The Lonestar Weekend

I met Robert and Kathleen almost five years when they hosted one of my concerts as part of 33Miles. One show turned into a ministry influenced by my old band's name and 33 The Ministry was birthed and now hosts numerous Christian concerts in south Texas every year.

The view from the Denver airport never disappoints and although I was missing my family this view from the jet bridge always reminds me that God is always at work, even creating sunsets.

I picked up my bat mobile from Budget in Dallas and crashed at my sister and brother-in-laws house for a few winks before I hit the road for Kilgore.

The bat mobile flew across the only real altitude changes in TX, the over-passes on my way to Kilgore.

The weather couldn't have been better, and it we spent a great few hours in the sun singing and preaching in the city park. The south is so cool and it was great to see old friends.

On Sunday morning I guest lead worship with my good friend Eric Michael at Lake Highlands United Methodist Church in Plano which is one of my favorite things to do. I love that my job keeps me in church every Sunday (wherever it may be) and I'm refreshed and inspired by watching and joining my colleagues in their various roles whenever possible. Eric is a gifted musician, leader and resourceful creative who has turned a dated gym into an inspirational place of worship. Since we have such similar roles as worship leaders and maintain music careers we had a ton to talk about and a lot of notes to compare.

Of course you can't go to Dallas without a meal at the best "Mexican" restaurant in America.

It was a tiring weekend but a blast to be on the road singing songs about my family and Jesus.

Here is the Church...

When Calvary Bible offered me a job last October I felt apprehensive and skeptical of the whole mobile church thing. As a touring musician I feel at home hauling road cases, but after years of pinching my fingers and dropping things on my toes the idea of an extra set up on Sunday morning sounded tiring. The strength of our calling to Calvary far exceeded being a little groggy on Sunday morning and now after almost a year of "mobile church" I've discovered several things. As I've read my leadership books and thought about volunteerism I've theorized that a team of the right volunteers can do more than paid staff and the people of Calvary have convinced me that it's true. It is inspiring seeing committed, enthusiastic people joining together in a shared purpose completing a task that each couldn't do on their own. Mobile church has shown me this.
But the end is in sight. I've been impressed with Calvary's financial stewardship and lack of debt which I've discovered is unusual in the church. Calvary will break ground on the Erie campus building in a few weeks and we'll be in our new building within the year.

Producing You are Exalted

Cross to Crown Record from Collin Stoddard on Vimeo.
Buy You are Exalted here.

This is a project I am proud to have produced and helped write, thanks to the executive producer Doug Goodin for your vision, leadership and talent that made record become a reality. Cross to Crown is an incredible ministry that resources churches by encouraging and equipping pastors through their seminary, books that they write and publish, and their music.

I appreciate and support the intentionality that went into creating You are Exalted. While hand-crafting, shaping and massaging the process and continually looking at the horizon is a long and sometimes painful process, it lead to making this record a huge success. One of the challenges of the creative process with any new artist is the amount of dialog and conversation that goes into discussing the heart, the message and the sound of a project. Most artists (even those who have never recorded a project before) have an idea of their sound and can fairly easily be identified by picking up a guitar and singing a few words. While Cross to Crown had the heart, vision and a general idea of the musical style, I was creating and aiming for a sound that we only had a description of and not necessarily a sonic example. This process takes a lot of trust for everyone involved: for Cross to Crown to trust that I hear what they're expecting to hear, and that I can deliver it, and for me that they'll like what comes from a tracking session! God was evidently involved in every process of this project and Cross to Crown was one of the best and easiest ministries I've ever worked with and I look forward to our next record together.

A little inside information about talent on the record, Adam Silverman played drums and I always appreciate his talent and contribution to almost everything I work on from my time in 33Miles to producing projects. We've known each other for a long time and it's a blessing working with someone who knows what to play when I don't know how to explain it. Cal Joslin who helped start the CCM group Sidewalk Prophets and I went to Belmont played bass. Matt Reviere, a session guitar player currently touring with 2012 Idol winner Scotty McCreery who I also went to Belmont with played acoustics and electrics. Tyler Ewing is an Emmy Award winning composer and the most talented arranger I've ever met and and he provided the string arrangements and tracking (I also went to Belmont with Tyler....) Jason Hall is an audio engineer who I refer to as a magician and mixed and mastered the record. (Sigh...yes, I also went to Belmont with Jason.) PS, You're welcome, Belmont, my next student loan payment is on the way.

Go buy this record! This year is filling up quickly for me in my studio. We are settling into our new house in Firestone, CO and my studio is now up and running it's new location with lots of new projects on the books.

I Worship When...

Calvary is working through a series called Stronger and this Sunday Adrian is speaking on growing stronger in worship. As a musician, music always comes to mind when I consider worship and I love to worship God through music. Everyone worships God differently and I shot and edited this video we're showing on Sunday of my friends sharing how they worship the Lord. I upgraded to Final Cut Pro X yesterday and it changed my life. I recorded audio on my Zoom H4N and being that I had such a limited time frame to shoot and edit this video and was using a new video editing platform I didn't spend much time editing the audio. What you hear is all straight off the SD card. I'm pretty impressed with that device!!

I Worship God When... from Collin Stoddard on Vimeo.

We Always Bring Our Best

Traveling is tough. Traveling with a family is tougher, and I always find myself dreading a road trip with our family of four, regardless of the distance. As a touring artist I find myself sometimes dragging my family to the strangest places experiencing the weirdest things, but we always grow closer together and discover life changing things we never would have encountered had we stayed where it's safe.

Drive south on I-35 from Kansas into Oklahoma and you'll see asphalt stretching miles in front of you, shrubbery, and that's all. Then just before you reach Oklahoma City and your bladder's about to burst you reach Edmond, Oklahoma. You may not remember the small suburb of Oklahoma City, but you probably remember this.

LifeChurch.tv is one of the most innovative and largest growing churches with an incredibly unique model of planting churches. They inherited this cross when they bought the land of a large struggling church which now houses their central offices. Completely updated and remodeled, LifeChurch's central offices aren't just a collection of office spaces, it's a think-tank and well oiled-machine overflowing with great vision and leadership to their growing 10 campus church.

Last weekend as we turned the four hour drive from Wichita, KS to Lawton, OK into a seven hour drive we found ourselves cruising right past the massive cross and I called my friend Chris Kuti who serves as the worship pastor at the Edmund campus and he gave up his afternoon to catch up and show us their facility. With the exception of the Cove in North Carolina, I have not been this impressed with a Christian ministry. 

Even though they won't all admit it, almost everyone I've interacted with who works in ministry has good ideas and desires to see growth in their flock, in quantity and quality. Blaine Hogan, the creative director of Willow Creek Church says in his book, Untitled, "No one cares about your ideas or how great a pitch-person you are if you can't execute your vision." What I saw at LifeChurch this weekend was great execution, vision, and leadership.

The campus aesthetically matches the visual branding of Lifechurch with hues of grey and red with their vision and values printed everywhere. Everybody who steps foot in LifeChurch will know what they are passionate about. Look around and you'll see that they practice what they preach. People are attracted to that.

LifeChurch believes in sharing the gospel and equipping every church, not just their multiple campuses, so much that they offer all of their resources completely free on their website. In many churches as giving is low and budgets are tight I personally have been greatly effected by churches response to freeze spending and hoard what they have. LifeChurch does the opposite with their resources and it's inspiring to see how many they have.

While LifeChurch looked awesome and exemplified quality, the articulation and execution of Craig Groeschel's vision inspired me the most. Every day I discuss vision and creative ideas with my wife, my pastor, my promotors and my creative team. In every discussion I hear the obstacles of implementation. While I've been guilty of making excuses I appreciated the example of pursuing a vision and seeing God bless a ministry with explosive growth. 

"We Always Bring Our Best." Out of all the prints throughout our walk this one stood out to me the most and has been ringing in my head all week. There are times I've been guilty of not bringing my best and I've experience the negative implications, or sometimes just lack of fruit. I've brought my best as often as possible and I've experienced the fruit. The fruit is inspiring, people are attracted to excellence and passion and want to partner with those who do great work. It's not rocket-science. Who do you hire to do a service for you? The person who does it the best. People (believers and non-believers alike) are attracted to excellence. What restaurants do you rave about? What parts of town do you like to visit? What products do you buy? What do you argue about with your friends? My assumption is that the answer to all of those questions includes the phrase, "the best." 

In Wichita last weekend we stayed with an airplane enthusiast who is rebuilding a Fairchild PT19 warplane. Although I don't really care about airplanes, I found myself wanting to just hang out in Wayne's hanger for hours just watching him work on his airplane and admire the precision and excellence of the best woodworking I've ever seen. He and his partners are confident their quality craftsmanship will win numerous awards at the next Oshkosh and potentially make them an extra one-hundred-thousand dollars. 

I played at Lawton First Assembly in Lawton, OK several days later and saw their newly installed Nexo sound system, their gorgeous building with Pottery Barn couches and coffee tables and gorgeous paint colors. In addition to their aesthetics they went to great lengths to make me comfortable and honored. They succeeded and evidently everyone who joins them feels the same way. In a town of 100,000 people they are a thriving, influential mega-church.

While I'm convicted about the areas in my life I don't bring my best, I want for my family, myself, my creative team, my musicians to always bring their best. Imagine how inspiring and awesome life would be if everyone did their best! I'd love to experience that! Regardless of the affects of doing everything to the best of our ability, God asks us to bring our best and it honors him. That's why we do it. Where do you need to bring your best?

A Tedious Process

Our move to Colorado has really been a three month process and I've had enough work that I haven't been able to temporarily shut down operations! The show must go on and in hindsight I find it humorous the places I found myself editing tracks and comping vocals. Check out a few of them!!

For the first time since our college days at Belmont I got to work with Matt Reviere, an incredible guitar  player on a record from Cross to Crown Ministries. Much of my producing these days is done long distance which has major pro's and a few cons. My interaction with studio players these days looks like this. Yes. This is conversation via FaceTime. Thank you Steve Jobs.

One of the biggest benefits of tracking parts long distance is that it can be a more cost effective way to produce a record with Nashville studio players. They don't have to travel to me and I don't have to travel to Nashville and we achieve a quality product similar to what we would in a Nashville studio. The downside is flexibility, but thanks to my good friends who will take a long distance studio gig from me they are always willing to re-track parts that aren't exactly what I had in mind. We share files over DropBox and I do a bunch of editing!

Tracking this way does make me miss the chemistry and camaraderie of tracking and hanging out in the studio with excellent musicians, but we get to work in our personal studios on our time. Pretty neat deal.

Make it Easy.

For the sake of your attention span and in light of my last blog which took about 20 minutes to read, I'll make this one a little easier. Our church meets in a school. Calvary is a special place with an abundance of volunteers which makes set up super easy...when everyone knows what to do. I made enemies of our tech crew pretty quickly by telling them to carve the sometimes one-and-a-half hour set up time to thirty minutes. I knew this was a lot to ask, after all, Sunday morning at 6:30am isn't a fun time to be awake let alone push carts and patch audio cables. Groups of people are capable of building incredible things together, just look at the Pyramids. Our "pyramid" was a thirty minute setup time and it started with getting everyone on the same page. I prefer to call it getting everyone on the same stage...plot. See how I did that? I probably insulted Illustrator and Adobe by using their baby to create a vector file of our stage plot, but I say always use the best tool for the job. Always.

    

I give you the Calvary stage plot. I took our set up team out to coffee and handed them this and an order of how to set things up: (I added the first one for effect) 1. Don't hate me. 2. Power 3. Avioms 4. Instruments 5. Audio Note: Coil the excess at the instrument. My tech director and I made a 25 ft quad box power cable that probably would have kept the Titanic from sinking (somehow). Aviom CAT5 cable runs on top of the quad box (we purchased the Aviom power distribution unit which replaced the need to have each Aviom individually powered, and audio cables run on top of that. The biggest thing that drives me bonkers on a stage is spaghetti. Save it for the Italian restaurant. XLR cables are notorious for not working, but you don't know that they don't work until everything is patched on top of them and you're starting sound check! Coil the excess at the instrument so there isn't a huge pile of linguini in front of the patch bay, and make sure all audio cables are laid on top and it makes re-patcing and tracing cables so much easier. Try it, you will thank me. Even if you don't set up every week, try it. For some reason, perhaps extra intentionality, we have less problems when we are tidier. The result? 25 minute set up time. What that translates into? Extra sleep. Nobody says "no" to extra sleep. Nobody. You're welcome. Collin

Five Years

In 2001 I was a freshman in high school. As a homeschooler I had time, encouragement and resources to focus on my two childhood passions: my horses and what my parents were more passionate about, my music. After my first "gig" as a background pianist at the five-star resort at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs and the concierge manager sent me a check for $250, music became my passion too and as a young high school student found my self playing regularly in churches and venues across our city often filling in for the church pianists who were on vacation or sick.

It was on one such Sunday morning in May that I was playing piano at a small Presbyterian Church on the outskirts of Colorado Springs that I saw her. The entire front of the church sanctuary was windows which faced the front range of the Rocky Mountains that let the sunshine flood the room with warm, bright, Colorado sunshine. She was hard to miss; slender, the brightest, blondest hair I had ever seen that reflected all the light that poured through the windows. She was wearing a white cardigan over a green sun dress. I thought she might be my age and from my vantage point at the piano I could see her sitting with what I guessed was her mom and sisters and I spent more time watching her than I did listening to the sermon and focusing on my job...playing the piano. (This is why you don't hire fifteen year-old piano players.)

Needless to say, I hoped for a chance to walk past her after church and maybe see if she'd smile at me which unfortunately didn't happen. Disappointed, I drove away from church with my family to a high school graduation reception with friends from the church and it was there that I saw her again. She sat quietly in a corner of the living room next to her sisters. Lunch had been served buffet style, then dessert, before I finally got up the nerve. As a home schooler I needed to take advantage of these opportunities which rarely came along and I wasn't going to miss this one.

I made my move by abruptly sitting down next to her and saying, "Hi my name is Collin."
"Hi." she said. That was it. Nothing more. She was either oblivious to my sheer terror, or was enjoying her perfected torture techniques and knew that the longer she waited, the more I would wallow and completely derail and she wanted a good show this time.
"...so what's your name?" I inquired. This was typical introduction etiquette, and she wasn't helping me out. I was beginning to question that this was a good idea.
"Jenna." Which was not followed with a, "and what's your name?" I was freaking out.
For the next half hour I sat there and bravely battled on, asking question after question which rendered simple, one or two word answers. I found out that she played violin, had two sisters, (which I already knew but couldn't think of a better question in that moment), had two cats, one dog and wanted a Mazda Miatta for her first car. Pretty good recon, I thought. I found out what I needed and concluded that she was perfect for me. (This is why it's a bad idea for 15 year-olds to date which we were definitely not allowed. Good job Mom and Dad).

I didn't see her until about a year later at the same friends annual fall barn dance. As we drove in from a distance I noticed her almost immediately. She was standing in a field of tall, dry grass and her bright blonde hair was reflecting the setting sun. That night I found myself conveniently close to her whenever the caller said, "grab your partner!" I danced with her all night and even though I got in trouble on the way home I even got her email address. It was so worth it.

Slowly but surely our family friends became the same family friends and I found myself playing more frequently at her church. Whether this was fate or initiative on my part I will always wonder, however God had a plan and I found myself falling more and more in love with this pretty girl. High school thankfully didn't last forever however we thought life would have been perfect if it never did. My parents highly encouraged me to take my music scholarship at Belmont University in Nashville, TN and my friends placed bets on how long we'd stay together once I moved away.

From August to November we wrote letters and got in trouble for wracking up high cell phone bills that made our parents question my devotion and investment to my studies. I made the deans list from then on to ensure we could continue our phone conversations. After returning home for Thanksgiving that first year we kissed for the first time.

I began to grow up in Nashville and my roots began to deepen. My high school sweet heart visited as often as she could, but as the years went by it became more obvious that we were both changing. I had started a band and life was different. My circle of friends was changing, my career was developing. I was traveling a lot, growing a ton. During our visits we still were able to adjust to being together, which sometimes took a few days. We saw long distance relationships end frequently which made us question ours. It was hard. My new friends were advising us to break up. They had no idea what they were talking about.

I sold my truck after my 21st birthday and with the cash I bought a ring. I'd waited for years to have a lump of cash big enough to afford a diamond and I set out to buy just that. I was determined to be taken seriously and make man decisions. I was tired of being told that we weren't going to last and that we weren't right for each other. Hadn't we proven that over the past six years already? I was convinced that if I loved hard enough, called often enough, wrote sweet enough love letters that nothing could separate us.

Like many things in my life I have to learn the best when I experience it, even when it's the hard way. Jenna and I began to fight more, and connect less. Even though I had a ring in the top drawer of my dresser I knew I couldn't ask her to marry me. We weren't doing well. We began to talk about ending years of investment and relationship. It really wasn't complicated, I was extremely selfish and wanted to push my agenda on God and it wasn't in God's timing. God was teaching me that life must happen in His timing. It's not about my timing. I began to see that even though my desire to fight for Jenna and provide for her and marry her were good, they weren't in God's timing and I wasn't loving her by listening to God first. I did one of the hardest things I've ever done...I took the ring back.

Giving up years of hopes and dreams is one of the hardest parts of life in my opinion but God was showing me that it has to be in His timing. Jenna was my best friend. We really loved each other, but God was teaching me how to love her and that life happens in His timing. During on of our visits together, this time in our home in the Colorado mountains, we sat on a rock outcropping overlooking Pikes Peak with the gold mine of Cripple Creek cresting the mountains way in the distance we prayed. We both gave our relationship to God. That was the first time we'd ever done that. In that moment we stopped trying so hard to push our agenda and force the pieces to work. I know this makes sense to you. We surrendered. We both said to each other that if we were never married than it would be okay. It was sad and we grieved.

Life returned to normal when I flew back to Nashville several days later. We didn't know what was next but we were okay with that. We were waiting for God to move us toward each other even though we didn't really know what that was supposed to look like. To be honest with you I'm still not entirely sure how it happened. It just did. God used our parents again, even though we were growing adults. My parents began to soften at the conversations about Jenna, they began to affirm us as a couple, her parents began to talk more about our future together and we hadn't initiated any of it. I'm not sure why God chose to work this way but He did. This time we were listening.

I spent a long time this time finding the perfect ring. I wasn't going to buy a ring that just anybody could buy, so I went to a jeweler in Manitou Springs, CO who designed custom jewelry and asked him for a ring that had vines engraved into the band. Our relationship had been a living example of John 15 asking the Lord to take the branches that weren't bearing fruit and I wanted the symbol of our marriage (our rings) to be a symbol of that lesson. I proposed to her on the same place that we had given our relationship to the Lord and she responded with, "YES, YES YES!! Of course yes!!" We both cried.

The battles weren't over. It took many months to agree on a wedding date that worked for the world, and we finally settled on February 9th. Tomorrow will be five years from the day that I got to say, "I do.  Those words were some of the most satisfactory and pleasing words I've ever spoken. Tomorrow I will say with joy and thankfulness and sobriety that God is faithful. What He starts He will complete. There is no way we can imagine what the process will be like. Sometimes if we knew what it entailed we would say no. We wouldn't go. Marriage has brought grownup decisions. Kids. Mortgages. Complications. Things that I had no idea would be hard. But.

Please don't read over that last word.

But. God is incredible. The payoff is incredible. Is marriage hard? Duh. Look at half of your friends and parents who aren't married anymore. Apart from God this wouldn't work. God taught me that He needed to give me Jenna and guess what? She's still His. I'm just the lucky guy that gets to do life with her. Who gets to stay up late at night rocking fussy babies and changing nasty diapers. I'm the guy that gets to rub her back and encourage her when she's exhausted and can't keep her eyes open. I'm the guy who gets to touch her gorgeous blonde hair and feel her arms wrap around my neck. I'm the guy, the only guy who gets to say "I love you." (I have many guns...) I'm the guy who will grow old with her. I'm the guy who will actively and tenderly stand up for her and lead her even when she doesn't want to be lead, I will love her when she feels unloveable. I'm the guy who gets to give her presents and flowers. I will do this to the best of my ability. I love everything about this woman. The vows that I said five years ago are more true today than they were that incredible day.

My wife deserves a better written blog post than this, but I want the world to know how I feel about this woman and what God has done in our lives.

I love you Jenna Christine.

A Little Merry Christmas Memory

My infamous picture box is stashed away somewhere in a bulging, freezing, catastrophic storage space in the freezing tundra that is northern Colorado. With it's absence I have no gorgeous picture from my photographer father's old 35mm Pentax to show you of a nostalgic old memory or visual to stretch some spiritual application from. No, the application and lessons of these past few weeks have been much more real-time and obvious.

I'm sorry for my silence over the past few months. In all honesty we've just been processing the reality of stepping through a door that God has opened which means closing one behind. In these seasons of transition I'm overly aware of the Biblical, realistic caricature of a sheep. That is me. I've never corralled a sheep, but I have chased a few cows and when they don't see exactly the opening they're supposed to head for, they don't stop, they timidly jump back and forth and clang and bash their horns on the corral bars and run into things. When moving cows I find myself not only annoyed, but embarrassed for them. Remembering that I am compared to sheep which are dumber than cows makes me embarrassed for me.

Two weeks prior to our scheduled departure date, Gabby came down with the flu/bug/sick/crap everyone in the USA is getting. Gabby's a passionate "all-in" kind of gal and her health is no different. When she catches something, she REALLY catches it. We're not talking a low fever for a few days, we're talking 103º for two weeks. Numerous doctor's visits and literally pages of us charting her med schedule, she was released from the Mercy Stoddard Hospital (that's what I named our house). Days later we didn't really pack up, we just grabbed our stuff and chucked it in some diaper boxes, wrapped it in plastic and threw it into a Uhaul truck. The big kind. Then we put my wife's car on the trailer of it and drove away.

Not that leaving with everything working out perfectly would have been any easier, but the past month has just been crazy. The past three years in Michiana have been nothing short of a huge blessing to us. We had some really tough seasons, but they were some of the best, growing times for us. As Jenna and I walked through our house one last time to make sure we had thrown everything in, we had to stop, lean against the kitchen island one more time holding hands and thank the Lord. When God meets you: in a season, a place, a time when you needed it most because you were at your lowest, it changes you. I needed to be changed when we left Nashville and I'm thankful that God chipped away at me, worked the clay soil of my heart so He could mold me on the Potter's wheel. We made life long friends. Friends I miss right now.

Well Colorado welcomed us as it does everybody else with promise of being colorful. Growing up we always joked that it was a million shades of brown. We didn't care. We were just glad to be home.

Jenna's parents are over-saturating our kids with much needed Grandparent love. There is no replacement for that. I still feel blinded when I walk outdoors and am confronted by this massive, orange ball of fire in the sky that penetrates my retinas even when I close my eyes. I hear they call it the sun. It makes the snow look pretty.

We had a good Christmas. My first "event" at Calvary was Christmas Eve (no pressure) and the band did great and I was even able to shoot and edit this Christmas video of some of the pretty footage I see on my commute between Colorado Springs and north Denver.

Christmas Day was a day of fun for us.

Palmer started crawling yesterday which has given him a big head and he's started pulling himself up on things and throwing his water from the high chair. They grow up so fast. Gabby started calling me by my first name.

Thanks for keeping up with the Stoddards.

Collin