The Brilliance – Planting Seeds Of Peace

CCM: In a time where everyone’s talking about fear and division, I appreciate how this album acknowledges the pain and wonders how to help. Do you have any thoughts on how we as Christians can start practically doing the work of reconciliation now?
DG: That’s a wonderful question that every serious follower of Christ should ask themselves. I think it starts with learning how to listen. We are so ridiculously blessed and privileged. America really is an amazing country, and yet, it has its own history with tragedy. So listening, and being able to see pain… Until you acknowledge pain, you can’t actually speak to it.

What’s hard is… How do you address things you’re blind to because of privilege? How do I look for pain? Not like how can I see it and avoid it, but how do I actually look for it without being in a place where I’m like, “Oh, I’m gonna fix them,” but in a place where I have compassion? Oftentimes where there is the most pain and violence, we need to ask, “Why is this happening?”

I think for America right now a huge, huge, huge issue that people only sort-of touch on is the violence going on in the south side of Chicago. It’s unbelievable for America. And yet we don’t really know the history and how to deal with it. And then okay, go farther out… How do we deal with what’s happening in Aleppo? How do we deal with violence not only from war, but from lack of clean water?

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CCM: Yeah, sometimes you can look at so much going on and it just gets overwhelming, like where do I even start?
DG: Yes. You feel that sense of, “Oh, my gosh, what do we do with this?” But it’s okay to be overwhelmed, moving to a place of remembering that, “Blessed is the one whose hope is gone.” And one of the unique things about being a Christian is this idea of the Incarnation, which is strength moving to weakness, light rushing into darkness, humility in its greatest form. So what do people with power do with their power? What are they responsible for? We’re really trying to explore those themes.