About Melanie
A story that did not stay in the dark.
I did not grow up in a safe house.
My first memories are of anger and of fear — a father whose addiction took the money that should have paid the mortgage, nights when nobody knew where dinner was coming from, and a little girl who learned very early that the adults in the room were not safe. I was hurt in ways I have only been able to name slowly, over decades. I learned to disappear. I learned to read a room and become whatever the person in front of me needed me to be, because being wanted felt like the only way to stay alive.
By seventeen I was living in a house that was coming apart, and I had no idea who I was.
How I met Christ
God did not reach me with a burning bush. He reached me with a cassette tape, a coffeehouse on Bardstown Road, and a Mennonite family who invited a strange, angry teenager to come and live in their house.
I had never heard the word Mennonite. I had never sat down to dinner with a family. For four years I lived with people who went to church twice a week and prayed before meals, and who did not run when I fell apart — who, when I was out in the garage raging at everything I could not say out loud, followed me and stayed. I had been saved a few years earlier at a Baptist boarding school, but it was in that house that I began to see what a life handed over to Christ actually looks like: two years of unpaid service, a dinner table, and a door that stayed open.
Faith did not fix me
That is the part nobody tells you.
I have been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, Bipolar II, depression, PTSD and a dissociative disorder. I have spent time in a psychiatric hospital. I began cutting myself at fourteen. I have attempted suicide more than once, the last time in 2017. I have also been prayed over in a way that wounded me more than it healed — by people who loved me and did not know what they were doing.
For a long time I believed God had made a mistake in making me.
What changed was not one dramatic night. It was learning to take a thought captive — to stop and ask whether the thing screaming in my head was actually true — and it was people who kept loving me while I learned how. My husband Mike, who I met in the fire service and married in 2001, has been the most patient human being I have ever known.
Where I landed
I am not a Mennonite. I lived with a Mennonite family from the age of seventeen for about four years — they took in a stranger and made her eat dinner at the table — and their convictions have stayed with me longer than any other church I have been part of.
What I carry from the Anabaptist tradition is not a uniform. It is believer's baptism, a church that is a body rather than an audience, a Jesus whose teaching is meant to be obeyed, plain living, and service that actually costs something. I also served in the Marines, and I am not a pacifist — I am not interested in a faith that has to be sanded down to fit one label.
My statement of faith says the rest.
What I did with the years
In 1995 a friend of mine died of a seizure brought on by diabetes, and I decided I would never be helpless again. I signed up for an EMT class at a fire station and never really left. That became twenty years as a firefighter and EMT in Jefferson County, Kentucky — trench rescue, swift water rescue, hazardous materials, urban search and rescue, and a search-and-rescue dog who worked beside me in the woods at two in the morning.
I have knelt on the floor of a stranger's living room on the worst day of their life. I know what that room sounds like. It is the reason I do not write songs about a God who keeps us from trouble. I write about the One who meets us in it.
Later, because I wanted to understand my own mind and be useful to other people's, I went back and earned a degree in psychology.
Why the music
I write songs because Scripture is where I found God to be trustworthy, and because most of what I have survived does not fit in a conversation.
Some of these songs came out of specific rooms — a hospital, a funeral, a night I did not think I would see the morning. Some are about the smaller mercies that kept me here: a dog, a friend, a verse that would not let go of me. They are written for the person who is where I have been, and for the ordinary congregation that wants to sing something true on a Sunday when nobody is pretending.
What this ministry is
Everything here is free. If a song helps you pray, or helps you stay one more day, it has done its work. If you are in that place right now, please do not sit in it alone — call or text 988 in the United States, or tell one person today. I have been on the floor, and I am telling you that the floor is not the end of the story.