A massive thank you to Sarah for sharing the history behind the incredible gift the Lord has given her.
I always wanted to write songs, but me getting into song-writing was extremely unlikely. Neither of my parents are musical. They did encourage me (and my sister) to have piano lessons, but we weren’t in a house full of instruments and people playing them. I kept up piano until my mid-teens and reached Grade Three. I never got the hang of Braille music, so the pieces became too complicated to learn by ear, and that was that. I also did half a year of music G.C.S.E. Whereas a typical mainstream school would have three hundred people in a year, the special school I attended at the time had about twenty, so there were only two people in my music class. At the end of the year, our teacher gave us predicted grades – hers an A, and mine a C. Looking back now, I should have been really encouraged by that. A C is good! But when you only have an A to compare it to, it sounds terrible. I was in the process of changing schools and choosing my G.C.S.E.s all over again. Based on her prediction, and the fact I was moving to a mainstream school (where Braille music would be unfamiliar to the staff), I gave it up. Very sad, but I never lost that desire to write a song.
So how did that first song come to fruition? I wrote words to other people’s tunes, to begin with. Not many people know this (until now!), but when I was eleven years old, I wrote alternative lyrics to “Dizzy” and called it “Scandalous”. Only my friend Alex has a copy on cassette. She very graciously said: “I think you had a cold”, but I just wasn’t very good. The lyrics didn’t even make much sense!
When I became a Christian, it was different. I had a message to convey, so I wrote “How Loving is the LORD our God” (to the tune of “Dear LORD and Father of Mankind”). With a line in it that talked about ‘Pure unbounded love’, maybe you could tell I’d been to a traditional church on and off as a child. It was ok, but it wasn’t really me.
Part of Haggai 2:18-19 reads: “Consider now from this day forward, from the twenty-fourth day of the ninth month, … from this day I will bless you”. Sunday 24 September 2000 was the culmination of a special weekend for Christians in my hometown, and those verses were quoted a great deal. We called the weekend “Going for Gold”, and singer-songwriter Godfrey Birtill came to share with us. I think at that point, he was just at the beginning of his fulltime ministry. He’d made three albums and written some beautiful songs. On the Sunday afternoon, Godfrey led a workshop on song-writing. I listened as he talked about Scripture-verses on his fridge, picking up his guitar and strumming some chords … At the end, I joined the mini queue of people to be prayed for. The interesting thing I remember about Godfrey’s prayer was, he said: “Strengthen her fingers for battle”. (Of course, whether it’s Brailing or typing, I write with my fingers.)
Three days later, I was just singing in the shower (as you do), when I realised I didn’t recognise the song. As a result of that prayer, on the twenty-fourth day of the ninth month, God had blessed me with the gift of song-writing … and I’ve never stopped being grateful for it.
All Sarah’s recorded songs are available to stream on YouTube. You can also buy or stream them on Amazon and ITunes. To find out more about her work, please visit:
her website
or:
her blog
Her first book entitled Christmas: God’s Promise Kept: Short Daily Devotionals For Advent was published at the end of 2020, and can be bought in both printed and kindle form from:
Amazon