CityView Magazine

arts Bloom Where You're Planted Worship leader Giles Blankenship's musical journey W By Hope Myers hen Giles Blankenship entered Integrity Worship's We Are Worship music contest, he never dreamed his song, You Are There, would be featured as the winner of the worldwide worship competition. It was a song that began with a couple of chords strummed out on a beat-up guitar. "My first draft of You Are There was penned a few years before the competition," said Giles. "Lars Gordon was a young man I met through Synder Memorial Baptist's inner city ministry. He was just a kid who walked around with an acoustic guitar strapped to his back. Lars was big into art, skateboarding and music. He called me up and said he had an idea for a song, so we sat down and composed it." One day, while meditating on Psalm 139, Giles started putting the words to paper. He played the chords he and Lars had composed, pulled out Psalm 139 again and then roughed out the lyrics. "In the early edits, I was thinking about how God is in our joy, pain and loss. How wherever we go, he is there, even when we make our bed in Sheol." He continued, "After I wrote the song, we went through a time of loss and grieving in our church community. The song meant a great deal when we sang it for the first time as a congregation." In late 2009, one of the deacons at Snyder Memorial Baptist took his own life and the life of his family in a shocking murder suicide. "It rocked our world," said Giles. "That was a tough year and we had to cling to each other and stick together for support." The grieving period lasted two years and from it came the inspiration for many of the songs on Giles' latest album, The Day Is Dawning. The album features a collection of songs about grief, hope, loss and finding solid ground as a community. It was meant to help everyone in the congregation who struggled from grief. "When we go through such loss, we hope to know on the other side what it was all for," said Giles. "Sometimes, hell is of our own making. But sometimes it's without any choice of our own. But through it all, we find ourselves." After writing the final draft of the song, Giles got together with his friend Kevin Perry to put the song into the album. Kevin brought his laptop and recording equipment to Giles' home and they sat in the living room with a guitar and recorded the song. "People found the song meaningful," said Giles. "So when I decided to enter the We Are Worship music contest, I put two songs up on Facebook as a poll to help me choose which one I would enter in the competition. The overwhelming winner was You Are There." Though the launch of the song grew slowly, it gained popularity to become one of the top five songs in the Integrity Worship Music competition. Integrity was looking for worship songs that were being sung in churches across the world, songs that were written locally and lifted up by a congregation. The competition opened July 1, 2013 on WeAreWorship.com and received submissions from international unsigned worship leaders. Winning the competition meant recognition, recording and most importantly, sharing a song that had come to mean so much to the congregation at Snyder. "I got a phone call on August 6th," said Giles. "I'd won the competition. But there wasn't even time to think. Integrity wanted to fly me out to London early the next week to do the first recording of the song. I got to the studio at 9:45 the morning after I arrived and I didn't leave until 10:00 p.m." Giles remembers the event fondly. "We finished the evening out with an award winning Indian dinner at a local restaurant. Never would have thought that I'd have Indian CityViewNC.com | 33

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