This is the ground where I was changed.
There is a concept in Celtic spirituality called a "thin place."
It is the idea that the membrane between Heaven and earth is not the same thickness everywhere. That there are specific moments, specific locations, specific experiences where that membrane becomes almost transparent. Where the distance between you and God collapses and you find yourself standing in territory that feels different from every other place you've ever been.
I've been thinking about thin places a lot lately.
The theologians and the mystics have written about them. The people I've had the privilege of interviewing on the Standing Stones Podcast have described them, often haltingly, often with tears, because the language for what happens in those moments is always slightly inadequate. You reach for words and they fall short of the experience.
For me, the thin place has almost always been worship.
Not religion. Not a building. Not a ritual. Worship. The kind that starts somewhere behind your chest and moves outward whether you want it to or not. Music has been the specific geography where I have heard God most clearly for as long as I can remember. Where the noise of everything I'm carrying, the anxiety, the ambition, the unresolved questions, goes quiet long enough for something else to come through.
I've written worship music before. Recorded it. Released it. And somewhere in that history, I stopped. Life moved on. And that thin place got harder to find.
It's back.
Over the past season I've been working with some amazing music tools to bring songs to life that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. I want to be honest about how this works. I brought the theology. The imagery. The heartbeat and the lyric ideas behind the music. The tools help translate that into the musical form I can no longer produce alone in this season of my life. It is a genuine collaboration and I believe God can work through any instrument He chooses, including the ones we haven't fully figured out yet.
The first song is simply called Standing Stones.
I think of it as the anthem of everything this ministry is reaching toward — the podcast, the stories, the encounters with God that we keep returning to together. The thin places that the people I've interviewed have described. The moments where Heaven stepped close enough to touch.
There is a line in this song that stopped me the first time I heard it come back to me.
This is the ground where I was changed.
I brought the thought. I carried the experience it points to. But when it arrived in finished form, it landed on me like it came from somewhere else entirely. Which, if I'm being honest, is how the best things usually arrive.
It says everything I've been trying to say about thin places. It isn't abstract. It is specific. It is past tense. It points to actual ground where an actual encounter happened and left something permanently different behind.
Jacob wrestled with God and walked with a limp for the rest of his life. Moses removed his sandals because the ground beneath his feet had become holy. The disciples on the road to Emmaus didn't recognize Jesus until the moment they did. And then He was gone, and all they could say was did not our hearts burn within us?
The thin place leaves a mark.
My prayer for this song (and for the ones that will follow) is that it becomes a thin place for someone who needs one. That in the listening, the membrane thins just enough. That God steps through.
Because that is what He does. He finds the ground. He shows up. And everything after that moment is divided into before and after.
This is the ground where I was changed.
I hope it becomes yours too.
Press play below and let me know what it stirs in you. I read every response.
