Nobody really ever goes into marriage thinking that it will end, said contemporary Christian musician Jason Gray.
“You enter marriage with hope and belief and joy,” he said. “And when everything falls apart, it’s surreal. It’s gut-wrenching.”
It was like a devastating slow bomb that exploded and sent shockwaves into every part of his life.
“My failing marriage broke me down,” Gray said. “It broke down a lot of what I believed. It broke down a lot of my hope.”
And then when the worst thing he could imagine happened — when his marriage ended — it felt like part of him died, he said. “It is a kind of death, a very real death of something that you loved very much.”
It’s a complicated kind of grief when something dies that you can’t lay to rest in the ground — things like failed marriages, miscarriages and broken dreams, Gray said. “A lot of people around you don’t know what to do to help or how to handle it. It’s a dark place.”
That’s the feeling that led him to write the song “Death Without a Funeral” for his new album, “Where the Light Gets In.”
The song says: “When you see me, I’m still breathing, though a million things have died inside of me.”
Gray said he hoped the song could serve as a kind of funeral for people like himself who have experienced that kind of loss.
“I wrote this album hoping that it would be a ray of light for people in the middle of darkness,” he said.
Gray was quiet for about a year after his marriage legally ended in January 2015, working through his grief privately and having a lot of “real” moments with God.
“It was confusing. I’ve never prayed harder for anything in my life, and it still went the way it did. It’s very lonely, confusing and painful at times,” Gray said. “Yet there were also ways in which I experienced His presence in a very intimate and dramatic way. It requires a deep engagement with grace and trust.”
There is something about pain that’s holy, he wrote on his blog recently.
“The best anyone can do is try to not lose themselves in the storm of it and in time work toward wholeness again,” he wrote. “The best way I know how to do this is to bring the broken pieces of my life to the God who redeems, restores and puts broken things back together.”
One of Gray’s favorite quotes is by the poet Rumi — “The wound is where the light enters you.” It prompted the name of the album’s track, “The Wound Is Where the Light Gets In.”
“It’s empowering to know that these hard things don’t have the last word in our lives — God’s Word has the final say,” Gray said. “The very thing that could destroy us, if we allow love and light into the wound, it could be the thing that makes us beautiful.”
Bringing hope
He said he believes that’s the core message God has entrusted to him.
“At those times when we can feel abandoned, alone and confused, if there was some way that these songs could speak into that moment, that’s my desire — that they could bring hope.”
For more information, visit www.jasongraymusic.com.
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