I went to a voice lesson, the first in about a year. I’ll be back in the studio to record five new songs in a couple of weeks and thought a few refresher lessons could only help.

I started out singing scales, down then up. Nothing new or different about that. And although I’ve done very little singing over the past year, my voice worked just fine all the way through the lesson.

However, I realized just how much has changed — how much I’ve changed — over the past year. Maybe it was simply being back in the same office with the same instructor from a time when things were so different that made me take inventory. Certainly, I’m not the same person I was then, but all the changes became evident during my lesson.

He asked if I was still singing in church, to which I replied that I’d quit attending church last August. He asked how many times I’ve sung over the past year. I could probably count them on one hand.

In that one-hour span, I realized how much my confidence has been shaken — not just in singing, but in general. It’s difficult to find anything worth having confidence in when the church — the institution my life was built around — more or less throws you away. It’s hard to be confident when your own flesh and blood condescendingly tells you there’s something wrong with you. There’s no confidence to be found when the God who used to speak to you on a regular basis is now silent. It’s hard to have confidence in what you believed you were supposed to do when everything gets put on hold for a year. It’s hard to have confidence in something that’s broken, and I have most definitely been broken — damaged goods.

But more than shattered confidence and broken pieces, I realized I’ve been clinging to something throughout all the changes: hope.

If I didn’t have hope, I wouldn’t have been in that office for that voice lesson. If I didn’t have hope, I wouldn’t keep searching for some redemptive qualities in the church. If I didn’t have hope, I would’ve already grieved that family member as dead. If I didn’t have hope, I wouldn’t keep asking God why He’s so silent. If I didn’t have hope, I wouldn’t be headed back into the studio in two weeks.

Taking inventory and realizing how I’ve been shaken to the core was good for me. I saw my brokenness, and realized the pieces can be a colorful mosaic or a puzzle pieced together to form a beautiful picture or maybe words pieced together to tell a story or sing a song. Hope won’t allow me to believe anything less.