After 4 years in Switzerland, I have returned with my family
to the USA. I’m currently in
Nashville, working my new record, 1,000 Different Colors. Here’s the back-story…
We were still new to Switzerland when we walked into “The
Connecting Zone” at International Christian Church (ICF) in downtown
Zurich. It was a hot and crowded
room, full of people from all over the world. Colorful flags from the nations hung across the ceiling and
around the walls. I looked to find
the Stars and Stripes, a comforting symbol of home in this foreign
environment. Here, I was the
foreigner. Our Swiss hosts served
a dark meat and vegetable sauce over white rice while Europeans, Africans,
South Americans, North Americans, Australians and Asians crammed together,
eating and speaking languages I had never heard before.
I had no place in my brain for this. Living in a new country, walking into a
room filled with scores of new languages, new cultures? To say, “it was a new experience” would
be the understatement of the year.
Growing up on my granddaddy’s farm in Powhatan, Virginia, before they
put in the first stoplight in our small town, I learned a lovely value of family roots,
and a strong sense of community. I
brought all this with me when I moved at 17 years old to Nashville, Music City,
USA. I traveled a little bit in
Europe; a couple of missions trips opened my eyes to living conditions in Mexico
and Central America. Still, I
admired the way my husband, Doug, related with ease to people from all over the
world. His close friends were from
India and Australia. His best man
in our wedding was a missionary in Lithuania. He made frequent research trips to Panama and spoke decent
Spanish. I could barely remember a
few phrases of high school French.
I longed for an international life experience.
I got one.
Over the next few months, we visited ICF, a brave new kind
of church plowing the hard ground of Central Europe. Hundreds of teens and young families poured into a warehouse
every Sunday, where the music was loud, the screens were big, and the pastor
had spiked hair and looked just like Keifer Southerland. I had grown up in church, and sung in
quite a few of them, but I had never seen anything like this. So many things differently done, and
yet the passion and love for Jesus was evident in the hearts of the
people.
After the services, back in The Connecting Zone, I became
friends with Abraham from Ghana, Eloise from Peru, Eli from South Africa, Edward
from New Zealand, and many others, and learned about their different cultures. It was as if I had only seen blue my
whole life; now I was beginning to understand the reds, oranges, yellows, greens,
and purples of the world.
One Tuesday evening as we all gathered for worship, our
friend, Matt Bossard from Switzerland, shared this story: He had been on holidays to the south of
France, where he enjoyed watching the sunset over the Mediterranean every
evening. “Everyone says the sea is
blue,” he said. “…but it’s not. It
sparkles with 1,000 different colors.”
This was a revelation.
My whole life, I was trying to paint the world with one
color: The sea is blue. But it’s
not just blue…the sea is 1,000 different colors.
In Switzerland, I learned this lesson: We try to make things
simple. We say, “Trees are green.
The sky is blue.” But the falling autumn leaves, the sunset sky…they are 1,000
different colors. We do this with
people sometimes, too. We say,
“She is like this. He is like
that.” But we are, each one of us,
1,000 different colors. We say,
“God is like this.” But, the ways
He leads us, the ways He reveals Himself to us, the ways He shows Himself in
nature all around us…God is 1,000 different colors.
And so I have a new song, and a new album, 1,000
Different Colors. The
songs are about hope and healing, seeing the world and God in new ways.
“The sky is not
blue…the sky is like You:
1,000 different
colors, moving all together
More beautiful, more
beautiful than words.”
Even more special is the way people from all over the world
are coming together to make this music happen. We are 1,000 Different Colors. If you’d like to learn more and be a part of the making of
this album, visit: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/audreywoodhams/audreys-new-album-1000-different-colors.
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