for the day when we’ll celebrate that in heaven.

Spring is definitely coming. When we stood around and buried Maria’s shell, as we reminded our girls, we planted a seed that would be raised incorruptible for eternity for hope and celebration. That’s what it really is all about. That doesn’t mean we don’t live with the questions and incredible pain. It’s not hey, cheer up. It’s all going to work out great. But really, ultimately that’s what the gospel is all about. Last night Stevie Joy asked me if fairy tells are true. I told her the greatest fairy tale really isn’t a fairytale but there is a happily ever after. It’s where Maria is, where we’re going to be with her for ever and ever. We will finally really be happy and everything will be right. So the greatest fairy tale is really true.

In listening to your music and watching your life for 20 years it’s not like Steven suddenly has to change what he’s writing about and start singing about hope because you have done that. The Lord has graciously allowed us to hear of his hope and his faithfulness through you through the years. So thanks. Keep doing it. We thank God for you. If I asked you how you’ve changed over those 20 years, what would you say?

I thought as you get older you get wise, but I’m getting more and more clueless but maybe in that is the very beginning of wisdom. I’m still in kindergarten on wisdom, I just know it’s fear of the Lord, absolute dependence and trust in him, at a level that’s just so deep that it’s pretty scary. And if I know anything more it’s just a greater desperation for the hope of the gospel and the grace of God and more desperation for his promises.

When your kids look back on this chapter in their life what do you hope they’ll say about their dad?

That their dad, certainly not single-handedly, but their dad led us through keeping his eyes on Jesus, keeping his eyes fixed on the hope of the gospel. And if they can remember me saying, “Blessed be the name of the Lord even in this,” that would be all I could really hope for.

My verse for you: Romans 15:13: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” God bless you.

Amen, buddy. Thank you for Servant. Thank you for what you do with that. Of all the things I like to receive in the mail I honestly will tell you, that I love the articles—what you guys have done. I’m just grateful for what you guys do. Keep that up because I know God is making a difference through you and bringing real stories into people’s lives to encourage them.

Visit Steven Curtis Chapman's site

Want to receive a complimentary subscription to Servant? Just email us and ask.