Episode #310 — Ellie Holcomb has never shied away from talking about the tough things in life. Her music often paints the picture of struggles, but celebrates the light that shines through the cracks in our story. But in the past year and a half, she’s seen a tornado touch down in her neighborhood, a bomb explode in her beloved Nashville, and a global pandemic. How do you find the light in that list?! Ellie’s brand new single, “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”, is a poignant part of her answer.
“Absolutely. Breathing has kind of become a superpower for me this last year, and the first line of this song is, ‘Your voice is a burning bush’ – which harkens back to that story in Exodus when Moses asks God, by what name should I tell Pharaoh to set all these people free? It was Yahweh.”
“And I learned that actually the word Yahweh sounds like a breath when you say it in the Hebrew. So the God who puts breath in our lungs has designed His name to be such that just when all we can do is breathe – that’s been a lot of the last year probably for a lot of us – we’re literally saying the name of God.”
Ellie explains how revisiting some of the most difficult moments in her life has brought her to a new realization about what peace really is.
“I went through like a 2 year counseling journey – revisiting some of the deepest wounds in my own story. And I’d visited those in counseling before, but they were visits, kind of acknowledgements. Like, ‘Ok. That happened. That was hard.’ But I had never let myself grieve or lament. And I think when we don’t let ourselves grieve and lament the things that break our hearts it starts coming out sideways.”
“As I let myself go back and grieve, I encountered the presence, the breath, the tenderness, the nearness, and empathy of God in a palpable way. What I realized was I was missing the power of the healing He wanted to do in my story. Because I was so scared of going close to the pain again. And He’s like, ‘No. I’m right here even in your most painful places.'”
Ellie Holcomb is an outstanding recording artist & bestselling author. She just released her single, “I Don’t Want to Miss It”. It features on her upcoming album, Canyon, on the way June 25th.
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On the Road with Ellie Holcomb
