Super Soap

There are some songs you intentionally remember.

And then there are songs that apparently move into your brain, refuse to pay rent, and remain there for the next thirty years.

“Super Soap” is one of those songs.

The story actually starts the year before I learned it, when I was somewhere in my early twenties and somebody made the questionable decision to give me a Vacation Bible School class of approximately twelve two- and three-year-olds.

By myself.

I’m not sure what happened in the planning meeting that led everyone to believe this was a good idea, but by the end of that week, I was traumatized.

Those children were adorable.

They were also two and three.

There were twelve of them.

And there was one of me.

By Friday, I had pretty much decided children were not the game for me.

I would make another run at teaching young children much later, volunteering in my mom’s classroom. That experience would officially seal my fate.

Teaching little kids was not my calling.

God bless the people who do it.

Seriously.

Give them crowns.

And Then Came Family Camp

Fast forward about a year.

I was asked to help with a classroom of four- and five-year-olds at a family camp I had grown up attending.

You can imagine my hesitation.

I had already survived the Great VBS Incident of the Previous Year and had no desire to return to active combat.

But a friend of mine had asked me to help with music and with one of the classrooms, so somehow I agreed.

And four- and five-year-olds?

Completely different species.

Holy smokes, they were adorable.

They said the wildest things. They could actually communicate what they wanted. Mostly. And they had enough personality to keep you laughing constantly.

At some point during the week, I apparently became comfortable enough that I fell asleep on one of their nap mats.

When I woke up, they were all sitting around me on the floor.

Just watching me sleep.

Had my friend not been there with them, I might have wondered whether a tiny coup was forming.

But the second I opened my eyes, they all started laughing.

Apparently watching the teacher sleep was quality entertainment.

Those are the kinds of moments that stay with you.

A Connection I Wouldn’t Understand Until Years Later

The hermanos in charge of that classroom would eventually turn out to be the parents of one of my good friends from my time at West Campus in the early 2000s.

We didn’t make that connection until much later.

And years afterward, her mom would be the one who supplied the photo I still have from that week.

I love things like that.

At the time, it was just another camp. Another classroom. Another group of people God had placed in my life for a few days.

Years later, I could see the threads connecting people and seasons that I never would have connected on my own.

God was already working in ways I couldn’t see yet.

The Song

We were staying in the dorms with the other college-age girls helping with camp.

Between most of the dorm rooms was a middle conference room/classroom area, and ours became headquarters for preparing whatever chaos we had planned for the children the next day.

Crafts.

Lessons.

Activities.

Music.

Lots of music.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, we practiced a song that included the line:

“When I take a bath, I think about the Lord. He cleansed me with His super soap.”

Super soap.

Why did that song stay with me?

I have absolutely no idea.

But it did.

It belongs in the same category as the “Recipe Song” from Psalty.

If you grew up in church during a certain era, you know exactly what I mean. Some of those songs embedded themselves so deeply into your memory that decades later somebody can say three words and suddenly you know the entire melody.

For instance: “Father Abraham….” (Did you finish the song?)

The funny thing is that I had performed the Psalty song at that very same camp when I was in fourth or fifth grade.

So by the time I was standing there as a college-aged volunteer teaching another generation of kids ridiculous-but-surprisingly-effective Christian songs, I was already standing inside layers of my own memories.

More Than a Camp

Family camp carries a lot of core memories for me.

It’s where I met a number of people who are still my friends today.

It’s connected to childhood.

Music.

Church.

Friendship.

Growing up.

Serving.

And my faith.

Some places become part of your spiritual geography.

You can remember where you were sitting when something clicked.

You remember the songs.

The people.

The laughter.

The ridiculous things that happened.

You may not remember every sermon that was preached, but somehow you remember:

“He cleansed me with His super soap.”

Apparently theology delivered through bath-time imagery has staying power.

Cleaning Church and Growing Up

Years later, during my time serving at West Campus, I was a youth leader.

And being a youth leader meant a lot more than standing in front of teenagers with a Bible.

We served.

We set things up.

We tore things down.

We helped wherever we were needed.

And we took turns cleaning the church.

There is something wonderfully unglamorous about church service.

Sometimes ministry looks like microphones and music.

Sometimes it looks like mentoring a teenager through something difficult.

And sometimes it looks like taking out trash, wiping down a bathroom, vacuuming floors, or wondering how one congregation managed to produce that many crumbs in seven days.

Somewhere in all of those years, that ridiculous little childhood song and the reality of serving began occupying the same space in my memory.

Cleaning.

Soap.

Being made clean.

Serving the people of God.

And realizing that faith is lived just as much in ordinary work as it is in the moments we usually label “ministry.”

So Eventually, I Wrote “Super Soap”

That is where this song comes from.

Not one single moment.

A collection of them.

A traumatizing VBS classroom.

A second chance with four- and five-year-olds.

A possible preschool coup.

Dorm-room preparation sessions.

A children’s song that refused to leave my brain.

Family camp.

Old friends.

Unexpected connections.

Years of serving at church.

And the realization that God has a funny way of taking things that seemed completely insignificant at the time and giving them meaning later.

I certainly wasn’t standing in that camp classroom in my twenties thinking:

“One day this is going to become a song.”

I was probably thinking:

“Please let all of these children go home with the correct parents.”

But that is one of the things I love about creating music now.

I get to go back and pick up pieces of my own history.

Sometimes they are painful.

Sometimes deeply spiritual.

Sometimes profound.

And sometimes they involve soap.

“Super Soap” comes from one of those memories that makes me smile because it reminds me how long God has been weaving together people, places, music, service, and faith in my life.

Long before I knew what any of it would become.

And maybe that’s why the song stuck.

Because underneath the silly lyrics was a truth simple enough for a four-year-old and deep enough to spend a lifetime understanding:

God cleans us up.

God changes us.

And somehow, He keeps using the most unexpected things to remind us.

Even super soap.

Runways

 Life Update

If you know me well, you know I go about 100 miles a minute.

I’ve never really known how to operate in slow mode.

If I’m interested in something, I tend to go all in. If I have an idea, I want to build it. If there’s a challenge in front of me, I want to figure it out. And if I somehow find a little extra room in my schedule, I will almost certainly fill it with something.

That was basically my summer.

I wrote a lot of music.

Like… a lot of music.

I spent the summer writing, creating, experimenting, revising, rearranging, listening, changing my mind, changing it back, and somehow ended up with several music projects lined up in various stages of completion.

At the same time, I knew I was preparing to start my doctoral program.

What I didn’t fully understand was what that experience was actually going to demand of me.

Now I do.

And there really is only one way to describe what comes next:

Academic Lockdown

For the next four years, I’m in a lockstep doctoral program with essentially no real breaks.

Add a full-time career and regular life responsibilities to that equation, and I’m beginning to understand exactly what I signed up for.

So if you don’t see or hear much from me sometimes, I haven’t disappeared.

I’m probably reading.

Or writing.

Or researching.

Or staring at something I’ve read six times and wondering why the words have suddenly stopped making sense.

And most definitely praying:

“God, please give me the strength to make it through this.”

Because I already know there will be days when determination alone isn’t going to be enough.

For someone who naturally goes 100 miles a minute, maybe the challenge of this season isn’t learning to slow down.

Maybe it’s learning where those 100 miles an hour need to go.

Apparently, I Was Building a Runway

The funny thing is, I lined up all of these music projects over the summer without really knowing what my doctoral schedule would look like.

Now I’m incredibly grateful that I did.

I’m currently working through the final mixes on another album that should be dropping in the next few weeks.

And after that?

I already have the next four albums lined up for edits.

Yes.

Four.

Because apparently this is what happens when someone who doesn’t know how to operate in slow mode gets a summer full of creative momentum.

But those projects mean I don’t have to keep creating at the pace I did this summer.

The songs are written.

The concepts are there.

The stories have been captured.

I can work through them when I have space. I can finish them. I can release them as they’re ready.

Past Me unknowingly did Future Me a huge favor.

I didn’t know what was coming.

But somehow, I built myself a runway before I knew I was going to need one.

Twenty Years in the Making

There’s another part of this that I’ve been thinking about a lot.

As intimidating as the next four years feel, there’s also something strangely familiar about where I’ve landed.

Because when I look backward, it feels like the last 20 years have been preparing me for this.

Not in a perfectly planned, straight-line kind of way.

Definitely not that.

There were career changes.

Different roles.

Different degrees.

Things I learned because I wanted to learn them and things I learned because life or work demanded that I figure them out.

There were opportunities I understood at the time and others whose significance I couldn’t see until much later.

There were detours that didn’t feel connected to anything.

And yet, standing here now, so many of those pieces make sense together.

Healthcare.

Business.

Data.

Analytics.

Technology.

Process improvement.

Decision-making.

Years of asking why something works the way it does and whether there might be a better way to do it.

None of those experiences seemed to be pointing toward one specific destination while I was living them.

But from where I’m standing now?

I can see the thread.

And maybe that’s why, underneath the intimidation, there’s also a deep sense that I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

Not because I know what the next four years will look like.

I absolutely do not.

But because I can look backward and see how much of what came before has prepared me for what is in front of me now.

Creativity Isn’t Going Anywhere

Academic lockdown doesn’t mean creativity disappears.

I don’t think I could turn that part of my brain off if I tried.

Writing and music have always been part of how I process life, faith, change, joy, frustration, grief, growth—all of it.

So there will still be songs.

There will still be writing.

There will still be random ideas that arrive at completely inappropriate times.

There will probably still be moments when I should be sleeping but suddenly decide something absolutely must be written down before morning.

I know myself.

But the pace will probably change.

An idea may sit in my notes longer.

A song may take months instead of days.

The blog may occasionally get quiet.

And music may become the place I go when my brain needs a break from research, informatics, implementation, decision intelligence, and whatever academic rabbit hole I happen to be living in that week.

That’s okay.

Not every season is supposed to look the same.

So, Here We Go

Four years.

Full-time career.

Doctoral program.

Academic lockdown.

A ridiculous number of songs waiting their turn.

And me—still moving about 100 miles a minute, but learning to be much more intentional about where I’m going.

If I get quiet for a while, just know I’m somewhere reading, researching, writing, learning, questioning my life choices, and praying my way through it.

And probably still making music somewhere in between.

Because while I don’t know exactly what these next four years are going to require of me, I do know this:

I didn’t arrive here overnight.

In so many ways, the last 20 years have been preparing me for this moment.

So I’m going in grateful.

I’m going in excited.

I’m going in knowing it’s going to be hard.

And I’m going in trusting that the same God who brought me all the way here will give me the strength, wisdom, and grace I need for whatever comes next.

Academic lockdown begins.

Here we go.