Steven Curtis Chapman Seeks The Glorious Unfolding
CBN.com - A GLORIOUS JOURNEY
For more than 25 years, Steven has been putting his life into song. He’s received 5 Grammys and 16 nominations, won an American Music Award and taken home 58 Dove Awards – something no other Christian artist has done. He’s also in the midst of celebrating 29 years of marriage with Mary Beth and healing from the loss of their 5-year old daughter, Maria in 2008. Steven feels now more than ever is the time to share these songs of steadfast messages of God’s faithfulness and grace. “God has continued faithfully to reveal Himself through dark places and reveal His mysteriousness,” says Steven. “I get the sense that He’s telling an amazing story.”
Recording this album was a labor of love. Steve’s son Will played drums on six tracks. On “Sound of Your Voice,” Steven recruited Mary Beth, daughters Emily and Stevey Joy, and daughters-in-law Julia Champan and Jillian Edwards Chapman to sing background vocals. Writing these songs helped give Steven a voice to his own joys and challenges. After Maria’s death, Steven wasn’t sure he would ever write songs or sing again. In 2009, Steven soldiered on with his album, “Beauty Will Rise,” dealing with the tragedy and the emotional turmoil the family endured. The new album represents the latest season in Steven’s life. “The theme was this idea that God will complete the story, and in fact, He already completed it and knows the ending,” says Steven. “This album gave me a chance to tell that, to celebrate loss and hope and new life.”
GOD’S BIG HOUSE
The Chapmans take comfort in knowing where Maria is. Three months before her death, Maria was asking her parents about heaven after hearing Audio Adrenaline’s song, Big House, in her preschool class. “It led to this precious time of praying with her and letting her just pray in her own words an amazing prayer asking Jesus to let her live forever with him in God’s big house,” says Steven. “And to come into her heart and to give her eternal life.” Mary Beth believes that’s why God entrusted the Chapmans with Maria for 4 years of her life. “By bringing our children here into a Christian home, our goal was that they would meet Christ and have a profound relationship with him….who knew that Maria would get to be first,” says Mary Beth.
One of the songs on the new album is called “Michael and Maria.” Steven wrote the song about his friend’s son who lost his life after a skateboarding accident and for Maria. “I sang it for Michael’s memorial, standing on the same stage where we did the memorial for Maria,” says Steven. “It was this total flashback for us.”
In 2001, after adopting their first child, Mary Beth and Steven started Show Hope, a movement to care for orphans. For the past 10 years, they have provided adoption grants to more than 4,000 families wishing to adopt orphans from around the world. In November 2001, the Chapmans became grandparents when their daughter Emily and her husband Tanner had a baby girl.
Steven will be singing, “Love Takes Me Over,” from The Glorious Unfolding album and “Christmas Time Again,” from his holiday album.
