The long awaited rains
Have fallen hard upon the thirsty ground
And carved their way to where
The wild and rushing river can be found
And like the rains
I have been carried here to where the river flows, yeah
My heart is racing and my knees are weak
As I walk to the edge
I know there is no turning back
Once my feet have left the ledge
And in the rush I hear a voice
That’s telling me it’s time to take the leap of faith
So here I go
“Dive”
Words and music by Steven Curtis Chapman
If you want a nice, tidy, organized life, you don’t marry Steven Curtis Chapman. And you don’t adopt orphans. And you don’t start an adoption/orphan care ministry. But I did all that . . .
As time went on and I felt God pulling me toward the needs of orphans around the world and the former orphans in my home, I knew I had to bid goodbye to my former hopes that I could neatly arrange every detail of my life into a nice, orderly existence. My story was not being written the way that I had planned. My grasp on orderly and predictable was slowly being pried from my fingers.
A trip we took to Uganda in the summer of 2005 illustrates my farewell to my old friends Orderly and Predictable. If I felt my life was already like riding wild, foaming rapids in a flimsy boat, all I had to do was go rafting on the Nile River – and over the famous Bujagali Falls – to experience that metaphor in wet, living color.
The trip started as a ministry opportunity. Steven and I, along with some of our children and close friends, headed to Uganda to meet up with missionaries from Far Reaching Ministries. I had been eager to get Show Hope involved if there was orphan care we could do in Uganda.
At the time, a terrorist group known as the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) had been abducting children at night from villages in northern Uganda, killing their parents in front of them, and brainwashing them to serve as child soldiers in the conflict between the LRA and the government of Uganda. Because of this danger in the countryside, whole communities of children would leave their huts before sunset and walk miles to the safety of lighted areas in larger cities. These children were known as “night commuters.” They would sleep in big groups in parking lots, often protected by government troops, and then return home to their villages in the light of day.
Churches had been working in the city of Kitgum, trying to help these children with food, shelter, and the gospel. Steven and Caleb took their guitars and Will took his djembe, an African drum . . . and they did a concert for the night commuter children in a protected parking lot outside of a church in Kitgum.
When we first arrived, it was still daylight and there were no children to be seen. The people at the church had put up a small stage for our guys. While Steven and the boys set up their gear, the rest of us waited and wondered when the night commuters might show up. We had all kinds of candy and hundreds of glow-in-the-dark plastic bracelets for them.
As the sun set, the children began to arrive: one by one, then group by group, and then there were hundreds of them, ranging in age from about three years old to teenagers. Some were tiny, carrying thin rolled mats to sleep on. Most were barefoot. They had walked miles and miles, just to get to a place where they could spend the night in relative safety.
As soon as the kids found out that we had candy and glow-in-the-dark stuff, they flocked around us. As Steven, Caleb, and Will started the music, the children sang along as best they could. They laughed, clapped, and raised their hands in worship to God, and we all felt His presence with us.
Later on this trip, God did give a way for Show Hope to help: we were able to commit funds to build a home for children who had been orphaned by AIDS in Kitgum.
After our visit with the commuter children, we took a side trip to the Nile River. Friends had told us that rafting there was an adventure we had to have. But I had somehow missed the rafting memo and didn’t even have on a bathing suit. I was wearing athletic shorts and a T-shirt, but that was fine with me since I had no intention of getting wet.
Our friends had told us that there are long stretches where you could just lie back and float, taking in the African scenery.
That sounded good.
What nobody bothered to share was that this idyllic float also included a bunch of class 5 rapids at Bujagali Falls.
At the nice, calm place where the rafting company was located, we got our life jackets – I wondered what those were for – and divided into groups of about ten people per raft, including guides. Our family and friends were part of a larger flotilla of eight rafts, each with experienced guides manning the main oars. There were a number of other random tourists in the other rafts, mostly visitors from England, Australia, and the U.S.
As we got ready to start, our guide walked us into the shallows and told all of us to get in the water.
“Why?” I asked. “I’m not planning on getting wet.”
“We need to teach you how to flip the boat over in case it capsizes,” the guide said. “And you need to know how to get back into the raft when you fall into the river.”
They showed us how to flip the big boats. This should have been my first clue that things might get crazy later. We were told that if our rafts flipped, we were to swim to any boat in our group – whichever was easiest to get to – and grab the ropes with both hands, crossed over each other. Then, as the guides would grab us by the wrists and pull, the idea was that we would rotate because of our wrists being crossed and fall neatly into the boat on our backs.
Once we’d practiced our little safety precautions, off we went. One of the other rafts drifted by. It was full of excited Americans who looked like they had been on a missions trip. As they went by we could hear them all singing at the top of their lungs:
The river’s deep, the river’s wide,
The river’s water is alive
So sink or swim, I’m divin’ in!
They were thrilled that they could actually sing the lyrics of Steven’s hit song “Dive” right to its author out there on, of all places, the Nile River.
Our SS Chapman headed out into the river. It was calm, quiet, beautiful. I lay back, perfectly at peace.
We continued this way for a mile or so . . . and then, in the distance, something intruded on my bliss. It was growing louder and louder, like the sound of a thousand freight trains. As I strained to see what in the world that sound was, I finally saw it in the distance: Niagara Falls on steroids. And our little fabric boat was being sucked straight toward it.
I didn’t even have time to scream. Our guide was shouting as loud as he could and we could still barely hear his instructions: “If I yell ‘paddle,’ then paddle with all you’ve got. And if we flip over, try and grab hold of the side of the boat!”
The last thing I saw was the front of the boat rising up in front of me, vertically. Then the bottom dropped out of my life – and my stomach – as I heard that daggum guide yelling, “Paddle!” And then I was underneath tons and tons of churning, rushing water taking me down and around and around and around, like a washing machine. I struggled, somehow popped above the surface of the mad water for a second, took a breath, and then down I went again, swirling into the abyss.
I popped out again, hyperventilating. I’m gonna die! I thought. Steven has killed not just me, but half our family!
Miraculously, when I popped up again, my eyes caught Steven’s as the boat was almost on top of us. If looks could kill, he would have been dead. I was panicking, worrying about Emily, who was not the strongest swimmer. But eventually the whole Chapman group was found alive and gathered back into that death trap of a raft.
“Wasn’t that awesome?” our guide yelled.
I looked at him like he was out of his mind.
“Are there any more like that?” I asked.
“Oh yeah, there are five total,” the guide bragged. “They get worse the fu
rther we go. Remember, if our boat flips, just swim to the closest raft.”
“Didn’t I hear something about a safety boat, you know, a different boat for people who panic?” I asked. I was envisioning something like an aircraft carrier, but larger.
“Oh yeah,” said our guide, who I was beginning to dislike more and more with every passing second. “Yeah, well, sometimes the safety boat flips too.”
“Then why do they call it the safety boat?” I yelled.
No more time for chatting. I could hear the roar of billions of tons of water. It was Niagara the Second.
It was the same drill as before. Our raft went vertical, and I was driven down into the vortex of washing machine hell. Again.
“Oh, well,” I moaned in my oxygen-starved brain. “At least I’m gonna die on a missions trip in Africa!”
I popped up to grab a gasp of air. I saw Caleb floating by, clawed desperately for him, couldn’t quite reach, and then down I went again.
I somehow surfaced. The water was calmer; I’d made it through the rapids. No idea where my raft was. But there was another raft a few yards away. I might make it . . . but I had a problem.
Due to the incredible underwater force, my elastic-banded athletic shorts and my underwear had been pulled down and were swirling, dangling around my ankles, terrifyingly close to flying off and being lost forever in the Nile River.
Swimming with one arm, I bent down with my other and grabbed hold of my underwear and shorts. I thrashed with my one arm and arrived at the nearby raft, the raft that would pull me to safety and get me the heck out of the Nile.
A guide was at the edge, ready to rescue me.
“Both hands on the rope!” he yelled. “Both hands on the rope!”
I grabbed the rope on the side of the boat with one hand, since my other hand was busy holding onto my underwear to prevent it from swirling down the river, never to be recovered.
The guide yelled down at me. “Both hands on the rope!” he bellowed.
“I can’t!” I yelled back to him.
Clearly the guide was mad that I wasn’t following his stern instructions. Or maybe he thought he couldn’t pull me in if I just held the rope with one hand.
“Both hands on the rope!” he yelled. “Now! ”
In a split second I had to decide which was worse, having the guide continue to yell at me in front of everyone, or being pulled into the boat with my underwear and shorts around my ankles.
Then, wincing, I spread my legs apart so my shorts and underwear wouldn’t wash down the Nile, and put both hands on the rope on the side of the raft, though I forgot to properly cross them like we had been taught earlier.
The guide, completely put out with me, grabbed my wrists and pulled me in the raft in one fell swoop. I flopped up and over the edge of the raft, landing completely face-planted on the bottom of the raft, my bare bottom up in the air, draped over the rounded, inflatable side of the boat.
What I didn’t know was that Caleb had already been pulled into this particular raft. I also had no idea just whose boat I had floundered into.
I just lay there for a minute. Silence from all the people on the raft.
“Please, God,” I prayed, “don’t let this be that boat full of the nice American missions team that was singing ‘Dive’ and waving to Steven!”
God heard my prayer . . . though the first face I saw when I finished flipping and flopping around like a landed fish was Caleb. He was just sitting there . . . staring . . . jaw dropped . . . looking at me . . . but trying not to.
I wriggled around, trying to pull up my soggy underwear and shorts to cover up, well, the bottom half of my body. Then I looked around. It was the raft full of tourists from England.
“Well,” I heard a chipper British accent proclaim, “I suppose if you’ve seen one bum, you’ve seen ’em all!”
20
Cinderellas Everywhere
She spins and she sways
To whatever song plays
Without a care in the world
And I’m sitting here wearing
The weight of the world on my shoulders
It’s been a long day
And there’s still work to do
She’s pulling at me saying, “Dad, I need you
There’s a ball at the castle and I’ve
been invited And I need to practice my dancing
Oh please, Daddy, please”
So I will dance with Cinderella
While she is here in my arms
’Cause I know something the prince never knew
Oh I will dance with Cinderella
I don’t want to miss even one song
’Cause all too soon the clock will strike midnight
but I know the truth is the dance will go on.
“Cinderella”
Words and music by Steven Curtis Chapman
Our life at home in Franklin, Tennessee, was as wild as rafting on the Nile, though in different ways. I felt like I had blinked and all of the sudden I had six children. Emily was twenty-one years old, Will and Caleb were in high school, Shaoey was in first grade, and our two littlest ones – only seven months apart – were both three.
Steven was doing concert stretches for three or four days, then he’d be home for a while. It was nonstop commotion – wild, fun, and at the same time exhausting. I had a front-row seat – even though I had no time to sit down – to watch my dream of an organized life morph into a life of craziness that I never wanted . . . or so I had thought.
How had this happened? Does God really have this weird, calculated sense of humor?
One typical night in the Chapman home in March 2006, Steven was in full “writing mode” for his upcoming CD, This Moment. However, he was also on bath and bed duty for Stevey Joy and Maria this particular evening, so he put the songwriting on pause to take care of the girls. He explained to them that they needed to do a fast bath and bedtime tonight because Daddy had to get back to work.
They did not exactly share his priority.
He got them in the bathtub and was working quickly, but as he turned around to get the shampoo and a washcloth, the girls escaped, leaving two little sets of wet footprints leading to their bedroom. A few moments later, two little giggling princesses appeared around the corner, Cinderella and Snow White, wearing their Disney costumes complete with matching shoes, tiaras, and wands.
“We’re going to the ball, Daddy!” they told him.
“No,” he said, “you are not going to the ball. You’re going back in the tub!”
Two or three escape attempts later, Steven finally got them clean, shampooed, and to bed.
“Daddy, can you read us a story?” they asked.
“No, no stories tonight,” Steven said. “It’s too late. We’re going to pray and go to bed! Pray a short prayer, immediate family only tonight! Pray fast!
“Okay,” Steven continued. “Heads on your pillows! No more drinks of water! No more questions! I love you! Kisses! Lights out! Now go to sleep! I mean it, good night!”
Finally! Steven thought as he headed back to his studio. Why dothey get so wound up on the nights when I just need them to settledown?
Then a thought hit him. It was as if God had whispered a name in his ear: Emily.
It was just yesterday that Emily was splashing in her bath, spinning and swaying her way through childhood without a care in the world. Steven used to call her “Queen Tuck” as he would tuck her in and tell her silly stories about Looney Larry the Coconut Hunter . . . and now she was an adult, twenty-one years old, away at college.
The years go by in a heartbeat, and then your children twirl right out of your life and into their own.
All that flashed through Steven’s mind in a second. It was as if God was saying, “Steven, are you really going to rush through moments like this? You already know how fast they go by! Remember Emily? She’s grown now, no more tuck-ins, baths, or make-believe balls.”
As he sat with a weight on his c
hest and tears in his eyes, he began to put his thoughts into a song. Within an hour, he had written a complete song called “Cinderella.” He played it for me the next morning as a work in progress.
I cried. “Don’t touch it!” I told him. “Record what you just sang for me and it’s going to affect a lot of people!”
So Steven put “Cinderella” on his This Moment CD. It became a hit song on the radio . . . and an all-time favorite song for our two little princesses, Maria Sue and Stevey Joy.
When the Fourth of July came later that year, we celebrated in classic Chapman style. We began the day with a pool party in our backyard with a big crowd of family and friends. Steven cooked up some of his famous burgers (they’re really not that famous, but since it’s pretty much the only thing he cooks, we let him believe they are). Chips, baked beans, and Nutty Buddies rounded out the nutritious feast, and the adults sat talking while the little ones played in the pool. Then, as the sun went down, it was time to light up the nighttime sky.
In Tennessee, fireworks are legal outside the city limits, and if it could be blown up, be lit on fire, or create massive amounts of smoke, it had been purchased by the Chapman men. The rest of the evening, the testosterone-filled “boys” lit things on fire for the women and girls to ooh and ahh over. We gave approval by clapping loudly and cheering at the top of our lungs, scoring each one. If a rocket didn’t meet our high standards, we would yell “Boo!” and “Dud!” at our explosives experts.
After all of the fireworks were blown up and the smoke settled down, we gathered food plates, trash, water bottles, and blankets while Steven and the guys collected all the scraps and pieces of burnt-out fireworks and put them in a big cardboard box. He made sure they were extinguished and put the box on top of our big plastic trash cans at the back of the house.
A little after four o’clock in the morning, Steven and I woke up in a panic to the shrieking of our smoke detector/alarm system. Steven ran around the room trying to remember where the keypad was to turn off what we assumed was a false alarm.
When he was finally fully awake and realized that the keypad was downstairs, he noticed a glowing orange hue outside the French doors in our bedroom. He yelled at me that the house was on fire. The ashes looked liked snow, but they were floating upward into the sky.
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