"From a Life of Sin to a Family Music Ministry" by Brackin Kirkland

Lesson Transcript

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us this morning on Strength to Strength. This morning we have Brother Bracken Kirkland. I believe you're from North Carolina. Is that right? Yes, it is. Yeah. From North Carolina, where he lives with his wife, Lindsay, and seven children. Mm-hmm. Right. Six boys and one girl. How excited were you when the seventh one was a girl after six boys? Oh, yeah.

You can only imagine. Yeah. Thanks for joining us this morning to share his testimony. And some of you may know them from the Sounds Like Rain YouTube channel. They produce music with their family, their children, and Bracken and Lindsay. And if I'm right, I believe the one song, "Give Me Jesus," has 10 million views on YouTube. So we reach quite a large audience with your music, which is wonderful.

And they also have a vlog, a video vlog on YouTube called Tiny Notes from Home, which is rather entertaining to follow along. So before we get started here, let's bow our heads for a word of prayer. Righteous Father in heaven, we come before you this morning. We thank you, Lord, for your goodness and your greatness. We thank you for you are the only wise God and that we can commit our lives to you.

We thank you that Bracken has agreed to come on this morning and share the story of his interactions with you and your work in his life and his family's life. We just thank you that he has joined us to share the blessing that they've received from you. We just pray that our hearts would be ready to hear of marvelous things that you have done in their lives. Be with him this morning. May he share with confidence and clarity. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. All right. You can go ahead. Amen. Thank you, Sam.

And welcome to everyone who is watching live and those of you who may view this in the future. My name is Bracken Kirkland, like Sam said. And I find myself in sometimes a strange position because people will commonly mention who we are online and our music and videos and all the metrics behind that, which in man's eyes can be seen as perhaps an accomplishment. But I'm just a normal guy. I'm a normal man with normal struggles and problems and all of that.

And ultimately, I want to be known as a follower of Jesus, first and foremost. I want to be known for his character being formed in me and his life flowing through me and out of me. And so I hope that's what you pick up from our time together today. I want to glorify the Lord from every fiber of my being because without him, I'm absolutely nothing. And that's not just lip service. That is a visceral reality that I live out on a daily basis, as all of you do as well. So thank you for having me.

And I think I'll just share a little bit about some of my background just to kind of set the stage or the foundation for the rest of our story. And I'll share a bit about our journey of faith as a family and some of the work that the Lord is doing now, and then hopefully looking forward to what the Lord—well, there's a new season and a new phase of our life that might be coming up soon, and I'll just explore some of that with you out loud. So I am 40 years old, and I have a wife named Lindsay who's 37.

And we have been married for 17 years this June. We met when she was 17 and I was 20. So we've known each other for about 20 years. We currently live near Asheville, North Carolina, in the mountains. And we've been down in this part of the country for, well, as long as we've been married. She and I would have met in Pennsylvania, in York County, south of Harrisburg. And she would have grown up there, and I would have met her there after my family moved to that area from Colorado.

I was originally born in Mississippi and grew up in Alabama and Florida. So I'm a bit of a transplant. And then we ended up transplanting here to go to college. She and I would have graduated college together, and then we bought a house and started having children down here. And then both of our families transplanted to here as well. So I guess you could say we're local to North Carolina now. We have seven children. Forest is our oldest. He's 13.

And then we have Joseph, Ezra, Silas, Noah, Elijah, and a new daughter named Lydia. And they are a tremendous blessing to us. Our heart's desire is to raise children that love the Lord and that desire to just surrender their lives to him in every way that they can. The fruit of that is yet to be seen. We're very happy with the hearts of our children as they are now. Of course, they're still children, but our oldest, Forest, has made a commitment to the Lord and been baptized.

And we see the power of God in his life, and we're very thankful for that. The rest of them are yet to be seen, but we place them in his trust, and we are just praying fervently and nurturing their hearts and their souls diligently in the way of the Lord. So if we were meeting for the first time, we would probably exchange pleasantries, and we would ask each other, "What do you do for work?" Which I like the guys who can say, "Oh, well, I lay block," or, "I'm a technician," or, "I'm a mechanic," or whatever.

And those types of—I have a hard time answering that question, to be quite honest. Recently in my life—well, I'll just say this. I have a background in handyman work and building and just some basic construction skills. And more recently, in the past three or four years, our family has shifted full-time to, I guess you could say, we make YouTube videos, which is a really strange concept. It's foreign. It's foreign to me. It's foreign to all of human history.

I feel like it's a bit of an experiment, and I don't exactly know where this whole thing is going to end up. And so I walk very tenuously into that. We're thankful for the technology that we have and the opportunity to share our lives so freely with so many people. But to be quite frank, it's just a strange—it's a strange time we live in and a strange job to have. But suffice to say, the Lord has provided for our family through that. And I can explain a bit more of how that works later if anyone is interested.

But let me catch you up quickly on how I find myself in this position today. I'll just go back to a bit of my early testimony and then kind of fast forward through that up to now. I'll spare you most of the details, but there's a few important kind of milestones along the way. I would have grown up in a Christian home in a variety of places around the country, mostly in the Baptist denomination, Southern Baptist, or then kind of moving into more of an independent fundamental Baptist.

So fairly conservative as far as Baptists are concerned. I would have had a very healthy childhood, loving parents. We had everything we needed. My dad worked hard. He was in the retail industry. And my mother was a school teacher. We went to a private Christian school. We were in church three times a week every time the doors were open. And I would have made a profession of faith as a young child.

I can't say that—well, it's hard for me to know when the journey started because I feel like when I was a young child and I made a commitment to the Lord that I'm not sure if I became a Christian or if I became a Baptist at that point because there was just kind of a kind of a normal kind of expected route that children would take where we would say the sinner's prayer and be baptized. And I don't know.

I don't discount that time in my life, but the power of God was not evident in my life until I had—well, there's a long gap, I'll just put it that way, between my youth and when I feel like I truly came to know the Lord in a real personal way. So in my early teenage years, I made some bad decisions and got caught up with the wrong crowd in school, began to indulge in just a variety of truly sinful activities. Most of them centered—well, yeah.

The crowd that I connected with at the school—and this was even at a private Christian school at the time—it was kind of the fringe guys. And growing up, I didn't have access to any kind of what people might term worldly music. But when I connected with these fringe guys in high school, the music that I heard from them just took—it just took me. And it was the beginning of a long downward spiral. I would say the music had the most powerful influence in my life at that time.

But as soon as I got into the music, I got into the culture. I got into the drugs and the alcohol and just everything that goes along with it, probably starting at the age of 14 years old and all the way up into my early 20s. So it was for a good long while. During that time in my life, I think I just ignored the voice of God. I feel like his conscience, if you will, was still with me.

And I suppose there was part of me that may have desired to do what was right, but I just pushed it to the side for the sake of fulfilling the desires of my flesh, which is—that is the human condition. That is the human struggle. And I would not have been strong enough as a youth to overcome that without the power of God.

And that's why I question this early conversion that I had because I truly believe that if someone is empowered with the Spirit of God, that the temptation of the flesh becomes less of a magnetic draw. Of course, we still struggle with things from time to time. But that's really what we want to teach our children is giving them the power of God to overcome sin, not just some formula.

So yeah, during this time in my life, teenage years, drugs, alcohol, I feel like I struggled with a kind of mental emotional disorder, some depression, anxiety. And I would have spiraled down pretty fast over the course of years to the point where, yeah, by the time I was 17 years old, I didn't want to live anymore. And when I was 18 years old, I attempted to take my own life a number of times. On one occasion, I took an entire bottle of pills, pain relievers, and ended up in the hospital.

And by the grace of God, I lived through that. Thinking about it now is very sobering. I had just had nothing to hold on to. It was a very, very dark time. Unfortunately, it was not the bottom. I came out of the psych ward with just kind of lost. And again, well, I figured at that time I should get a job to do something. I had dropped out of high school and just didn't really have a lot of meaning or purpose in life. The job that I took was, again, centered around music, going to music festivals.

And I kind of did—well, yeah. I'm trying not to go too deep into the weeds here. But suffice to say, I ended up in a crowd of people that were using hallucinogenic drugs, including LSD and mushrooms and things of that nature. And so I had kind of hit a bottom when I tried to take my life, but there was an even deeper bottom to go on these mind-altering substances. And I specifically remember one time when I had taken a bunch of these hallucinogenic drugs.

And while I was traveling around with what people call the hippies, the peace, love, and happiness people, with the rainbows and the sunshine and the flowers and all of that because I was looking for some joy or some purpose in my life. And these people seem to, at least on the surface, have some form of peace or whatever. But the deeper I got into that community, the darker it became. And I was used by a drug dealer to move LSD from state to state at one time. And I got pulled over by the police.

And to the best of my remembrance, I had this substance with me. It was like 4 o'clock in the morning, and my car had broke down on the side of the highway. And I parked in a really, really bad spot, kind of on the inside of an outer curve in the road on Highway something coming south out of Pittsburgh, just a busy road in a bad spot. And they stopped and tapped on the window. And they were just concerned for my safety because I had parked right on the white line. There's tractor trailers buzzing around.

I didn't know any better because I was out of my mind on drugs. And they quickly realized that I was just a riffraff hippie kid. And they wanted to search my car. And I just kind of freaked out. I just, "Oh God, please help me get out of this one." Kind of one of those deals with the Lord where, "Lord, if you get me out of this, I'll turn my life around, I promise." Kind of one of those moments. And actually, the first thing I thought when they started searching my car was, "I'm going to go to jail.

I'm going to go to jail." But what hurt me more was that I thought to myself, "And I'm going to have to call my dad to bail me out," which was just a terrible thought. My dad is the most loving and supportive father I could hope for. Like I said, I had a good upbringing. And the Lord just met me there in a moment of humility, I suppose. And he was gracious to me. Well, let me rephrase that. He was merciful to me. He showed me his mercy. And the police didn't find anything in my car. I was underage.

I know there were empty alcohol containers and drugs and paraphernalia and all of that. They didn't find any of it. And they sent me on my way. And what's interesting is that where I had parked on the road was maybe a few hundred feet from an off-ramp. I could have just pulled off the off-ramp and pulled into a gas station, and I would have been fine. But for some reason, I ended up right there at that moment. And that, to me, was the lowest point. And it was at that point that I started to turn my life around.

Now, it would have taken a few years before I could retrain my brain out of bad habits and really get the power of God to help me overcome these things and to renew my mind and to just undo the layers of sin and death that I had brought upon myself for all of those years. That was when I was about 18 years old, 19, yeah, somewhere in there. A couple of years later, so I ended up moving back into my parents' house. And it was a couple of years later that I met my wife, Lindsay. And she was young and spunky and fun.

And she liked to have a good time, but there was no drugs, no alcohol. She was totally clean. And I was just magnetized to that. Here are these people that enjoy life, so to speak, but they don't need these mind-altering substances to do that. And just real quickly on my wife, she would have grown up in a Unitarian Universalist home, which they believe that all paths lead to the same destination, that all religions are valid. And she didn't believe that to be true. That's what she was taught.

She knew that Jesus said that he was the way, the truth, and the life. And she would eventually come to terms with that shortly before her and I met. And so we both met in this kind of pseudo-Christian or proto-Christian world where we had the touch of the Lord on our life, but we weren't exactly sure what that looked like or how to flesh it out. But nonetheless, we knew that God is real, that Jesus is his son, that his life is true, and that we have a—how do I put this?

At the time, we would have thought that we have a responsibility to follow him. And about that time is when we moved to—so all of my story up to this point happened in Pennsylvania. And it was about that time when we met that we moved to North Carolina to go to college. That's when we got married and bought a house and our extended family transplanted down here. So I hope that's not too much detail, but that kind of gets fast-forwarded through my early life.

And there's obviously a lot more there, but those are some of the highlights that kind of set the stage for where we are today. And Lindsay and I would have—during college, we would have sought to honor the Lord with our lives. We got to a point where we were fairly typical college students. We went to a Christian college here in North Carolina. And I mean, Christian colleges come in a variety of shapes and forms. This one was decent.

And we had Bible classes, and we had all of our—there was enough Christian influence, I suppose, to help, albeit with all the other trappings of college as well. Suffice to say, we ended up going to a small church kind of startup. And we would have started overlapping with some friends that some of you might know. Burton and Ashley Salthouse, they live in Pennsylvania, would have been our dearest friends at the time.

And we were all on a journey together seeking the Lord at this small kind of non-denominational college church. And let's see here. Where do we go from here? Yeah, I'll say this. We really desired to honor the Lord. We didn't know what that looked like. We started reading the Bible together, my wife and I and some friends of ours. And something clicked. Something changed. Something was different during this period of our life.

We started reading the New Testament again, and it was almost like I was reading it for the first time. I focused heavily on the red letters. And there was just an undeniable difference, an undeniable power, an undeniable life that I was just receiving from these words, the living Word of God through the living Son of God. And I just couldn't live the same way anymore, the way that I had. I mean, we would—we weren't party people, but we would go to the bars on Saturday night and then go to church on Sunday morning.

That was kind of the life that we were living at the time. And we would have been generally good Christian people. And there might have even been a certain level of acceptance of those types of activities in the church circle that we were in at the time. And the more I read the words of Jesus, I thought, "The question that I would ask myself at the time was, what if Jesus really meant what he said? What if Jesus really was who he says he was and if he meant what he said?

If that's the case, then my life should look different." Not different for different's sake, but different because if the true power of God indwells me, then where's the change? Where's the true life-giving power that frees us from our former ways and kind of launches us into his ways? And so we started seeking that wholeheartedly, Lindsay and I and a number of friends, including this brother Burton and his wife. And we just got on fire.

In other words, the way I might phrase it is, prior to this point, we would have rearranged the Bible and the Word of God to fit how we wanted to live our lives. And instead, we started to rearrange our lives to fit with the life and teachings of Jesus. And that's been an ongoing journey since then. This would have been early 2000, so going on 18, 20 years ago. And I've not arrived. We've not figured it all out. But I'm thankful that the Lord revealed himself in this kind of fresh way.

I felt like we had kind of our reformation or Anabaptist experience of like, "Well, hang on. These structures and these forms of Christianity that we're living in, they don't line up with the pages of Scripture." I'm not saying that they're completely in error. The people that we fellowshipped with at the time would have loved the Lord, and they would have desired to honor him with their lives. But that only went so far. And when you went farther than that, there was resistance to it. And I was like, "I'm all in.

I want to go all the way, regardless of the consequences." And I don't even know what I'm saying when I say that. But because I don't know what the consequences are, because I don't know, I haven't gotten far enough down the road to experience those things. But with God's help, that's the direction that I'm heading. I had read Pilgrim's Progress at the time for the first time. And I was just like, "We're leaving. We're out of here.

We're headed and we're headed toward the kingdom, that kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven." And so I attribute all of that just to the power of the Word. And reading it, someone once said, "Where's the best place to start reading the Bible?" And the answer is, it's on your knees. And that is exactly where we met the Lord was just, "You change me. You fill me. You inform me. You renew my mind and my heart in all areas of my life." And I'm still relinquishing and surrendering things to him to this day.

So what did that look like practically? The outworking of that would have been I felt like at the time that I was too focused on myself and my own desires and my own bank account and my own equity and my own house and my own job and my own life and everything. And we need those things to live and survive. Those things aren't inherently wrong. But for me, I had begun to idolize those things.

And meanwhile, we read in the book of Acts that the early Christians, they sold all they have, and they gave to the poor, and they lived in common union with each other. And so along with a number of friends, we just moved out of our houses and moved on to a farm together. Now, you have to remember, we're young. We're zealous. We're naive. We're just crazy enough to do this thing. And I'm not suggesting that that's the right way of going about.

This whole intentional community thing that we were experimenting with is just that. It's an experiment. And I could go on a long time about why that doesn't work. But it was a proving ground for us. And we lived together with another family at the time that was running a missionary training camp on their farm. So they had built this African village on their farm here in North Carolina, complete with mud huts and the whole thing. And we would bring in youth groups from churches to come camp for a week.

And we had this whole missionary training program that we would teach them. We had this Kenyan man that we knew. We would bring him in to be the village elder, and he would speak Swahili. And so we would train in the morning, we would train these campers about cross-cultural missions and all sorts of things. And then in the afternoon, they would go do these simulated missionary activities in the village. And we did that for a number of years. But I got thinking like, "I have not been a missionary before.

And here I am teaching cross-cultural missions to youth." I mean, I could do that theoretically, but in practice, we got the missionary bug. And we were just like, "We know the Lord says we should serve the least of these and take the gospel to the ends of the earth. And let's go do that." Again, that was kind of like a time in our life when our zeal got ahead of us, and we thought that we needed to do something for the Lord and that we needed to create, just do something. And I'm that kind of guy.

I like to get things done. And we had heard about a family from Oregon that was going to Papua New Guinea. And I'm telling you that when you hear the end of the story, you'll completely understand why I'm telling it. It's kind of a pivotal point in our journey. And so we thought, "Okay, let's go visit this family. They're going to Papua New Guinea. They were all in, just going on a faith-based mission." I guess they had had a literal dream that the Lord was sending them to the Bulu people.

And they didn't even know. That was just out of the blue. They didn't know where the Bulu people were. And they went online and found this tribe called the Bulus in Papua New Guinea. And they said, "All right. Well, we're going to go." And we said, "Well, we'll go with you." So I flew my whole family out to Oregon. This would have been, oh, 10 years ago, maybe 8 years ago to visit with this family. Now, during this time, my wife and I were trying to find our way.

I have a fairly strong disposition, and my wife is fairly subdued, laid back. And so we didn't necessarily have to we didn't have an upside-down marriage, if you will, in terms of God's created order. But we still had some things to work out. And I was struggling with leading my wife in a way that she wanted to follow me, I guess you could say.

I've never been the domineering type that says, "Well, you just need to follow me just because I'm the man of the house and this is me." But at the same time, I've been like, "Look, we need to do something with our life. And here's how I feel compelled. And what's it going to take for you to get where I'm at?" That kind of thing. I felt like I was always a few steps ahead of her down the road. And naturally, I would be. At the time, I had a few years of life experience on her.

But I felt like if because naturally, our wives are more domestic, and they have more temporal, earthly concerns, if you will. And that's not wrong. We have children. We need a place to live. We need a place to eat, bathe, sleep, etc. I get it. But I was kind of trying to press the boundaries a little bit. And we were familiar enough with Scripture at the time that she wanted to be a good wife, and she wanted to follow. But her heart was not there. And I didn't even realize it at the time.

So all I have to say is we get to Oregon to visit this family to potentially join them on their mission to Papua New Guinea. We were going to stay there for two weeks and have some in-depth prayer meetings and really get to the heart of it. Within a couple of days, they picked up that her and I were not united on this endeavor. And they really encouraged us to become united.

They saw that I was leading, that I had a passion and a desire to honor the Lord, and that my wife had a desire to honor me, but that her heart was not in it. And so it was at that time that we decided that we wanted to actively pursue unity in our marriage, not just on the surface, but deep inside. And while we were in Oregon, we decided to write and record music together. And the reason that we kind of chose that specific activity to unite us together is because my wife comes from a musical family and background.

I had an interest in music. I had given up all of my music from my prior life. And I had been musicless, intentionally musicless on purpose for a number of years at that time just to kind of reset and retrain my brain and allow the Lord to kind of empty me of my past musical experiences. And believe it or not, it was actually the biggest point of contention in our marriage. We were both so passionate about music, but in very, very different ways. And we thought we didn't fight about money.

We didn't fight about child training. We didn't have a lot of relational issues. But man, when it came to music, we could really go at it. And so we thought, "All right. Let's hone in on that.

Let's pick this most difficult, friction-filled part of our marriage and commit to intentionally working together in this area." And because what we had hoped was that we could work together for a season, learn what is the proper order in our family, and find the heart of the Lord, and to prepare us and train us so that we could go on the mission field in Papua New Guinea or elsewhere. It was supposed to be a temporary thing that we would just use as a tool. And so we came back to North Carolina.

At the time, we were renting a tiny house. We were living in a shed, a 14 by 40 minibarn on a borrowed piece of property. And we had a 10 by 20 minibarn next to the house that we turned into a music studio. And we just started recording music on our cell phone with very basic equipment, no frills, and started posting it on the internet. And I guess my logic or reasoning behind that was I knew my wife was gifted musically, and I wanted to honor that gift in her. And I'm not—how do I say this?

I always tell people that I'm not a musician, and they don't believe it. But it's kind of true. I mean, I'm sitting in a room full of instruments here, but I'm more of a technician. I'm more of an engineer. And so I figured I'll use my music engineering skills and her natural gift, and we'll just do something together. I didn't think much about it, but we started posting videos, and people started watching them. And it was during that time that we—well, I suppose I say people started watching them.

I started our conversation by saying this is kind of a strange time that we live in because I have this—there's two edges. There's two sides to this coin, and it's kind of a double-edged sword, if you will. Any of us that create things, any of us that do work for the Lord—and that could be anything—and all of you do something for the Lord, I mean, your existence is enough. But I know that all of you are intentional in some way. I'll just take Bryant, for example, or the brothers at ABT.

We do this work, and we want people to know about it. But only because we want for the work to be effective, and we want for the Lord to be able to multiply it in a way. And so that's the fine line that I walk as a YouTube guy is that we spend a lot of time making music to the glory of the Lord. It is an act of worship. It is an act of honor and glory to Him. And I don't want to hide that under a bush. I don't want to—but I also don't want to stand on the street corner in long robes and say, "Ah, look at me.

I've got it all figured out." So that's the weird kind of place that I find myself in is we know this can be a blessing to people. We want to honor the Lord. We want to share our gifts with the world and be a light to Him. We want to reflect His glory. And so that is why we post things online. I suppose there could be another—there could be another way to go about that. And I'm open to suggestions. But I suppose the reason I'm stumbling here is because that's just a struggle.

It just is a real struggle that we're still trying to work out. I don't know what the end game is, but I want to be thinking about that because I don't want to be stuck in a cycle of, "And here I am. I'm waxing philosophical about YouTube content." But I just don't want to be stuck in a cycle of create posts, positive feedback, create more post videos because it's a little maddening, to be quite honest.

And because I sit here in this room and point a camera at myself and upload it to the internet, and people like it, and the Lord provides, and then I do it again. I'm in a time right now, to be quite honest. And I'll probably wrap up here shortly, but where I'm really questioning the whole thing in a good way. The Lord, I feel like, has laid a foundation for my family. He has provided for us in beyond what I could hope for or imagine.

And I feel a heavy weight of responsibility with the hundreds of thousands of viewers and subscribers that we have and the tens of millions of views on our videos too. I feel a mantle of responsibility to use that as a platform, as a foundation to—there's something more. And since the new year of this year, I've been really seeking the Lord about what is that. Because I'm 40 years old. I can't feed the YouTube algorithm forever and just expect to get the same results. I'm going to lose my hair.

I'm going to go out of style. I'm going to be irrelevant at some point. And that's okay. I'm not trying to impress anyone here. We just really want to continue to seek the Lord. And I'm asking Him deeply right now in my life, "Lord, what is this next season, this next phase?" I have a teenager now and more on the way. I have six young men soon to be—well, I say soon, I guess relatively soon to be husbands and fathers and leaders of their home. And my focus is, what can I do to set them up for success?

And that's an exciting thing to explore with them. So that's kind of how this YouTube thing came around. That's been our main focus for the past couple of years.

I guess in the process of making music, we also started making these family video blogs or vlogs just to kind of share a behind-the-scenes look of our life and just to share general scriptural encouragement, encouragement from a Motherly's perspective or from the perspective of a family that's just dealing with normal daily life in a family of nine, which has proved to be a blessing to people as well. And so the feedback that we get is positive.

But it's not lost on me that I sit in a place of privilege and that I sit in a place of responsibility because we get comments and emails just by the dozens and hundreds a week of people who are just like, "I just found your music, and I've been struggling with depression, and this song really lifted me out of a dark place today. Praise the Lord." And we're like, "Yes, yes. That's why we do this." And so I guess just pray with us, if you think of it, just as we seek the Lord. We want to turn our lives inside out.

And I don't know what that looks like yet. We're thinking of various outreach opportunities and projects and programs that we can implement to take this foundation that the Lord has laid and multiply it even further than where we are now. I'm afraid I don't have a lot of clarity on that right now. But I hope that as I continue to grow in the Lord, that I can just continue to surrender everything to Him and that I can be quiet and still enough to hear His voice and to follow it faithfully.

I just want more of the Lord in my life every day. And I'm thankful for the opportunity to serve Him. I'm content in the Lord as we sit here today. But as all of you probably know, there's sometimes this holy discontentment or this holy draw or pull to something more, to going deeper. And I think a lot of times—I suppose I'll close with this—for me, it's easy to have an inkling from the Lord about something and to kind of just put it on the back burner. "Oh, someday. Someday we'll do that.

Someday I'll follow that leading of the Lord." But I'm of the impression right now that life is short. Nothing else matters. And everything that we do in every breath should point people to the Son of God. And I'm excited for the next phase and season of our life as we continue to do that. So all that to say is, praise the Lord. Thank you. I hope some of this has been an encouragement to y'all. I want to honor and glorify Him.

And even though we have kind of a public forward-facing life and ministry, there's a lot churning in the background. And I know all y'all churn on these things too. I don't know. I'm scrolling through here. I don't know many of you or most of you, but I do know that there are a lot of people in a similar position, regardless of your background or what season in life you find yourself or the scale of life that you find yourself at.

Just continue—may this be an encouragement—just to continue to seek the Lord, find that we think of the still small voice. The only way to hear that is to still our hearts because it's a quiet voice, and it beckons us to more, not to just the status quo, the everyday, "Hey, I'm doing all right. I'm honoring God to the best of my ability." That's great. But that's the floor. That's not the—that's the foundation. That's not the ceiling. And so may we continue to press on to the Lord in all that we do.

And with that, I'll turn it back over to Sam. All right. Thanks, Bracken. Thank you for your honesty or thank you for sharing honestly about your experiences. And it's amazing where and how God meets us. You sharing your story about being along the road and the police walk up, and that's the lowest of the low and the launching point of your return to God. I'm amazed to hear people's experiences and where God has met them and how He has met them. It's incredible to hear that.

Thank you for the challenges there on the end to move on the inkling. So much time goes by. And if you hear a word from God or a challenge or the Spirit is teaching something, to move on that now. There's no better time to move on an inkling from God than today. So I really appreciate that. I'm going to open it up for questions or comments. We're also going to play one of their songs at the end. I can't remember if I had mentioned that at the beginning, but I'll mention it now.

At the end of all this, after our prayer and announcements, we are going to put Humble King on, and we'll close with one of the songs from Sounds Like Rain. So a question I have is, you obviously grew up familiar with scripture, but you mentioned that. So the question, what would you say brought about the different view of the scripture when you said you started reading the New Testament again and it was like you read it for the first time?

What place did you have to get to in your mind and heart for that to happen? Well, I had to get to the place where nothing else worked. I had tried, obviously, drugs and different worldly philosophies and religious ideas and life experiences that just they're all broken. And I needed power. I needed—I couldn't do it on my own. And the words of Jesus were compelling to the point that I just couldn't ignore them anymore.

They became the power that I needed to rise above and to be transformed into His image, which is the way that—which is the way that it's like a recreation. It's a new birth. That's the way that God intended us to be was in right relationship with Him. And obviously, the prodigal son was a compelling story for me at the time. But it went beyond just like it went beyond, "Thank you, Jesus. Now I'm saved. Amen." It went to a place of, "Thy kingdom come on earth looks like something." I don't know what it looks like.

I don't know how to interpret that. But the power of Christ is the only saving grace that this world has. And I began to taste and touch and see and feel that for myself to the point where I was like, "I saw these things." For example, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus pointed to, "You've heard it said," or, "This is the way things were. Here's the old way.

But I tell you." I was like, "Wow, what else did Jesus say?" And that's where it became this journey of discovery of where turning the other cheek became a reality, not just lip service. And those kinds of things that I'm still discovering to this day.

But yeah, the New Testament became a—and the early church became a roadmap for what the life of a Christian should look like rather than being informed by the Christian culture and society around us, which, like I said, there's some level of honesty and truth there, but a lot of times people don't want to go all the way with it. And to be quite honest, maybe I'm afraid to go all the way with it too.

But I'm trusting that the Lord's grace will—and Titus says, "The grace of God teaches us to deny ungodliness or worldly lusts." It teaches that it empowers us to live righteous and holy. So it's God's grace that does that to us. It's not—it's the grace of God is empowering. It doesn't just free us from sin. It empowers us to live a victorious life. And that's exactly what I needed during that season. That's what we all need, so. Yeah. Praise God.

I ask that because I've experienced a similar thing in the past, I would say about a few years ago, where the life of the scriptures was so overwhelming and became so real to me. But I guess it's a place where we all need to get in our lives, regardless of our setting or even upbringing, is when we are willing to have that honest look. Sounds like for you, it was a lifeline in a time of dark need.

And it is for all of us, but that willingness to just be honest with ourselves and with God and with the scriptures and then allow that power to start to work within us instead of us trying to make—because we're really good at manipulating how we see things and how we relate to things and how we relate to truth and how we relate to God. But to be willing to just drop the manipulation and allow it to take over in our lives. So yeah, that's incredible.

Yeah, that's exactly—that's the best way of putting it in short form. Thank you. Does anyone else have—there was something popped up here on the chat. Explain the name Sounds Like Rain. Yeah, it's just what it says. I like to tell people, "These are the sounds of the rain of God in our hearts and lives." It's obviously a play on words. But I can't say that it came to me in a dream or anything, but it—yeah, I—well, yeah. I tend to get into philosophical weeds pretty fast, so I'm trying to avoid that.

But these are the sounds of the rain of God in our hearts and lives. I can appreciate that. I like it. We all want to see the rain of Christ, but we want to hear it as well. Yeah. I suppose I will say this much. I feel like a large part of Christianity today—and I'm not excluding myself from this because I was raised in this culture as much as anyone else was—but a large part of it—and I'm still learning what this looks like myself, but it doesn't fully understand the kingship of Jesus.

And there's the Lord and Savior part of it. People say that they made Jesus their Savior. The Lord part of it is harder to grasp. And the king part of it is like when we grab a hold of the idea that Jesus is king, that he's brought a new kingdom on earth, that we are living in the kingdom now and that it's separate from the kingdom of the world and that a king has—a king has dominion. He has his subjects. He has his laws. He has his provision.

And when we place ourselves into the hands of the king, I think a lot of people might be afraid of that because they think of the kings that beheaded people or whatever. But this is the loving king. This is the humble king. This is the shepherd king. And so we want for Jesus to reign in a kingly form. Not just the Jesus of the cross, but the Jesus of—and not—okay, so this is maybe where the difference is. It's like there's the Jesus of the cross. There's the Jesus of the resurrection.

So that's like the Savior Jesus and the Lord Jesus. But the king Jesus is the Jesus of the ascension, the Jesus that sits on the throne on high, so. Yeah, it's good. I appreciate that. Anyone have any other questions or comments? Thank you, Brother Bracken, for sharing this morning. And just how it touched just with your testimony, the way God has worked in your life, and just the reality that just grappling with life currently and what that should look like for you all.

Really do appreciate you and your family a lot and know that you are—I want you to know that you are inspiring and challenging many people. But I also want to bless you too with just that humility of saying, "Lord, what's the next phase?" When you have ministered to so many people, it can quickly become an idol to you. And I just want to really bless you for just opening up, not holding it too closely. But at the same time, don't stop making music.

But yeah, I have a verse here for you, Brother, for you and your family out of Colossians 1:9. We are asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding. And may God guide and direct you and Lindsay and your family as you move forward and know that you're loved and appreciated by many. I have a friend here with me, Luke North from Alabama. And he's got a—sorry about that. He's a young man, and he really appreciates your talking this morning as well.

And he's got a question for you. What does your relationship with your extended family—so your parents, your grandparents, and your wife's parents and grandparents—what does that look like? Have y'all been able to maintain that? I come from a non-Anabaptist background myself. My dad and mom came from the Methodist. And I know that when they went to the Anabaptist background, it put a huge strain on their relationships. And they were a very close family. They would even consider themselves a very Christian family.

But what does that look like for you? And for your family? Sure. Yeah. So my wife's parents are not believers. And they're the type of people that just kind of affirm whatever anyone believes as your truth and whatever. So I mean, they see us living a positive, healthy, wholesome lifestyle, and they're happy about that. They really, honestly don't have any—we don't get any pushback from them. And then my folks are part of the church, albeit a different part.

And we're living—our lifestyle now is different than the way that I was raised. But my folks are supportive of us at this juncture in our life. I think early on, we made some pretty radical changes, for instance, to the way that we dressed and to how we spend our time and things like that. For example, my folks would want to take us to the beach every year. And we used to do that. And then there was a time when we stopped. And I don't have a problem with going to the beach.

But at the time, I was really struggling with, "Where does this fit into my Christian life? Is this luxury? Is this vanity?" Not to mention some of the trappings that one might find there. And so there's a little bit of friction there. But generally, they're pretty supportive. My advice to people that might find themselves in a similar position is just to walk in humility and really just show by our actions that this truth that we have found in Christ is life-changing.

But I think the biggest problem that people have in general is they are afraid that you're going to judge them and that you might not approve of who they are. And I probably would have outright said that to my family at one point, which is not in the spirit of Christ. We do need to be—we need to stand for righteousness and truth. And we do need to maybe have some difficult conversations from time to time. But those have to be built on a foundation of love and respect.

And ultimately, our actions speak louder than our words. And it's easy to say, but it's just plain true. And so I want to be more gracious to people because, quite honestly, there was a time in my life when I called myself a Christian. And the Lord was working in my heart, but I was not there yet. And I don't want to assume that I'm there yet now because the Apostle Paul teaches us that we need to keep pressing on to the end of the journey. And even then, our only hope is in Christ.

And when people see that, I think it says more than our ability to just speak fluently on certain topics that are dear to our heart. So yeah, let our power be in the life of Christ that dwells in us and flows out of us. I agree. Thank you for sharing that. I do want to encourage you, though. You said you're looking at the next phase. And I believe that our family's next phase was we've started to have to take care of our elderly family.

And it's been challenging because there's not that many other people in the family that are willing or able to do it. So I want to encourage you that don't abandon your parents or your grandparents because sometimes the mission field is your extended family. And sometimes the greatest witness you can be is to your family, your parents, and your grandparents and such. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah, thanks for the comments on relating to extended family.

We get a little pushback from my wife's family about the changes that we've made in our lives. And that's something that we feel like, "Well, you can't go wrong just showing them the love of Christ." Because it'd be easy to preach to them. It'd be easy to point out the things they're doing wrong. It'd be easy to do all of that. It's a little more difficult just to humbly serve our king and let our actions play out in the relationship and show them Christ in that way. Do we have any other comments or questions?

Someone asked how you met us as hosts. Well, we haven't met yet, I guess. I'm not sure if you've met Glenn, but you've met Bryant before, I take it. That's right. Yep. I've met Glenn and Bryant. And I'm not sure who else is on here. Patrick and probably some others here. I'm looking at the names. Yeah, we've spent a lot of time in central Pennsylvania there. And I think we have a lot of common friends. Are you planning on being at Kingdom Fellowship this week or this year? I don't know if we'll make it this year.

We're sorting out some things. But if we do, we'll be happy to see all y'all there. Yeah, for sure. All right. If there's no one else that would like to comment or raise a question, I think we can wrap this up. It has been a blessing. Thank you for coming on, Bracken, and sharing your journey with God. And it's encouraging to see where God has led you and to see your humility and willingness to serve.

I think it's a good reminder that that's what it takes to be a follower of Christ is humility and surrender, just as he was humble and surrendered to his father. We have a perfect example in him in that. And we see the fruit of that in his life of sinlessness. So God bless you and your ministries there and your family. I can say I don't envy you in the limelight and what all that entails and what that brings in. But I appreciate your courage and your humility in that.

And so we'll remember you in prayers because we do enjoy your music. Coming from a non-Anabaptist background, my wife has struggled to find music. And I'll say it sounds like rain is on a lot in our house. So praise God for that. And so thank you for pouring into the kingdom in this way. And I hope that you find the direction you're looking for in the days ahead for you and your family there, so. Thank you, Sam. Yeah. It's been inspiring.

So I'll make a couple of announcements, and then we'll have a prayer, and then we will be playing The Humble King by Sounds Like Rain. This afternoon, we have a Strength to Strength Sisters. That'll be at 3 o'clock. And Marcia Zimmerman will be sharing on Visiting the Fatherless and the Widows. So tell your wives and the sisters about that. That'll be at 3 o'clock Eastern Time this afternoon, same link, if they would like to join for that.

And also on June 18, we'll be having a talk on Understanding Trauma, OCD, and Scrupulosity. I hope I didn't butcher that pronunciation. That'll be by Conrad Eby on June 18th. So I think at this time, we'll have a prayer. Brother Bryant, would you mind leading us in prayer? Absolutely. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this opportunity here to meet this morning in this way. And Father, we do live in interesting times.

As our brother was pointing out, the ability to interact with the world, the ability to not only influence the world for your kingdom, but the sobering thing too is the fact that we can be influenced away from you. And so Father, we need much wisdom in these times. And Father, I just pray, Lord, that as these verses say here in Colossians 1, that we may walk worthy of you, fully pleasing you, bearing fruit in every good work, and growing in the knowledge of you.

That we may be strengthened with all power according to your glorious might for all endurance and patience, with joy giving thanks to you who has enabled you to share in the saints' inheritance in the light. And so Father, we ask for that knowledge of your will. We ask for wisdom and spiritual understanding for the Kirklands and for all of us who are on this call and for those who will listen. Father, we need your Holy Spirit's power. We just need you, Lord, to guide and direct us.

Bless Bracken and Lindsay in a special way as they are being used of you to impact people, to show people the light. And then as they consider their future, to guide and direct them, Lord. Go with us today, Father, and we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Thank you. I want to thank you all for joining us this morning. I hope you've been encouraged and uplifted to see the hand of God at work in our brother. Remember them in prayer.

They have a big ministry in what they're doing, what they're singing, and the involvement of their family and their children. And so if you can remember them. God, go with you today. May you serve him in humility. And may his kingdom come in your lives. And his will be done as it is in heaven. And at this time, we'll put on a song. And that'll be it for us. Once the song is over, that'll be the end of the call. So God bless you all. And I hope that you serve him today. Go with God. You are my King. You are my King.

Oh, kneel me down again here at your feet. Show me how much you love, humility. Oh, Spirit, be the star that leads me to the humble heart of love I see in you. You are the God of the broken, the friend of the weak. You wash the feet of the weary, embrace the ones in need. I want to be like you, Jesus, to have this heart in me. You are the God of the humble. You are the humble King. Here in the dusty ground, I bow with kinks where wise men laid before their offerings. I lay no golden crown here at your feet.

Just this, my broken life, I offer thee. You are the God of the broken, the friend of the weak. You wash the feet of the weary, embrace the ones in need. I want to be like you, Jesus, to have this heart in me. You are the God of the humble. You are the humble King. You are my King. Jesus, you are my King. You are my King. You, Jesus, are my King. You are the God of the broken, friend of the weak. You wash the feet of the weary, embrace the ones in need. I want to be like you, Jesus, to have this heart in me.

You are the God of the humble. You are the humble King. You are my King. You are my King. As iron sharpens iron, so a man sharpens the countenance of his friend.