TJ Hirst

Read Part I in this series.

Even on the ordinary days of Courtney King Walker’s life, her creative side comes out. Creativity helps her discover how to organize her life, get chores done or help her children. She creates in the garden and in the kitchen. And she creates music.

Music is definitely the most creative part for me—playing songs that come from the heart. There’s creative parts of me that I can’t explain. It’s coming from the Spirit, the connection to God. All of my songs are something I feel strongly about. They are unique, personal thoughts that come out of trying to understand the world around me.

When she reads the scriptures, she receives a powerful feeling about Jesus Christ and how He loves little children. Her LDS perspective shows her that babies are perfect and do not need baptism as infants. Christ’s invitation in the New Testament of the Bible and in the Book of Mormon to bring the little children unto Him became the basis for her song, Little Hands, Little Feet.

Listen to it here:

Little Hands, Little Feet, copyright 2001 by Courtney King Walker, all rights reserved.

I thought of the little children as His allies. I have a hard time believing that the little children didn’t feel his divinity. He always called them to Him. They were always following Him and wanting to go with Him. I can just imagine these little connections happening.

The little children in the song follow Christ through his earthly ministry and to his crucifixion. Courtney wrote and recorded this song at the same time as His Eyes. Courtney plays the piano and Jill Thompson and Linda Stewart sing vocals. One of the most touching parts is when they sing about Christ’s resurrection:

Then the sun shined His light
and awoke the world from night.
As we wiped the tears from our weeping eyes,
we looked for a sign.

Little Hands, little feet, they did say.
He is gone away, despite your faith,
But then He stopped and He looked my way

“The children knew he was alive more than the adults,” Courtney said about these words. “And He answers the silence, ‘Come Unto Me.’ “

The repetition of the words “Come Unto Me” invite all who listen—not just the children—to come unto Christ. Originally, she titled the song Come Unto Me, but her friend and vocalist, Jill Thompson, convinced her that the title should be Little Hands, Little Feet.

The little hands and little feet of four children fill the Walker home. In raising them she has learned the need to balance songwriting with mothering so that neither suffers.

Writing music is something that takes patience and quiet. I have to let my barriers down and let the Spirit guide me. With babies you have to stop for a time. Right now is the season for children. I can’t get the good inspiration I need for writing music or being a mom if they are in conflict.

She remembered an experience when she was in the process of writing a song. It was the middle of the day and her children were around her at the piano, wanting to play along with her. She felt frustration toward them and realized, “If I am yelling at my children to write a spiritual song, I am missing the point.”

So, she lives her life in sequential phases. For some time she was in a creating phase when she wrote a lot of music. She composed primarily at a keyboard for several hours in the evening when she could be alone and quiet. She put on headphones to tune everything out except the spiritual connection she was seeking. In that way, she took what was in her head and expressed herself.

For now, she has written the words she needs to say, and she’s moved into a new phase in which she is taking it in, learning and absorbing. She is grateful for her roles beyond songwriter as woman, wife and mother to find ways day-to-day to apply that continuing creativity.

Fulfilling The Desire to Create is Part II in a series from an interview with Courtney Walker. Read Part I here. TJ will publish more of Courtney’s words and songs in Everyday Biography, next Wednesday, July 16. Little Hands, Little Feet is copyrighted by Courtney King Walker, 2001, and downloads may not be sold or used without permission. You may contact Courtney by email at walkerfamily5 (at) gmail (dot) com.

I knew Courtney King Walker as an artist. When we met in St. Louis, Missouri, in the mid-90’s, I was a young mom with occasional free-lance writing or editing opportunities, and she had just taken a job as a graphic artist for Brown Shoe Company, the parent company of Naturalizer Shoes. The interaction with another creative mind inspired me in my own expressions.

Later, with the birth of her children, Courtney’s primary creations shifted toward her home and family, from which she shares her talent in words, music, art, food and love. In the changing phases of her life, Courtney always feels the need to create.

Most recently, I have come to know her as a Christian (LDS) songwriter. She has self-recorded five of the 15 or so songs she has written. She began songwriting without formal training after 10-12 years of piano lessons. Around the age of 16-18 she figured out that she could write music at the piano if she just played and then wrote down the notes, and she wrote something for her high school graduation.

During the summer before she started college at Brigham Young University, she read the book, Jesus The Christ by James E. Talmage. She read about those anciently who did not believe that Christ was the son of God, and the thought came to her to write a song reflecting Christ’s divinity.

“I was always able to write and express myself well,” Courtney said. But now, she felt a purpose for that expression as she thought about “looking at Him and seeing His divinity. The words just kind of came out,” and she put the words to music and created the song, His Eyes.

His Eyes by Courtney King Walker, copyright 2001

On this recording, Jill Thompson and Linda Stewart sing vocals and Courtney accompanies them on the piano. (Singing is not her talent, she said.) She recorded it at a Bay Area recording studio in California in 2001 after many years of revisiting and revising—an important part of the process. She said,

All of my music has grown up. As I’ve grown older, I look at how naive I was. I go back and revisit it to see if it is sensitive. I ask myself, ‘Is that careful enough? Is that kind enough?’

That type of emotional and spiritual reflection and expression motivates her creative process, not commercial success. She said,

I always received support from a handful of people who listened to my music and liked it even though I didn’t have the training. I just do it the way I know how, which is probably blasphemy to people in the music world.

Though her audience may be small, the depth of her ability is great and the absence of fame or commercial success does not diminish her talents and creations.

Fulfilling The Desire to Create is Part I in a series from an interview with Courtney Walker. TJ will publish more of Courtney’s words and songs in Everyday Biography, on Wednesdays in July. His Eyes is copyrighted by Courtney King Walker, 2001, and downloads may not be sold or used without permission. You may contact Courtney by email at walkerfamily5 (at) gmail (dot) com.

My daughter and I just finished reading The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom, which is the June Book Selection for the Bodacious Bloggity Book Club at Marathon Bird. Today EH and I each share our impressions for the discussion.

Every step in life opens into a future of uncertainty. Some of the experiences brighten us with pleasure, others hurl horrific happenings toward us and some seem to have no consequence beyond that day. The future of Corrie ten Boom’s world, like all of ours, was unknown. Yet, in her youth and early adulthood the daily faith of her family prepared her to meet the destructive forces of World War II when they reached her country and her own family with compassion and courage.

One of my favorite examples is of her wise father’s response to Corrie’s questions about sex. They were riding the train. He set his heavy bag in front of her and asked her to carry it off the train. When she said she couldn’t, he taught her this parallel truth. He said,

It would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a load. It’s the same way, Corrie, with knowledge. Some knowledge is too heavy for children. When you are older and stronger you can bear it. For now you must trust me to carry it for you.

Corrie’s father is not only giving an appropriate answer to his child but teaching her a pattern of faith. He is saying, “trust me with your unknown questions and fears,” just as she later applies that pattern to faith in God during her loneliest and most disheartening moments.

Now that my own daughter is “older and stronger” to bear some of the weight of these historical events, I invited her to share this book club discussion with me. She said:

The Hiding Place, the story of Corrie ten Boom, is a remarkable one. Through her many struggles of hiding Jews in her family home, she learns from her sister how to have faith in God. After being sent to Ravensbruck and being shown where they were to sleep, a smelly, straw-covered platform covered in fleas, occupied by seven other women, almost the first thing they did was pray. Not in sorrow, asking to get out of their situation, but thanks. Thanks for everything, including the fleas.

As Corrie remarked to her sister, “Betsie, there’s no way even God can make me grateful for a flea.”

Her reply was profound. “‘Give thanks in all circumstances,’” she quoted. “It doesn’t say, ‘in pleasant circumstances.’ Fleas are part of this place where God has put us.” When, during their daily Bible studies with the other women in the barracks, they realize that their area is rarely patrolled, Betsie finds out that it is because of all the fleas that the guards avoid the place.

Other miracles abound as Corrie’s faith grows. The vitamin oil that she snuck in for her sister continued to produce oil, even after Betsie had passed it around to so many others. When they received vitamins from a friend who worked in the hospital in the camp, the oil stopped coming out.

I read the story of Anne Frank in school, and even though I knew it had actually happened, it didn’t seem as real to me. Then I read this book, and it seemed real. It took me a little while to figure out why. Her faith, so similar to my own, allowed me to compare my life to Corrie’s.

I learned from Corrie’s story, like my daughter, by comparing it to my own life. Despite the crimes committed against her, her sister and many others, she continued to identify and strive to correct her personal weaknesses like selfishness. Ironically, her tragic circumstances of the concentration camp magnified her understanding of the biblical account of the apostle Paul’s own “thorn in the flesh.” Through that comparison she learned this truth:

The real sin I had been committing was not that of inching toward the center of the platoon because I was cold. The real sin lay in thinking that any power to help and transform came from me. Of course it was not my wholeness, but Christ’s that made the difference.

Corrie’s faith prepared her. Her adversity transformed her. That purifying process took place not in an idyllic setting but one of the most cruel. Most of our lives are not idyllic nor horrid but the reality of them presses upon us the same opportunities to meet them with faith to live and love.

I zoomed in to take a picture of my children in front this stone monument in a sacred place. Between my children’s heads I read these words, “Build A House Unto Me.” The moment impressed upon me my charge as a mother.

Then answered Jesus and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you,
The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do:
for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.
St John 5:19

Jesus Christ’s relationship to Heavenly Father established a pattern for us in following His Father and ours. On this day that we honor fathers, the power of my own father’s example is deep in my heart. Day to day, in little ways, I follow him as he follows Christ. Glad to be with you today, Dad!