Sun Days on Orcas | For King and Country

||| SUN DAYS ON ORCAS by EDIE KULPER |||

Last night I took our older son and his friend to a concert in Everett by For King and Country, a Christian band led by two Australian brothers named Joel and Luke Smallbone. Luke explained during the concert that their father was a music promoter, and their parents and four siblings moved to Nashville, Tennessee, when their mother was pregnant with her seventh child. When they arrived, their dad lost his job and the family lost everything – everything they owned, their security, and the assurance of eating at each mealtime.

One day, an acquaintance asked if he could walk through their empty house to take a look inside. They agreed. The next day, two moving trucks full of furniture pulled up and men unloaded all kinds of furnishings into their home. People made them food over and over again. One man handed the keys of his brand new car to them, telling them to take it.

The outpouring of generosity by others changed their lives. I know that they change lives, too, and at the least, their songs and lyrics remind people that they aren’t alone, they aren’t forsaken, that even past hardships and bad choices need no longer define them. I had never been to a Christian concert before, and what I love is the fact that they sing about things like joy, like children, and about loving their parents. How refreshing!

Appropriately, our son needed to turn in three songs to his guitar teacher at school, and he happened to choose For King and Country’s “God Only Knows” as his final song. He spent about ten hours laying down a multitude of tracks, getting them aligned to recreate the song on his own, so we had some great audio preparation for several days before the concert.

The Angel of the Winds Arena was sold out, and I thought you might like a peek at the show. Perhaps you haven’t been to a Christian concert either, so how appropriate it is that I can share this to you on a Sunday. These short videos do not do it justice whatsoever, as the brothers sang powerfully, the bass and drums reverberated heavily through our chests and organs, and the crowd built to the point that its roar between songs near the end was near deafening.

The band paused between songs to speak encouraging words to everyone, tell inspirational stories, and talk about Compassion International, an organization that helps anyone sponsor a child or multiple children around the world who don’t have future prospects or even present basics like enough food or education. After handing out packets to everyone in the audience who was interested, they got back to playing.

Considering that I haven’t been to a concert in a few decades and haven’t been to any events in the last few years, and that my son and his friend had never been to a big concert, this was a phenomenal first in many respects. Risky? I’m not sure. But worth every minute of it for my mental health.

I hope that you, too, have finally been able to enjoy some long-awaited activities that are filling your aching need for normalcy, whether you’ve walked through the farmers’ market and enjoyed spontaneous conversations in the stunning sunlight, attended the punk-band concert at The Grange, or simply expanded your mainland horizons beyond shopping at Costco for groceries. May the springs in your brain that twanged loose during the pandemic be reforming one large, reformed coil at a time with every outing and human you reincorporate back into your life.

To pick a child to sponsor, click here.