New Year's Newsletter

We saw that not everyone was able to receive our latest email newsletter so here it is:

Happy New Year!

We hope this email finds you all well rested from time off and filled with love from time with friends and family over this past holiday season. For After the Chase, 2008 was our busiest year ever. We played all over the country this year - Washington, Oregon, California, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida - and got to meet and connect with many wonderful new people and church families. We saw more fruit in our ministry in 2008 than ever before - God gave us opportunities to share our faith in Jesus and we saw people come to Christ at our concerts. We had such a great time and are excited about what this coming year may hold for us.

In early December, Nathan and I found out that we are going to have a new addition to the band. Unfortunately we won't know what instrument he or she will play for about 9 months...that's right...we're having a baby! We haven't been to the doctor yet (still very early) but we think the due date is Aug. 30th. We would appreciate your prayers for the baby this year.

About 4 days after we found out that we were pregnant, we also found out that Nathan's last day of work was Dec. 31st. He was laid off from his full time job this year. As many of you know, Nathan's job has been supporting the majority of our music ministry. It enabled After the Chase to grow, travel, and record new music as well as let me (Jenna) work full time from home on bookings and various ministry details. We are a little concerned about the financial future but also know and trust that God will provide all of our needs.

We are exploring what God has in store for us this coming year. Please pray for us! Pray for a healthy baby, for guidance in the next steps of our ministry, and for God to open new doors for us. We've had people ask us in the past if they could donate towards our ministry to help us. We have mainly declined given that Nathan had a full time job that was supporting us. But now, given the dramatic changes in our life, we're freely accepting any help you want to provide!:)

So if you would like to make a tax deductable donation to After the Chase's music ministry, you can send us a check made out to "Redwood Covenant Church" (our home church). Just make sure to write "After the Chase" in the notes section on the check. If you don't care about tax deductable donations you can always send us a check made out to "After the Chase" or buy lots of CDs and give them away to your friends. The address to send your checks to is:

After the Chase
779 Riesling Road
Petaluma, CA 94954

If you'd like to see us live this year, just email us to book ATC for 2009 now as our weekends are filling up. We will continue to tour through July and stop in August for the birth.

Thank you for all your prayers and support,

Jenna (and Nathan!)
After the Chase

On the road...

I thought we should start recording a little bit of video while we're traveling. We're new at this, so forgive us for the lack of showmanship. Maybe we'll get a better camera soon that will make this easier ... right now there are twenty steps just to post a video!
~Nathan


Nathan, Jenna, and Gary on the road in Ohio - Sept 2008




Nathan and Jenna on the road in Florida - Sept 2008

Who are you becoming?

There is a junior high school right across the street from our house. (recently built, and frankly I wish it wasn't there by the way, but that is another story). I was driving by the school today, and I saw a bunch of kids standing around, waiting for their parents to pick them up. Every Wednesday they get out early, and if I leave at just the wrong time, I'm stuck in parental deadlock for a long time before I can even get around the block.

As I sat there, waiting, watching parents cut off other parents, honking horns at each other, picking up their loved ones, I started wondering what each of these kids would become someday. Would the red headed girl laughing with her friends become a business woman, running some kind of successful enterprise? Would the young man sitting off all by himself become the next Bill Gates and start a new technology empire? Would any of these kids end up crashing their lives on the rocks of bad relationships, substance abuse, and fade away before they ever got a chance to live? Would many of them just come out "normal" in society's eyes -- because that is the path of least resistance?

And then I thought about that phrase: "what would they become?" What a strange, permanent sort of phrase that is. As if we as human beings start out young, get educated, and then "become" whatever it is we are trying to be - doctors, lawyers, truck drivers, plumbers ... and then we're done. How tragic life would be if that were really the case. And what a tragedy it is for people who do stop growing, changing, and learning at some point. 

In life, either you're growing, or you're dying. Status quo is just another form of fading away, and waiting to die. 

My hope and prayer for all of the kids standing around, waiting for their parents to come pick them up, was that they would never "become" anything. That they would never cease "becoming" who they are -- life is a journey of becoming, drawing closer to family, friends, and God, or moving away. The choices that we make every day, the plodding commute to work and back, the words we exchange in anger or in love -- they are either part of becoming something more beautiful, or becoming something less beautiful. 

Who are you becoming?

~Nathan

Ode to St. Paul's EYC

Oh what a sad day
When After the Chase couldn’t fly away
To Shreveport is where they had wished to go
To be with a special group that they know
But blasted Ike reared it’s head
And dreams of seeing friends seemed to be dead
And now here we are so sad and blue
St. Paul’s EYC we’re so lonely without you!

Tour Update

We just got back from a weekend in Oregon. We played in Mt. Shasta on Friday, Portland on Sat, and Sweet Home on Sun. I just wanted to share an article that someone wrote about our Friday night experience at a small coffeehouse called The Coffee Connection. It's a little embarrassing how this article reveals that we sometimes play for an audience consisting no more than my parents but it also paints a great picture of why we do it. You just never know what opportunities you might pass by if you are not willing to look a little foolish for God. Click here for the article. And if you really want to know what it was like that night, you can watch it here. I'll try to post the other video of our rendition of "La Bamba" soon:)

Jenna

Thanksgiving in LA - 2 years ago

Here is an old blog from Nov 2006 that we had on Xanga – now we’re blogging here, and I only wrote two things on that other blog, so I thought I would move it over here:

Nov 2006 - 

We just got back from a weekend in Los Angeles. It was Thanksgiving at it's best - 30 people crammed into my grandmother's house, all catching up on 5 years of life that we haven't shared together. My extended family is very loving when we're together, but not very good at visiting each other, other than when someone like our grandmother calls us all together.

My Grandma told us stories about her childhood in the old south, about the gifts of the Spirit, and about how she forgave her father. She spoke in tongues for the first time when she was 45. Soon after, she felt a heavy pressure on her heart to forgive her father and apologize for the mean things she had said to him when she was young about his drinking. It was really wonderful to see how God moved in her life to bring reconciliation and healing to her family. The day she apologized to her father, he stopped drinking and never drank again.

She told us stories about my Dad and his brothers throwing mice into the maid's room to keep her trapped there while they rampaged through the house -- decorating the windowsills with crayon drawings, drawing on the walls, and knocking things over around the house. They were throwing things out the windows when my grandma showed up to give them a serious spanking. My uncle said that once they realized they were going to be in trouble and get spanked within and inch of their life, they decided, what the heck, why not just keep doing more fun stuff until we get caught?" My grandma said she used to invite her to eat with her at lunch time at the same table, and she never told my grandfather (who passed away 7 years ago) because he wouldn't have approved of such a thing. I don't think she ever protested for civil rights in public, but I was glad to hear that she treated people like human beings in the privacy of her home.

We got a chance to play concerts at a church in Upland and a Calvary Chapel in Redlands. We had a blast playing our songs, and it was wonderful to hear people come up after the concerts and say "I don't know if you were here for any other reason, but I know for sure that you were here to play that one song just for me -- it was exactly the message God wanted me to hear today." Nothing makes our day more worthwhile than to hear that.

Grandma's stories and playing concerts - all in all, not a bad way to spend Thanksgiving at all.

Nathan

I looked back on some old journal entries when I was a teenager -- all I talked about was grandiose dreams: changing the world, inventing time travel, and learning to be more like Christ to people around me. Every once in a while I would stray from these things to writing about whatever girl I thought was going to be my future wife. I haven't invented time travel or changed the world (at least that I know of) -- but I did find a wonderful wife in Jenna. Or rather she found me. Or something like that.

But contrary to popular opinion, the band that we named After the Chase has nothing to do with romance between us. It does come from an old saying the south "He chased her, until she caught him" -- but it's more of how we relate to God. We chase after truth and God, trying to find what's really out there, what made the universe, what made us -- and in the end God catches us. So if you were ever wondering, or didn't catch the meaning on our own website.

I spent my lunch time yesterday with my nieces and nephews, and talked about light sabers, star ships and teleportation. And my niece pretended to be an alien with little ear muffs on her ears. Then they had to work on their school work (they are all home schooled) and I helped them learn how to add and subtract fractions with different denominators. It was a a good day, even the school part. My sister sure has a lot of work on her hands, home schooling four children. I had fun teaching one of them about negative numbers.

I've got to say - lightsabers were definitely more fun than denominators. But lightsabers will probably never really get invented without denominators.

Nathan