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‘Provision’

I asked Matt if he wanted to film a video, and the sometimes-HM-columnist felt led to write the story of the song. Here it is, in his words:

“Provision” is a song about losing something in life you find comfort and security in. The song’s lyrics are centered on a gentlemen who owned an (allegedly) lucrative wholesale company. Before I ever met him, I thought highly of him because he was contributing to a missions organization in Austria, an organization I had been working beside for the past two years. Because of my trust in him and my faith in his company, I invested most of my cash savings in his corporation.

About a year later, the entire investment program came crashing down, in enters the FBI. It came to light that this gentleman’s “company” never existed in the first place, and subsequently that I would only see penny’s back on each dollar I had invested. I was devastated.

The money I had invested in the company was money I had saved from years of landscaping each summer (prior to August Burns Red). Losing most of that money in the Ponzi Scheme put me in a state of shock because all I could think of were the long, hard hours of manual labor that now seemed to have been in vain.

Months later, I was on tour in Stuttgart, Germany and went on a run up a beautiful mountain close by to the venue I was playing that night with ABR. When I got to the top of the mountain, I looked out over the valley, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. When I had started the run, all I could see, at first, were train tracks, old dilapidated buildings and a few small shops scattered throughout the town. As I climbed the mountain, the topography changed, and with it, the landscape: The rocky, cobblestone roads turned into dirt paths surrounded by beautiful trees and flowers.

While on the run, I could only see what was directly in front of me. I knew I was climbing, but it was sometimes hard to believe all those twisty paths would eventually lead me anywhere at all. It wasn’t until I reached the top of the mountain and looked out over the path I had just taken that I could see how everything was connected.

I wrote the song “Provision” at that very top of that mountain peak in Stuttgart. I put pen to paper and let God do the healing in me as I wrote the words, telling the story of a very painful and costly experience in my life. The line in the middle of the song says, “I am just as much the problem as the man behind bars. He did with his business what I do in my heart.” It was only after I read back what I had written that I started to gain the full perspective.

God could teach me lessons in the midst of such great loss. In actuality, I was standing on a mountaintop with the full perspective of the path I had taken to get to the beautiful vista. But I was getting an even more profound spiritual perspective, allowing me to see I was a sinner all the same.