Mike Janzen: Life Audio. Um, in those days I was stuck alone with my thoughts. And sometimes your thoughts aren’t that pretty when you’re all by yourself. And so I needed to be reminded of who I was. That God actually loved me. And that God was near. And I also had to be reminded of who God was. That he’s, he’s full of love.
And he lifts those up who have fallen or who are going through really tough times.
Joshua Swanson: Welcome to The Walk, a devotionals podcast for worshipers. On today’s episode, we’ve got two stories to share. We’ll start with Mike Jansen. He’s a versatile Canadian songwriter, worship leader, and composer that recently debuted an album rooted in the Psalms.
Now crafting a Psalms based album is not groundbreaking, but Jansen’s path to this project was fraught with heartache and physical challenges. His story is a profound devotional journey that we’re really excited to share with you all. Then we’ll hear from Aaron Stewart, the co founder of Planning Center, on the story behind the company.
How did he and Jeff get together and create this platform that’s now the premier software tool for running church services? It’s a really fun testimony in its own right. Okay, here we go. First with Mike Jansen.
Mike Janzen: Hey there, it’s Mike here. Uh, it’s great to be with you today. Uh, today we’re gonna be diving into the Psalms. Uh, the Psalms were a real lifeline for me over a really serious head injury that I had a few years ago. Psalm 42 in particular was something that really helped lift me. A number of years ago I was getting together with a friend at a sushi restaurant and he Asked me if I ever would do an album on the psalms and I thought about it and thought great idea But I probably won’t have time for that I didn’t tell him that but I continued on Life was busy at that point with lots of music stuff a few weeks later.
I had some stomach problems I got up in the middle of the night I drank some water, took two steps and went crumbling into the tile floor. I’d hit my, my jaw right into the floor and passed out. My wife was at my side a few seconds later. And she said, are you okay? And I said, yeah, I think I’m fine. And so I stumbled back to bed.
And the next morning I got up, went upstairs. And everything was just a bit blurry. The lights outside looked strange. My computer screen looked strange. My daughter speaking sounded strange and so I phoned up one of my friends who’d had a lot of concussions and said hey, Jen Here’s my symptoms. What do you think?
She said yeah, it sounds like you’ve got a concussion So I thought well I asked her how many days will will I be out because I was a self employed musician with with a house payment to pay and so the only way you do that is by playing music or making music and she said well you know typically three four or five days you should start feeling better the worst one i’ve heard of is sort of three or four weeks and part of my heart sank because i thought even four or five days i’d have to cancel some things and thinking about three or four weeks just seemed like too much to deal with at that Well as the weeks kept going I felt worse and worse and by the end of the month I was in the basement almost entirely the whole day I couldn’t walk down the street straight.
I was dizzy all the time and nauseous. I, um, I couldn’t even talk to my wife about normal little things. My daughter, I couldn’t spend really any time with her. And I was really just stuck on the couch, um, all day long. Trying to close my eyes and not do too much. Well, what do you do when you’re in the dark or going through a really tough time and you can’t get out of bed?
I turned to the Psalms. I had time and so I thought let’s dive into the Psalms. Now, I couldn’t look at screens so I had my iPhone and I would take it and you know just look at it with one eye open one closed and try to pick a verse or two that would somehow resonate. Um, in those days I was stuck alone with my thoughts.
And sometimes your thoughts aren’t that pretty when you’re all by yourself. And so I needed to be reminded of who I was. That God actually loved me. And that God was near. And I also had to be reminded of who God was, that he’s, he’s full of love and he lifts those up who have fallen, who, who, or who are going through really tough times.
Psalm 42, verse eight was one of the first ones that pulled up on my phone and looked at, and it said, by day, the Lord directs his love. At night, his song is with me. I just began to say those words over and over again. By day, the Lord directs his love. At night, his song is with me. And I started thinking of the times during the day, even my days in the darkness, where God was directing his love to me.
Whether it was a meal that someone would bring to our house, whether it was my wife dropping off something to drink in the studio, whether it was my daughter giving me a smile. There are ways all around me that God was directing his love to me. And then at night, his song is with me. And that idea that in the hardest places of life, in depression, or maybe despair, or anxiety, or sickness, In those hard places that his song is, is with us, that his love, his, his, um, showing himself to us stays with us in the hard times.
I think often we think that God is distant when we’re going through really difficult scenarios or circumstances, but that’s completely the opposite. God draws near to us and near to the broken hearted. So that’s the first takeaway for today, that God is near the broken hearted. It’s important for us to think of our own life and think of times where God has been present to us when we’re going through really tough times.
In those tough times, for me, it was really hard to let go of who I was, what I was good at, my job. But when I lost all that stuff, you know, you had to think a little deeper and remember a little more about What we actually believe that God loves us deeply, that we matter, that we count, that we’re safe, that we’re secure.
So thinking of our own lives and being grateful for what God has done in those hard times is really important. It’s also important to think of others around you who are going through tough times, to say a prayer for them. To remember them, to drop off a meal for them. We often found in our family that people just doing something was better than doing nothing.
Often when I know someone’s going through a hard time, I might reach out to them with a text and say, Hey, what can I do? But even a better thing, probably, we learned was for people just to do something. Just to say, hey, I’m praying for you. I’m thinking of you. Uh, do you need a meal tonight? What can we do for you?
So take some time today. As you listen to this, take time to think of those around you going through a hard time. Pray for them. Lift them up. Something that was so important to me in those days was the role of music. Although I couldn’t listen to music the first month, once I started listening, I really needed music that was gentle and healing.
One of the guys I turned to was Fernando Ortega, whose songs were full of space, which you need when you’re healing, full of grace, which you need when you’re healing, just to not feel like you’re completely falling apart. And it’s sort of a challenge to us who are worship leaders, songwriters, worshipers, to keep finding music that resonates with people who are going through hard things.
Joshua Swanson: When we come back, Mike dives into the importance of lament.
Mike Janzen: Well, the importance of lament in the Psalms. It’s a really big deal. Uh, more than one third of the Psalms are laments. And of course, the Psalms were the ancient Jewish songbook that were sung in times of exile, when they were being led off by captors. You can imagine how horrific that was. And also during times of peace, where things were settled and felt secure.
They were memorized by, uh, Jewish, uh, the Hebrew culture. Uh, Jesus would have memorized all 150 books and we see that clearly in his life when he’s hanging on the cross, he turns to Psalm 22 and says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Lament is this deep, deep prayer that pours out those, those heartaches, those things that we are struggling with, those doubts.
Uh, those things that we’re angry about, those things that have been done to hurt us, um, it’s just an honest, guttural prayer to God. And I think it’s crucial for a lot of different reasons. In Psalm 42, after the verse that says, By day the Lord directs his love, the psalmist continues, Why have you forgotten me?
Why must I mourn? My bones suffer mortal agony. My foes taunt, where is your God? Why my soul are you downcast? Now the psalmist could have left it there. That’s a lot of raw emotion right there. Psalmist continues, put your hope in God. Takeaway two is that trust is built through our suffering and through our honest prayers to God.
It’s a lot like a good friend who has gone through really hard things with us. Trust is built with our best friends when we let them in on the things that have been really big struggles for us or the secrets that we’ve sort of kept hidden. And it’s the same with God. Trust can be built in these really hard times of suffering as we open up our hearts.
As we let God into the things that he already knows but that somehow something special happens when we actually say them or vocalize them. I think a lot of churches aren’t quite sure what to do with lament, and if we look at our set lists on a typical Sunday, they probably aren’t a third lament, and yet lament is such a crucial thing.
As, again, it builds this relationship and allows us, when things go terrible, for our deepest soul not to disintegrate. Think of your own current struggles or places that may be off limit to God. Psalm 32 says when I kept silent, my bones wasted away. That’s quite a picture of our soul atrophying, or totally dying within us, withering away, if we keep silent before God.
Today, take some time before God to bring all of your struggles to God. He can take it. He can take every little bit that you throw at Him. Also, it’s a great idea to take a psalm, like Psalm 42, and verse by verse to respond to it. To respond both in remembering God’s goodness, like Psalm 42 verse 8 does, and also in responding out of the lament.
I love Psalm 86 as well for that. There’s so many great psalms. Pick a psalm a day and go through it and allow that to guide your prayer time. Psalm 18 is one of my favorites. And I just wrote a new psalms album and one of the songs in there is called Took Hold. Psalm 18 verse 16 says, He reached down from on high and took hold of me.
He drew me out of deep waters. He rescued me from my powerful enemy, from my foes who were too strong for me. They confronted me in the day of my disaster, but the Lord was a support. He brought me into a spacious place. He rescued me because He delighted in me. It’s a beautiful, beautiful passage, the first part that God has reached down and took hold of us.
Often before God, we feel we have to do things to earn His love, or we feel like we have to be good at stuff, or be in a good season. But this verse reminds us that He takes hold of us. He holds us through the hardest times. And then the last verse, verse 19, He brought me into a spacious place because He delighted in me.
Wow, what a thing that God delights in us. That regardless of what is going on in your life today, regardless of how things are crumbling all around you, that God delights in you. That you are beloved, that you are on his heart, that he rejoices over you with singing. What amazing, amazing truth.
As we close today, God is near the brokenhearted. If you’re going through a difficult time today, God is near. He’s close. He hasn’t forgotten you. And secondly, trust is built through our suffering and through our honest prayers before God. That God is waiting and wants to be that closest of friends for us in the struggles of today and the things we’re going through.
Let me say a prayer for us. Heavenly Father, thank you so much for today. Thank you that you are close to us. In the hardest of circumstances. Thank you that our souls are secure with you. Thank you that we can pour out the deepest cries of our heart to you and that you listen. What an amazing thing. We pray today, Laura, that you’d be honored, that you would lead us in your ways and remind us of your presence with us no matter what we’re going through.
We pray this in your name. Amen.
Joshua Swanson: Thank you, Mike Jansen, for spending time with us and sharing your journey. We’ll play out this episode with one of Mike’s beautiful songs. It’s called, Took Hold.
But first, it’s always fun to hear the origin story of products that we use daily. And today, Aaron Stewart, our partner on this episode, is going to share the origin story of Planning Center.
Aaron Stewart: I was the music pastor at the church there, uh, one of. And Jeff was doing graphics and web stuff. And so, Jeff was helping sort of the, the, one of the coordinators put the order of service together and he was always a computer programmer kind of person.
And so he was building software to help figure out, okay, if these things take this amount of time, then this other venue that has to like sync up with it, they need to, it was a whole bunch of timing stuff. And the order of service, I was always. Super computery as well. That’s the word. And so I, uh, this was in 2004 and 2005.
So when I started at this church, I walked in and I saw these manila folders on the wall and I was like, what are these? They’re like, Oh, these are the music packets. And we, and we burn CDs and we do, and we print out the music. I’m like, okay, okay. And like, and then someone drives them to people’s houses.
And I was like, I will not be doing that. And so part of this was like, okay, well, we need to get the music to people ahead of time. And online software was barely a thing. So the first version, for me at least, was I was making a custom website every week and just uploading my chord charts to that. And I had also made some databases that were in Microsoft Access that was like tracking who has sung the songs.
So anyway, Jeff and I got together and I was like, Okay, well what if this stuff that I’m doing to organize the music team and the things that you’re putting in for the order of service, what if that was all just software? So he started building it, um, as a Windows app because that’s what he was certified for, but then I got a new job.
And my job was going to move me to a different church in Las Vegas, which is the last place on earth I ever thought that I would move. Um, but that’s where the Lord called me. And so when I moved there, they were a Mac church and my old church was PC. And right at this time, it was like, there’s this new web technology that I think you can build websites like that are.
Like an application. So Jeff transitioned from Windows to web. And so I moved to Vegas and we sort of worked remotely to sort of figure out what the software should be. And he would program it all. And then I would get it and I’d be like, this works. And so my church was the first one to start using it in Vegas.
And then I had attended. Saddlebacks purpose driven worship conference for a couple of years and I was like, you know what? We should try to get a booth there and start to sell it to people and so we got a booth there in 2006 and on June 27th is when that conference launched and so we took out Alone and just had the ugliest booth that you’ve ever seen.
It was like these bright yellow tablecloths. We borrowed from A catering ministry and like it was something it was something for your eyes to behold But it really connected with people because it this didn’t really exist at the time and so when we launched it there for the next six months word of mouth spread and then in January of 2007 Jeff took out an ad with hmm Worship Leader Magazine, actually, you might have heard of them.
We took out an ad there and that advertisement is what basically catapulted us. And we’ve been growing basically every single month since then.
Joshua Swanson: It’s like the tech director and the worship leader got together and created a business. Thank you for your story, Aaron. To find out more about Planning Center, head to planningcenter.
com. If you haven’t done so already, it would mean a lot to us if you would subscribe to our podcast and leave us a review. All right, until next time, I want to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership. If you go to lifeaudio. com, you’ll find a collection of faith centered podcasts about health and wellness, parenting, current cultural events, Bible teachings, and more.
So check them out at lifeaudio. com. I’m Joshua Swanson. Here’s Took Hold by Mike Jansen.
Mike Janzen: I was down, sinking fast. Devil waters rushed around me at last. Closed in tight, couldn’t breathe and I called it hate. You reach down, and to call to me out From the waters deep, strong with a current sweet Yet you came and saved me Up, to the highest heights Up, to the sea who cries Live until the veil of night When you come
It’s a call me out from the water’s deep storm with a cold sweet. Yet you came and saved me up to the highest heights, up to the seat of Christ. Late at day, the veil of night, when you came and saved me. Save you, you from darkness into life. You darkness. And how can I say for all the wonderful things that come from dinosaurs alive? Life Audio
