To This I Hold is a music devotional project created and recorded solely by musicians at Grace Polaris Church.
Each video and devotional invites listeners into the journey of what it means to suffer well as a Christian.
The songs and the devotionals don’t seek to provide easy solutions or quick fixes, but to turn our eyes onto Jesus, our suffering Savior who promises to walk with us until we arrive home.
My Soul Has Found A Refuge
This Bleak Midwinter
There’s a real mood about winter. It’s very contradictory: equal parts cozy and melancholy. The same season that gives us quiet nights around the fireplace with family also gives us the ominous hush of lonely snowfall on an abandoned street. It can take an ordinary moment and make it either rapturous or uncanny, alive with joy or eerily liminal.
Christ My Everything
“Bean Bean”
Four-year-olds (or maybe just my four-year-old), have a shocking ability to fixate on things. Gone are the days of distracting an upset toddler with a set of keys or an episode of Miss Rachel. When my boy wants something, he will move heaven and earth to make it happen. Sometimes it’s a good thing, like figuring out how to parallel park his ride-on electric car or how to effectively drive his RC car (it’s always car related).
Yet Not I
What Gift of Grace
Growing up, competition was simply part of the air I breathed. I had siblings who approached family game nights as if their life depended on depleting all of my Monopoly resources. I played sports in a town that granted celebrity status to successful athletes and made sure to let you know if you fell short of expectations. My closest friends and I were constantly jockeying for the highest GPA (I know, teacher’s pet…gross). I spent many years living with the assumption that achievement wasn’t just encouraged–it was expected.
Your Will Be Done
David’s Secret Chord
I think Jeff Buckly wrote better than he knew when he sang of some secret chord that David played that pleased the Lord. There’s something about certain musical or lyrical progressions that stir something warm in us. Music, like nothing else, can reach into the inner corridors of our souls and draw out something ineffable, something of another world. It’s nostalgia mixed with relief and topped with a warm hug. We all have a longing for a world to which we’ve never been, like a song we’ve forgotten. I think this song evokes that.
Intercedes
The Vanity of Performance
Not to get all “in my day” about it, but I’m thankful to have grown up in a time largely before social media. To quote comedian Nate Bargatze, “whatever I did in high school is a rumor, it can’t ruin my life.” By now it’s probably obvious to all of us that, whatever positives social media can bring, it can be equally cruel and damaging to take finite human brains and make our lives, actions, and decisions perpetually public and open to vicious scrutiny from virtually infinite peers.
Be Still My Soul
A Lullaby for My Soul
I have three children all very close in age. Even though we’re entering the teenage years, I still treasure the memories of holding them as little babies in my arms. I loved those quiet evening moments after bathtime and a final feeding, when my baby was fresh and clean, nestled in my arms as we rocked together by the glow of the nightlight. He would sigh deeply, not from weariness, but from contentment — fully at rest, feeling safe and secure.
To This I Hold
I’ve always had a very sensitive saccharine meter. What I mean is I have no patience for sugar coating, empty promises, or an imaginary view of what the world is actually like. I’m insufferable to watch TV with because at every commercial break I annoyingly comment on the ways the advertiser is lying to us. Unfortunately, fuzzy-feeling commercialism can bleed into Christian art and media too, which then spills over into some bad theology. Sometimes mainstream Christian art sells a feel-good brand that seemingly prioritizes profit over faithfulness, and record sales over reality. An unfortunate chunk of the artistic content that has come out of the current evangelical mainstream reeks of an overoptimistic triumphalism that finds little basis in the average Christian’s Tuesday morning.