Well, it seems like the year has been going by pretty fast. For a lot of the year, I’ve been away from music production due to another commitment. Been starting again on getting one of the last songs (called Test Me with Fire) on the Before the Harvest music album ready for mastering. I think it’s getting closer to being ready, but still trying to fine tune it a bit. Learning that there’s only so much that can be done if the original recordings (on my part) aren’t that professional. Also, this song recording is so old that I ended up adding more lyrics to the song years later, but it’s not in this original version of the recording.

Along the way, I’ve been working on writing some new songs in the evenings. Even with just spending about a half hour a night during many weeknights, I believe that God has given me many new songs. Really excited about a lot of these—especially ones for an album called Spirit Fruit. It’s an album that hopefully includes some Biblical Scripture and some thoughts about what the Fruit of the Spirit might look like or involve [1].

I’m really enjoying these songs, though, and I hope they are somehow encouraging to you as well. For now, these particular songs are written in (however poor) Japanese—but I usually like to try to include an English translation of the lyrics on my Music Scrapbook when this is the case. I think one song on this project has been translated into English, if I recall, so maybe it’s possible to do more of that someday. Even though I’m not that good at using Japanese effectively, I really like using Japanese for songwriting due to the fairly consistent consonant+vowel combination of sounds. It makes it easier for me to make lines rhyme or sound like they match. With English, though, I like how there are many ways to use short, one-syllable words to be able to fit lots of meaning into a single lyrical line.

With all of the challenges going on in our own lives and around the world, I would like to encourage each of us to keep looking to Jesus even more when life gets tough. Thanks for taking the time to read this update!

[1] Galatians 5:22-23 (NIV)