Friends,
Elizabeth Delaney is a local Cincinnati Christian recording artist. Her new CD is Hope Beyond Hope. I was stunned when I first heard Elizabeth's powerful voice. The range of her voice is incredible. She not only sings her music but she writes the lyrics and the music. So, if you are looking for an excellent song writer, Elizabeth is your lady for the job.
Below is her amazing story of getting her music recorded and published.
(Adapted from my blog at my website: http://elizabethdelaney.tmgartist.com/
)
Shortly before Thanksgiving Day last year, it occurred to me that I had been entirely too quiet regarding testifying about the miracles that I experienced along the journey of recording Hope Beyond Hope. Then on Thanksgiving Day, I read about an accident that happened the day before on a Texas interstate in which there was a 100 car pile-up. That pretty much primed the pump for me.
My heart goes out to those who were in the middle of that horrible accident. When I read about the accident on Thanksgiving Day, it had been less than a year ago that God had saved me from a 41 car pile-up along an interstate on which I was traveling -- the very interstate that was a large part of my journey toward recording Hope Beyond Hope. More on that miracle later. I decided that Thanksgiving Day was a good day to express my thanks to God and testify about all those miracles, and began to use my blog, which is connected to my website, to respond to what I believed He was prompting me to do. The purpose of testifying was to inspire and build up the faith of others to believe that God is interested to move in major ways in their life, too.
I’d been so focused on walking out the experience of recording Hope Beyond Hope that I really hadn’t had the opportunity to process the multitude of miracles that came with it. With the production process being pretty much over and the fact that I was paused as I waited for the next flurry of activity, the realization of those miracles was really beginning to take a hold of me.
There have been miracles surrounding being in the right place at the right time, financial miracles, miracles related to my car, travel miracles, divine appointments, divine protection, and probably even more than that. As I mine my memory and consider all these, it’s overwhelming to me and I’m the one who walked through it all! I will also say that I had and have an amazing little group of friends who are intercessors who have been very generous and faithful regarding keeping me covered. God doesn’t need “many” to get His work done – just a few who are dedicated.
There are two main reasons that I even ended up considering recording Hope Beyond Hope. And I hope no one minds if I get real about this: one is because of a crummy economy that had cut into my opportunities as a freelance writer. The other reason was because of the persistent encouragement of a Christian friend of mine, Mia, who is also a music mentor to me.
I ended up finding out about my label, Tate Music Group (TMG), through a Christian organization called Actors Models and Talent for Christ (AMTC). I heard a commercial about them on the radio, and after asking lots of questions and putting the matter before the Lord in prayer, felt led to participate in seminars that led up to a convention where actors, models, singers, singer-songwriters, dancers and others who want to pursue the arts as a vocation get to have a week-long opportunity to connect with entertainment industry professionals.
I’d say my first miracle in connection to all of this happened before I even went to my first seminar. Seminars require money. Money was something I didn’t have. So I began to pray that if the Lord wanted me to do this, that He’d deliver the cash into my hands. The way that He chose to respond to that was to provide me with a temporary job outside of my freelance writing.
page 2
Though I wasn’t crazy about the type of work it involved, the purpose that He had set before me fueled my determination to endure a kind of race that I knew He had set before me.
Carrying that thought out a bit further, training to compete in your favorite sport can be grueling. So can practicing to master your primary instrument. So I tried to look at this as a part of my preparation for where He was leading. And honestly, there were some days when I did better with that than others.
Another drawback to this temporary job was that it wasn’t the best paying position in the world. This meant that sacrifice was required on my part to get where God was taking me. Between covering the bills and payments for the seminars, there was little if anything left at the end of my paycheck. Things like car repairs would sometimes get neglected.
I had an issue with my car axel crop up only days before I needed to leave town for one of the seminars and the drive was about a two hour drive one way. I was probably on the edge of testing the Lord, but I opted to make the drive anyway in spite of the warnings of a couple of auto technicians.
I couldn’t see any other means to get to the seminar at the time, so I prayed and asked God to step in and help me and also asked every friend I had who was an intercessor to pray for me for travel mercies. There was also a lot that I didn’t reveal…until I got home. I am walking proof that God protects fools and little children. Incidentally, when I finally got the axel fixed, it was certainly a testimony to an entire building of auto technicians – and I really didn’t even have to say anything.
Switching gears a bit, something that God used to help prepare me for the convention was a karaoke competition. I found out about it through a friend of mine. A restaurant that had just opened near me was apparently doing it as a part of building up their base of patrons.
This was a rather unusual competition in that the owner of the establishment picked the songs for you and if you wore a costume, you would get extra points with the judges. Since there were three rounds to every evening of competition, there was usually just enough time to change costumes in between each song. I was put in a position whereby I had to break out of the genres that I was used to singing, and sometimes even think outside the box if I was going to stand for what I believe and keep things focused toward positive values and still be entertaining. This was a positive growth experience for me, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that there were several fellow Christians who were a part of it too. We were often the catalysts that God used for keeping things truly positive values and still entertaining.
I see this as a miracle from several angles: the way that this particular competition was designed was not too far off of the pattern that was used for the convention; I was given the opportunity to apply what I was learning through AMTC and through each seminar before I ever went to the convention; I was challenged to prepare on a weekly basis. In some ways, the competition was more rigorous than the convention, so I felt very prepared and confident not only because of the seminars, but also because of the karaoke competition. Not only was it a miracle of right timing
page 3
in terms of the opportunity to participate, but also of preparation for where I was being led by God’s Holy Spirit.
When the convention was still a few months off, it seemed that everyone around me was sick in one way or another – mostly upper respiratory issues. Unfortunately, I was having my own struggle with a persistent sinus issue that wouldn’t seem to go away. I didn’t worry too much at first. But when it got to be about three weeks away and over the counter meds weren’t working, I started to get nervous. A sinus issue for a singer is like a sprain for someone in sports. You just aren’t going to do as well because your body won’t let you.
I’ve always been radically healthy all of my life, and so I tend to be very stubborn about going to the doctor. In fact, I prefer to seek the Lord first and go to the doctor as a last resort. So I asked my prayer warrior friends to pray over me that God would heal me. No one even hesitated. We all believe that the Lord can heal through prayer. While my healing wasn’t immediate, about a week later, the sinus issue was gone and I remained radically healthy up to and all the way through the convention. In fact, the problem never returned.
The convention was being held in Florida, and since I love long road trips and hate what’s going on with the airline industry, I planned to get a rental car and drive. God miraculously provided the travel expenses that I needed, and the fact that I was driving to Florida in January seemed like a plus. No snow for me! Visions of enjoying the hotel hot tub in between seminars that would be provided at the convention and opportunities to showcase my music were dancing in my head. Nevertheless, I had never driven that far before, and since I was anticipating a 15 hour drive one way, I wanted the covering of my faithful prayer warrior friends. I have no doubt that such a move is why I experienced the miracle that I did in the midst of a 41 car pileup on the way to the convention.
When we testify about what God has done for us, it causes the faith of others to increase. Sometimes just hearing or reading the real life stories of what God has done for someone else, especially if it’s someone else that we know personally, can give us the faith to believe for what we need or would like to see happen in our own life.
As I write this, it’s as though I relive it -- sometimes right down to the very emotions. So perhaps the one doing the testifying also somehow gets strengthened in their own walk. Nevertheless, I believe that the reason that it occurred to me that I’ve been entirely too quiet is because the Holy Spirit is prompting me to testify about these things.
So when the morning to leave for Florida arrived, I was grateful and feeling as though I had no worries. Everything seemed to be going reasonably smoothly. I was running a bit behind regarding finishing up my packing and picking up the rental car, but that was easily resolved with a phone call. Little did I know that running behind is part of what God used for yet another miracle that He would do for me along the journey of recording Hope Beyond Hope.
Snow flurries floated through the sky and smacked against my windshield. I smiled. Thank you Lord that I will be driving out of this and am going somewhere warm!
page 4
By the time I got things squared away at the car rental place and had transferred my luggage from one car to the other, the snowfall had gotten pretty heavy. And as I drove along the interstate, it seemed to be getting worse. Nevertheless, I was reasonably kicked back as I enjoyed one of the several audio books that I had brought with me for the journey.
I had been driving for maybe a couple of hours when I began to notice that the road was starting to get slippery even though the snow seemed to be tapering off. I began to get nervous and slowed down a bit, asking the Lord for protection and thanking Him with a renewed gratitude for the prayer warriors that I knew were praying. I saw red tail lights up ahead and began to gently apply the brakes. Then I started to slide.
Unable to remember if I had anti-lock brakes or not, I began to pump the brakes. It seemed to get worse. My palms broke into a cold sweat. The car up ahead was getting uncomfortably close. “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” I called out continuously, now mashing the breaks as hard as I could. I still wasn’t stopping. People slammed into one another in front of me. Metal banged and crunched together to my right and left. I suddenly halted. Then I glanced in the rear view mirror just in time to see someone slam into the person behind me. I closed my eyes and cried out to Jesus some more, anticipating impact. Everything suddenly stopped. I opened my eyes. I was completely untouched yet everyone around me had plowed into someone else.
“Oh my God! This is Psalm 91 in action if ever I saw it!” I exclaimed in tears.
I sat and cried for a minute both in an emotional response to the terror of the moment and out of gratitude to God for His divine protection.
Slowly, those whose cars weren’t completely incapacitated moved them off to the side of the road. Once I calmed down a little, I moved out of the way of others. Though I was still pretty badly shaken from the experience, I was determined to keep going. I weaved around those who couldn’t move their cars. Sirens wailed in the distance. I couldn’t believe the number of people who were involved, and called my husband, Gary, to tell him what God had just saved me from.
“I just read about that on the internet. You were in that?” His stunned voice asked.
“By God’s grace, no! I was saved from it!”
“That was a 41 car pile-up! The snow storm system is a huge one that goes through about three states. It’s so bad in so many places that the police are telling people just to exchange information.”
It would have been nice if that was all there was to that portion of the adventure, but it wasn’t. Traffic crawled along the interstate for hours. What should have been a 15 hour drive, was expanded to a 24 hour one. I actually ended up missing check-in and orientation, but there wasn’t anything going on until the evening after that. Even so, the sunny sky and spring-like weather that greeted me when I got there was certainly a welcome change to what I had just finished traveling through.
page 5
The week-long excursion presented additional seminars and ample opportunities to learn and grow. You could easily fill each day with something of a crash course on how various aspects of the industry work in between the short, scheduled performance opportunities to showcase your skills and abilities to industry professionals searching for fresh faces and new talent. I carried a small notebook around and filled it.
On the second to last day of the conference we got the opportunity to actually meet with industry professionals one-on-one. They all had tables set up in a huge room and that particular event was run something like a job fair, lasting for only a couple of hours or so. There was no way that you could meet with everyone in the room, so you had to choose your opportunities wisely. Though we all had a program book that detailed who everyone was, I had my prayer warrior friends praying for divine connections for me. The last day was reserved for industry professionals who wanted to meet with specific talent one-on-one. The representative from Tate Music Group asked to see me, which I see as being yet another miracle because somehow, I had missed even seeing that particular entry in the book we were given.
She told me that one of the things that drew her to me was my enthusiasm to learn. Every time she saw me, I was taking notes. She gave me some background on the company and asked me about my vision for my music and my demo CD that I had brought with me. Less than a month after I got back from the conference, I was offered a recording contract.
I had absolutely no connections to help me get where I was trying to go when I first started out many years ago. I had a vision that I believed God placed in my heart but no idea how to get there. That being said, perhaps the biggest miracle of all is the fact that I have gotten this far. I look forward to seeing where the Lord will take me next.
Shortly before Thanksgiving Day last year, it occurred to me that I had been entirely too quiet regarding testifying about the miracles that I experienced along the journey of recording Hope Beyond Hope. Then on Thanksgiving Day, I read about an accident that happened the day before on a Texas interstate in which there was a 100 car pile-up. That pretty much primed the pump for me.
My heart goes out to those who were in the middle of that horrible accident. When I read about the accident on Thanksgiving Day, it had been less than a year ago that God had saved me from a 41 car pile-up along an interstate on which I was traveling -- the very interstate that was a large part of my journey toward recording Hope Beyond Hope. More on that miracle later. I decided that Thanksgiving Day was a good day to express my thanks to God and testify about all those miracles, and began to use my blog, which is connected to my website, to respond to what I believed He was prompting me to do. The purpose of testifying was to inspire and build up the faith of others to believe that God is interested to move in major ways in their life, too.
I’d been so focused on walking out the experience of recording Hope Beyond Hope that I really hadn’t had the opportunity to process the multitude of miracles that came with it. With the production process being pretty much over and the fact that I was paused as I waited for the next flurry of activity, the realization of those miracles was really beginning to take a hold of me.
There have been miracles surrounding being in the right place at the right time, financial miracles, miracles related to my car, travel miracles, divine appointments, divine protection, and probably even more than that. As I mine my memory and consider all these, it’s overwhelming to me and I’m the one who walked through it all! I will also say that I had and have an amazing little group of friends who are intercessors who have been very generous and faithful regarding keeping me covered. God doesn’t need “many” to get His work done – just a few who are dedicated.
There are two main reasons that I even ended up considering recording Hope Beyond Hope. And I hope no one minds if I get real about this: one is because of a crummy economy that had cut into my opportunities as a freelance writer. The other reason was because of the persistent encouragement of a Christian friend of mine, Mia, who is also a music mentor to me.
I ended up finding out about my label, Tate Music Group (TMG), through a Christian organization called Actors Models and Talent for Christ (AMTC). I heard a commercial about them on the radio, and after asking lots of questions and putting the matter before the Lord in prayer, felt led to participate in seminars that led up to a convention where actors, models, singers, singer-songwriters, dancers and others who want to pursue the arts as a vocation get to have a week-long opportunity to connect with entertainment industry professionals.
I’d say my first miracle in connection to all of this happened before I even went to my first seminar. Seminars require money. Money was something I didn’t have. So I began to pray that if the Lord wanted me to do this, that He’d deliver the cash into my hands. The way that He chose to respond to that was to provide me with a temporary job outside of my freelance writing.
page 2
Though I wasn’t crazy about the type of work it involved, the purpose that He had set before me fueled my determination to endure a kind of race that I knew He had set before me.
Carrying that thought out a bit further, training to compete in your favorite sport can be grueling. So can practicing to master your primary instrument. So I tried to look at this as a part of my preparation for where He was leading. And honestly, there were some days when I did better with that than others.
Another drawback to this temporary job was that it wasn’t the best paying position in the world. This meant that sacrifice was required on my part to get where God was taking me. Between covering the bills and payments for the seminars, there was little if anything left at the end of my paycheck. Things like car repairs would sometimes get neglected.
I had an issue with my car axel crop up only days before I needed to leave town for one of the seminars and the drive was about a two hour drive one way. I was probably on the edge of testing the Lord, but I opted to make the drive anyway in spite of the warnings of a couple of auto technicians.
I couldn’t see any other means to get to the seminar at the time, so I prayed and asked God to step in and help me and also asked every friend I had who was an intercessor to pray for me for travel mercies. There was also a lot that I didn’t reveal…until I got home. I am walking proof that God protects fools and little children. Incidentally, when I finally got the axel fixed, it was certainly a testimony to an entire building of auto technicians – and I really didn’t even have to say anything.
Switching gears a bit, something that God used to help prepare me for the convention was a karaoke competition. I found out about it through a friend of mine. A restaurant that had just opened near me was apparently doing it as a part of building up their base of patrons.
This was a rather unusual competition in that the owner of the establishment picked the songs for you and if you wore a costume, you would get extra points with the judges. Since there were three rounds to every evening of competition, there was usually just enough time to change costumes in between each song. I was put in a position whereby I had to break out of the genres that I was used to singing, and sometimes even think outside the box if I was going to stand for what I believe and keep things focused toward positive values and still be entertaining. This was a positive growth experience for me, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that there were several fellow Christians who were a part of it too. We were often the catalysts that God used for keeping things truly positive values and still entertaining.
I see this as a miracle from several angles: the way that this particular competition was designed was not too far off of the pattern that was used for the convention; I was given the opportunity to apply what I was learning through AMTC and through each seminar before I ever went to the convention; I was challenged to prepare on a weekly basis. In some ways, the competition was more rigorous than the convention, so I felt very prepared and confident not only because of the seminars, but also because of the karaoke competition. Not only was it a miracle of right timing
page 3
in terms of the opportunity to participate, but also of preparation for where I was being led by God’s Holy Spirit.
When the convention was still a few months off, it seemed that everyone around me was sick in one way or another – mostly upper respiratory issues. Unfortunately, I was having my own struggle with a persistent sinus issue that wouldn’t seem to go away. I didn’t worry too much at first. But when it got to be about three weeks away and over the counter meds weren’t working, I started to get nervous. A sinus issue for a singer is like a sprain for someone in sports. You just aren’t going to do as well because your body won’t let you.
I’ve always been radically healthy all of my life, and so I tend to be very stubborn about going to the doctor. In fact, I prefer to seek the Lord first and go to the doctor as a last resort. So I asked my prayer warrior friends to pray over me that God would heal me. No one even hesitated. We all believe that the Lord can heal through prayer. While my healing wasn’t immediate, about a week later, the sinus issue was gone and I remained radically healthy up to and all the way through the convention. In fact, the problem never returned.
The convention was being held in Florida, and since I love long road trips and hate what’s going on with the airline industry, I planned to get a rental car and drive. God miraculously provided the travel expenses that I needed, and the fact that I was driving to Florida in January seemed like a plus. No snow for me! Visions of enjoying the hotel hot tub in between seminars that would be provided at the convention and opportunities to showcase my music were dancing in my head. Nevertheless, I had never driven that far before, and since I was anticipating a 15 hour drive one way, I wanted the covering of my faithful prayer warrior friends. I have no doubt that such a move is why I experienced the miracle that I did in the midst of a 41 car pileup on the way to the convention.
When we testify about what God has done for us, it causes the faith of others to increase. Sometimes just hearing or reading the real life stories of what God has done for someone else, especially if it’s someone else that we know personally, can give us the faith to believe for what we need or would like to see happen in our own life.
As I write this, it’s as though I relive it -- sometimes right down to the very emotions. So perhaps the one doing the testifying also somehow gets strengthened in their own walk. Nevertheless, I believe that the reason that it occurred to me that I’ve been entirely too quiet is because the Holy Spirit is prompting me to testify about these things.
So when the morning to leave for Florida arrived, I was grateful and feeling as though I had no worries. Everything seemed to be going reasonably smoothly. I was running a bit behind regarding finishing up my packing and picking up the rental car, but that was easily resolved with a phone call. Little did I know that running behind is part of what God used for yet another miracle that He would do for me along the journey of recording Hope Beyond Hope.
Snow flurries floated through the sky and smacked against my windshield. I smiled. Thank you Lord that I will be driving out of this and am going somewhere warm!
page 4
By the time I got things squared away at the car rental place and had transferred my luggage from one car to the other, the snowfall had gotten pretty heavy. And as I drove along the interstate, it seemed to be getting worse. Nevertheless, I was reasonably kicked back as I enjoyed one of the several audio books that I had brought with me for the journey.
I had been driving for maybe a couple of hours when I began to notice that the road was starting to get slippery even though the snow seemed to be tapering off. I began to get nervous and slowed down a bit, asking the Lord for protection and thanking Him with a renewed gratitude for the prayer warriors that I knew were praying. I saw red tail lights up ahead and began to gently apply the brakes. Then I started to slide.
Unable to remember if I had anti-lock brakes or not, I began to pump the brakes. It seemed to get worse. My palms broke into a cold sweat. The car up ahead was getting uncomfortably close. “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” I called out continuously, now mashing the breaks as hard as I could. I still wasn’t stopping. People slammed into one another in front of me. Metal banged and crunched together to my right and left. I suddenly halted. Then I glanced in the rear view mirror just in time to see someone slam into the person behind me. I closed my eyes and cried out to Jesus some more, anticipating impact. Everything suddenly stopped. I opened my eyes. I was completely untouched yet everyone around me had plowed into someone else.
“Oh my God! This is Psalm 91 in action if ever I saw it!” I exclaimed in tears.
I sat and cried for a minute both in an emotional response to the terror of the moment and out of gratitude to God for His divine protection.
Slowly, those whose cars weren’t completely incapacitated moved them off to the side of the road. Once I calmed down a little, I moved out of the way of others. Though I was still pretty badly shaken from the experience, I was determined to keep going. I weaved around those who couldn’t move their cars. Sirens wailed in the distance. I couldn’t believe the number of people who were involved, and called my husband, Gary, to tell him what God had just saved me from.
“I just read about that on the internet. You were in that?” His stunned voice asked.
“By God’s grace, no! I was saved from it!”
“That was a 41 car pile-up! The snow storm system is a huge one that goes through about three states. It’s so bad in so many places that the police are telling people just to exchange information.”
It would have been nice if that was all there was to that portion of the adventure, but it wasn’t. Traffic crawled along the interstate for hours. What should have been a 15 hour drive, was expanded to a 24 hour one. I actually ended up missing check-in and orientation, but there wasn’t anything going on until the evening after that. Even so, the sunny sky and spring-like weather that greeted me when I got there was certainly a welcome change to what I had just finished traveling through.
page 5
The week-long excursion presented additional seminars and ample opportunities to learn and grow. You could easily fill each day with something of a crash course on how various aspects of the industry work in between the short, scheduled performance opportunities to showcase your skills and abilities to industry professionals searching for fresh faces and new talent. I carried a small notebook around and filled it.
On the second to last day of the conference we got the opportunity to actually meet with industry professionals one-on-one. They all had tables set up in a huge room and that particular event was run something like a job fair, lasting for only a couple of hours or so. There was no way that you could meet with everyone in the room, so you had to choose your opportunities wisely. Though we all had a program book that detailed who everyone was, I had my prayer warrior friends praying for divine connections for me. The last day was reserved for industry professionals who wanted to meet with specific talent one-on-one. The representative from Tate Music Group asked to see me, which I see as being yet another miracle because somehow, I had missed even seeing that particular entry in the book we were given.
She told me that one of the things that drew her to me was my enthusiasm to learn. Every time she saw me, I was taking notes. She gave me some background on the company and asked me about my vision for my music and my demo CD that I had brought with me. Less than a month after I got back from the conference, I was offered a recording contract.
I had absolutely no connections to help me get where I was trying to go when I first started out many years ago. I had a vision that I believed God placed in my heart but no idea how to get there. That being said, perhaps the biggest miracle of all is the fact that I have gotten this far. I look forward to seeing where the Lord will take me next.
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