Building an Altar To Remember
Jonathan David Helser
4 min read ⭑
“In the future your children will ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?”
I will never forget being a little boy bouncing around my living room, dancing with wild abandon, jumping from couch to couch in uninhibited joy as my dad’s music spun around on our family’s turntable. The music blasted out of our vintage wooden speakers, wrapped in tweed covers and powered by a Fisher Stereo Tube Amplifier. One of my favorite things to do was see if I could jump high enough off the couch and land with such a thud that I could make the record skip. Every time I did this, I felt like I was a part of the band. The melodies of that album have woven their way deep into my heart. I’m listening even tonight as I’m writing, and my heart still bounces around with joy to the sound of my father’s songs. He recorded this album in 1975, three years before I was even born. The songs were a collection written from his first few years of following Jesus. The music is full of deep joy, raw honesty and passionate worship — some seriously soulful and funky music. As I listen to my dad’s album tonight, I feel like I am standing at an altar he built with the songs of his journey, songs that are stacked like stones, one upon another, to form this album. Forty years ago, it was an altar he poured his worship out upon, but now I am at this altar and encountering the same God that changed everything in his life.
Many times in Scripture, when the fathers of the faith encountered God, they would build an altar. They built these altars so they would remember — remember their encounter with God, remember the place where everything changed. They took the time to gather stones and then stack them into a large pile so they wouldn’t forget how God had met with them. They also did this so they could bring their children and grandchildren back to the place their story changed forever.
I envision Abraham taking a walk with his son, Isaac, and coming upon this random pile of rocks. Isaac looks up at his dad and says to him, “Dad, what in the world is that big pile of rocks doing over there?” Then Abraham looks at Isaac with a wild twinkle in his eye and says, “Son, that’s the place I encountered God. That’s where Heaven collided with Earth and my story was changed forever.” Because the Father took time to build an altar, the legacy is passed from one generation to the next.
No one builds an altar for just himself; he builds it for generations to come back and encounter God.
Tom Henell; Unsplash
In 2005 we set out on an adventure with a group of friends to record our first album. We decided to host a conference, build a studio and record a live album within a two-month period of time. We were a bunch of twenty-somethings who didn't know what we were doing, but we had hearts full of faith. The cost was over $40,000, and we’d only had a few dollars in our account two months before the event. Long story short, we had a collision with God’s goodness, and the day the conference began, everything was paid for. It was during the making of this album that I first saw the significance of building altars. My vision was that the album would be more than just a collection of songs, but it would be the stones of our journey that we would stack for others to come to and encounter God upon. The album ended up being a very live and very raw recording, but every time I hear it, my heart is flooded with the way God encountered us in those days and changed us forever. Since that first album, we have been a part of quite a few recordings, and every time we get to record music, I am overcome with the wonder of building an altar where others can come and have an encounter.
What if building an altar with our songs goes beyond just recording an album? There is something eternal in all forms of creativity. God’s first display of creativity was when he spoke the word light and worlds were born. That original word is still echoing across space and creating. Man can’t build telescopes strong enough to catch that first song that his lips breathed into existence. I believe that anytime we engage creativity, we can create something eternal like God did. Whether it’s with ink or paint, melody or lyric, when we create, we are lighting a flame that can burn much longer than we can imagine. No matter how simple or grand the creative act is, we are engaging eternity.
Paul wrote letters in a prison that he thought would only be read by a few, but 2,000 years later they are being read more than any other book ever printed. Michelangelo painted a ceiling hundreds of years ago, and every day multitudes still stare up in wonder at what he took the time to create. Beethoven wove together a tapestry of notes only his heart could hear, and those melodies are still echoing around the world.
We don’t have to be Rembrandts or Bachs to create; we all have eternity in our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Creativity is simply giving permission for the eternity on the inside to flow out through color, sound, lyric, ink and in all the endless ways beauty can manifest. Even if the moment of creativity is as simple as stopping and writing in a journal, we are touching eternity. An old Chinese proverb says, “The faintest ink is more powerful than the strongest memory.” I have been collecting journals from my journey, and when I pass away, I am going to give them to my children as part of their inheritance. My hope is that as they read my history with God, they will encounter the One who wrote my story. Whether we are writing in a journal only a few eyes will see or recording music that thousands of ears will hear, we can’t underestimate the power of our creativity. When we stop and create, we are building something generations can come back to and have an encounter.
Jonathan David Helser is a songwriter, worship leader and founder of The 18 Inch Journey, a discipleship school in North Carolina. He also leads Cageless Birds, a collective of artists, with his wife Melissa. Jonathan and Melissa are known for their hit “Raise A Hallelujah,” which reached #1 on the Christian Billboard charts, and “No Longer Slaves,” which won Worship Song of the Year at the 2016 GMA Dove Awards.
Adapted from “Building an Alter” by Jonathan David Helser in Cultivate: Volume 4. Copyright © 2017 Copyright Used with permission of the author.
