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Audrey Assad just dropped a new single called “Wounded Healer” — the latest release from her upcoming album, Evergreen, which is scheduled to come out February 23, 2018.
The tune opens with an instrumental ensemble that creates a lively Irish impression, then proceeds to follow a Celtic-inspired melody. It hits you right in the heart-strings.
One of the things we love about Assad’s style is the intense, unrelenting drumming that surrounds her strong, pure vocal. Her arrangement brings to mind images of a faithful person, praying in solitude while the world around her is in chaos.
This may be a metaphor for Assad’s recent creative difficulties. She has been very open with her fans about what she refers to as a “wounded faith,” one that left her with writer’s block for the better part of four years. Now the popular Christian musician has worked her way out of it, and if “Wounded Faith” is any indication, she’s poised to blow us all away next year with Evergreen.
Along with this single, Assad issued a press release in which she talks about the story behind “Wounded Healer”:
Hello friends! I am so excited to be writing to let you know I have a NEW single out today. It’s called “Wounded Healer,” and here is the back story. This song came last. Just as I was closing the drawbridge to sequester myself in the castle of work and romance that is record-making, it ran up like a messenger from a far away town to inform me breathlessly that I was still missing something. Faith has felt like a dire and difficult sojourn for a very long time now. If I could use a word to describe myself the last few years, it would be “unconvinced.” I’m that person who reads the story of Thomas touching Jesus’ wounds and cries because I’m not sure I’ll ever be anyone other than the one person in the group who really just can’t believe God is moving and present the way that everyone else seems to. And yet I remind myself over and over that maybe there was some wound in Thomas that needed to be healed and maybe the only medicine was to have his hand in Jesus’ wounded side — to see with his own two wondering eyes that Christ rose from the dead not as someone new, but as himself; in a body that reveals to us exactly who God has always been — a Suffering Servant, a Wounded Healer, a dwell-among-us kind of Presence. What an interesting thought that, in response to Thomas’ questions, Christ didn’t explain or prove by eyewitness testimony or present a logical case for who he was—he simply invited Thomas to touch him. Jesus, as Brian Zahnd says, is what God has to say. I can’t believe how many years I spent piddling about in theological conversations that didn’t start and end there! If Jesus is the Image of the Invisible God, we ought to always start and end with Him as the Revelation of God we seek. Though I have remained a Christian nominally throughout my entire life (including these latter Unconvinced Years) I can truly say I am being born again today as I realize on a deeper level than ever before that Christ is not a set of ideas or a law or a prophet or a priest, but the Person/Word of God about whom John waxed poetic and to whom all things point, in whom all things begin. And as I grapple with life’s most painful questions, especially as regards suffering, I find myself drawn again and again to contemplate that scene between Christ and Thomas; to ask for insight into what it reveals about God that Jesus kept his wounded body and that that body was raised from the dead and ascended into heaven. I feel compelled to seek comfort in the wounds of a Wounded Healer. So yes. This song came last — but it feels to me as though it had always existed.
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And today we celebrate...