Saturday, August 12, 2017

Turn My Heart -- Lynn DeShazo



An October morning in 1989 in the basement of her parents’ house was the scene. Birmingham, Alabama (its flag is shown here) was familiar to Lynn DeShazo, but she’d been gone awhile, and was feeling that her surroundings didn’t quite recapture everything she needed that day. So, 33-year old Lynn asked God to “Turn My Heart” in a way that He’d done before. She found that He was listening, as the next few months transpired. Moving from one place to another was more difficult for Lynn than she had imagined, even though she’d pondered this episode for many months and felt certain she was taking the right path. Could it be that the turning had started many months prior to that autumn morning when her thoughts actually coalesced into the words she sang for the first time? It seemed, as she reflected on the events 20 years hence (in 2010), that she was still approaching him with the same expectation – letting Him turn somebody isn’t an isolated incident.

Lynn DeShazo had been on an eight-year journey during a time in her post-college years in the 1980s that finally led her to “Turn My Heart”. From Alabama to Michigan, and then back to Alabama, Lynn may have concluded that God was doing some directing before she asked for his guidance a bit more directly the morning she wrote her ‘Turn…’ song. She helped plant and lead a church in worship for several years in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in what she might have thought was the epilogue to her college and post-college career in Auburn, Alabama that had concluded in 1981. By 1989 Lynn was headed back to the Deep South where she’d begun. Landing in her parents’ basement, working in a UPS store, and engaged in a nascent – and still somewhat uncertain – songwriting career, Lynn felt uneasy. She no longer had the church in Ann Arbor to lean upon, where all her friends and life’s purpose had been centered for the better part of the previous decade. True, she was indeed a songwriter, a calling that had been gestating for several years, indeed since her high school days. But, she felt the ambiguity of this calling’s future. Would she find a church where she could minister, particularly with this gift for music? Her unease had actually been ongoing for a couple of years, beginning in Michigan, so this visceral sensation upon which she focused one October 1989 morning wasn’t new. But, as she read about a king in Proverbs 21:1, the words resonated, spurring the words of “Turn My Heart”.  Lynn wanted to be part of His river, like water He directs down a path. She evidently wanted to live there, not just ride a raft through it and then jump out. That’s why she uses the word ‘surrender’ in the song’s vocabulary to express her desire to be one with His spirit. The next few days and weeks, Lynn’s life was indeed blessed, as she finished the song, found a church, and moved into a place to live (not her parents’ basement!). She’d begun a new chapter, one she’d been working on, perhaps unconsciously, since Michigan.                   

Lynn was probably used to making turns in her life before she actually wrote some words to that effect in 1989. She describes at least two other choices shortly after graduating from college, shared in her book (see if referenced below) that were ‘turns’ she took to grow in reliance on Him. (I won’t share them here – she does a better job of it in the words she wrote in her book!) So, by the time she needed more direction in 1989, she was already used to seeking Him out for this purpose. She relays that her ‘turning’ was still continuing in 2010, when she looked back over the previous 20 years. Lynn’s still swimming in His river!  

The book, More Precious Than Silver, by Lynn DeShazo, WinePress Publishing, 2010, is the only source for the above song story.   

See the composer’s site here: http://www.lynndeshazo.com/index.html

No comments: