Nichole Nordeman – Loved Into Living

CCM: In separating yourself for a time from the corporate church, to have a little breather in your faith and spiritual perspectives, did you ever feel that God wasn’t near?
NN: I didn’t feel that God wasn’t near. I always sort-of understood that I was the one that wasn’t near. I know a lot of people have felt this way, but I’ve never experienced the feeling of abandonment or, “Where is God?,” in my grief—the fear that He is somehow withholding His love or presence. For some reason, I’ve always understood that if there is a distance in my relationship with the Lord, it’s been created by me. I’ve always trusted that He hasn’t moved, that He is where I can return. I’ve returned to different ideas about who God is, but I’ve always really trusted in God’s character to be steadfast.

CCM: You’ve been at this singer-songwriter thing for twenty years now. If you had held the experience, the wisdom, that you have now, what is a conversation you would have with your younger self at just the beginnings of your music career?
NN: I wrote an entire song about that on the record called, “Dear Me.” It is a letter to my younger self about the ways she wasn’t quite ready yet to see her faith or to see the world, and the things that I know now that I wish she knew then. If I had one thing to say to her, I would say, “I want you to experience how vast God’s love is for all His children. It’s a waste of oxygen and time to try and control who’s in and who’s out and who is worthy of our admiration and who is worthy of our condemnation,” and all the things that the church and Christian culture just gets so hung up on. To be able to see past all of that as being so human and fragile and to really understand the vast ocean of God’s love for all of us, and how small all of this will seem in light of things that have eternal significance in His kingdom.

I look back at a younger version of me as a Christian and she’s holding a very small bowl, and writing songs from that place too with yearnings and a desire to know more, but really not experiencing more yet. I don’t know that I would give her advice, because you just have to allow God to reveal Himself to you in His time and in ways that you can only learn walking certain paths with Him.

> Stay tuned to CCMmagazine.com during the remainder of August 2017 for more from Nichole Nordeman!

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