Seeing the Sound of Faith
The old white bench pew that is pictured in this Reba McEntire photo tells a story. I don't know its past, but God used it to foretell the future. He had a special purpose – or more accurately a repurpose – for this bench. It is not only part of the “God and My Girlfriends” song story, but it also intertwines with one of my Accidental Entrepreneur businesses.
My husband Craig and I co-owned a furniture and home decor store from 2014-2017. Some of the furniture pieces we sold were custom-built from reclaimed materials. Others were salvaged items found on treasure hunts, which we’d sometimes get a little slice of history about to share with customers. I loved the lost-and-found part of our business: finding lost relics of the past during ‘pickin' trips’ and restoring, or "upcycling,” them into unique decor pieces. Something lost was found…then found again. The past was reborn as a ‘new old’ treasure that found its way to a new home.
The special bench-with-a-past pictured above is one of my favorite stories from our store. How it ended up on the front page of The Tennessean newspaper with Miss Reba in 2017 has a heavenly backstory...one that revealed, in advance, something that God had ‘in store’!
It happened on April 25th, 2016. I know the exact date because I made a note of it. It was one of many ‘supernatural coincidences’ I’d been experiencing, from the moment I’d learned that Reba was planning to record the “God And My Girlfriends” song I co-wrote on her upcoming album. I was encountering so many that I'd started telling others, “It’s like God is giving me a scrapbook of souvenir moments surrounding this song!” (You can see a timeline of souvenir moments here).
Craig was experiencing it too. The day it happened was a Monday — a day he had worked at the store that was not his usual workday. Arriving home after closing time, his first words to me were, “You’re not gonna believe what happened at the store today!”
He explained that a week or so prior, a photographer had come into the store (on another day that was also not Craig's usual workday), and while browsing through our furniture items she spotted a vintage white bench that caught her eye. She asked Craig if he’d be willing to rent it to her for a photo shoot. He said yes, and they worked out a rental arrangement.
My husband’s excitement grew as he shared with me what happened next. When the photographer came back into the store to return the bench, he asked her how the photo shoot went. To his surprise, she glanced around the store as if making sure no one else was around, before showing him one picture from the shoot on her iPAD.
“You’ll never guess what the picture was,” Craig told me with a big smile on his face. “It was Reba, sitting on the white bench. The photo shoot was for Reba’s upcoming album cover that your song will be on!”
Wow. Wow!!
Craig and I both marveled at the divine orchestration that had to occur in this still-unfolding story. Of all the stores in Nashville, this photographer just happened to come into our store, on a day when my husband just happened to be working that was not the norm. She’d decided this bench was just right for a Reba album cover photo shoot, which just happened to feature the song I had written sung by Reba herself. She then brought the bench back on another day when Craig just happened to be working (due to an employee calling in sick), and while chatting with Craig acted on an inner-prompting to show him a picture from the shoot.
Ten months later, Reba’s SING IT NOW: SONGS OF FAITH AND HOPE album was released, with the white bench from our store featured within its booklet-style CD cover pages. It also appeared on the front page of the 1/29/2017 edition of The Tennessean newspaper in promotion of the album, accompanied by this headline:
THE SOUND OF FAITH.
Whoa - Drop the mic.
Only God could ‘repurpose’ the past and make it a ‘present’ [gift] in my future.
Complete with two published scrapbook souvenir photos.
All ‘on record’ as proof that I have seen ‘the sound of faith’ come to life!
Click here for Reba’s recording of the God and My Girlfriends song.