By Steven Curtis Chapman | Sparrow Records
Beauty Will Rise is a collection of 12 songs from Steven Curtis Chapman created in the 18 months since the loss of his daughter Maria in a tragic auto accident. Part lament, part praise, part grief, part hope, part wrestling and part pondering, the tracks resonate as Chapman's "personal psalms." Raw and honest, the recording could be the most important of his more than 20-year ministry.
For the first time in his career, due to the intensely personal nature of the project, Chapman made the album in a total vacuum while traveling across the country on tour last fall and spring. From the rooftop of Maria's Big House of Hope—an orphanage for special-needs children in the Henan Province of China—Chapman detailed on his blog how the songs came about: "[The orphanage] represents something that we never would have scripted, asked for or imagined," he wrote. "But we are right in the middle of part of the beauty that God is bringing from the pain and ashes of our last year."Chapman said he began the process a couple of months after his daughter's May 2008 death, "not really knowing if I would ever feel like I could sing, stand on stage again or express the motions, the grief and the loss in music.
"But, in the days that followed, I felt that God was allowing me to write my own songs, and that's really what these are to me, a collection of my own psalms, laments, ponderings and God meeting me and my family in the grief and in the midst of our journey of the last year.
"It's been an amazing, wild process, very raw, real, honest."
Of the album's first single, "Heaven Is the Face," Chapman said that "obviously heaven has become a much more real place and something I long for more now than ever before. I can't wait to see the face of my little girl that I long to see again. I'm saying to God, ‘You know my heart, and I know that heaven is so much more than that, but right now Lord, this where my heart is.'"
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