My friend, John R. Mabry, has released a new album, No Stranger. If you like 1980s Rock, you’ll like this album. The music has that vibe (at least I think it does). But if all you do is let the music live in the background, if you don’t spend some time listening to the words, you’ll miss this album’s journey.

John is a deeply spiritual man and his Christian faith is much more complex than an adoption of some doctrine. For John, faith is deeply relational. Faith is about trusting God, and faith is about John’s fidelity to God and God’s fidelity to John. And, as anyone who has been in any sort of loving relationship knows, relationships take work. You’ll hear, if you listen carefully to this CD, about the work John puts into his relationship with the Divine who he has come to know through Jesus.

I strongly recommend listening to this CD the way John ordered the tracks – at least the first few times you listen to it. You’ll probably end up with a favorite song or two (mine are “Love Loves You” and “If Jesus Was Like Me”). Still, if you listen to the tracks in John’s order, he will take you on a journey – from the reality of the pains we all experience in life that can lead us to cry out to God (in “No Stranger”), to the desire to be protected from the evil in the world (in “Don’t Want to Know”), to the desire to live aligned with God’s hopes for each and all of us (in “Fooling Myself”), to an invitation to be in community with the Holy (in “Stay With Us”), to a faith that trusts God (in “No Stranger (Reprise)”).

I hope you will enjoy this album as much as I do. The easiest way to find the album on the platform you use is at https://johnrmabry.hearnow.com/ You can also check out https://johnrmabry.bandcamp.com/releases