Man on the Run / Made in Anchorage

Baptism: Proclamation of Faith

I was recently baptized into the Christian faith in Lake Tahoe, CA, by my cousin. This is what I read in front of about 30 relatives right before I walked out into the water. Becoming a Christian has been a surprising thing to me (to put it mildly, and that will become very clear as you read). After the Proclamation you'll find a few more reflections. If you'd like to see me read this live, I've posted the video here on my instagram. In March of this year I believed the Bible was a book of ancient wisdom, mixed with moral fables, along with an unbelievable tale about a very insightful ethicist who claimed to be the Son of God – a claim I did not at all believe. Today, however, I believe that man, Jesus Christ, was and is that. This shift is as strange to me, no doubt, as it is to many of the people who know me; I can almost hear my prior self cringe – if I can invoke CS Lewis, I have been pulled into these truths kicking and screaming.

I at one point mocked the Christian faith. At others, I viewed it like a crutch. And at my most charitable, I viewed it as an incredibly useful self-deception – envious of what securities and communal benefits and truths sat interlocked with its foolishness. I used to think – I was too rational, too ‘above it’, too learn-ed to believe – yet, mid-April, there I was, with no doubt in my heart, Jesus is Lord, and like I was being held down by a divine thumb squirming to reclaim my prior self, almost wishing I could undo it – let me be my own God, I seemed to say – I couldn’t; the light shone too bright; the veil could not be un-lifted – the truth could not be un-truthed – and for weeks after I felt something like spiritual whiplash – shocked at the absurdity of the transformation; absurd because the claim is no less objectively outrageous though I now believe it, and absurd because five days before I was struck with this belief, I didn’t have it at all.

I was eating dinner in Seattle with my cousin, Cameron, and his wife, Courtney; they talked about God’s grace and read scripture and discussed the teachings of Jesus – I respected the devotion, I respected the culture behind their beliefs, I respected the wisdom within their beliefs – but in the back of my mind I viewed what they were doing as a solution to life’s struggles that I personally just didn’t need; I thought something like – some people need hard truths packed a certain way to best receive them. If someone can’t be moral on their own, can’t grow on their own, can’t confront their lesser self on their own, maybe they’ll do it at the behest of what they believe is the creator of the universe; good for them, I thought, beneath a heavy yoke of what I now see as condescension. I wanted everyone living in the light, even if it meant needing the support of a created God.

That Friday, however, during casual conversation with my family, what poured out of my mouth was a very sound argument for the divinity of Christ and the validity of the gospel; I was raised in the church, I knew the stories, but it was here that those stories suddenly crystalized into truth. It’s like I was suddenly revealed the image within the constellation; the stars had always been there but I was blind to their collective shape. Or like a boulder had been tumbling toward my soul and finally there in front of my family – it tumbled out. I was as much the listener as I was the speaker. My parents looked knowingly at each other like, “I think he believes.” When I saw them do this, I thought, “oh no, I think I believe.” In this moment, it was like a presence that had been following me my whole life landed on my shoulder – or like an ancient key found an ancient lock in the truest place in my heart; it is a memory that I revisit again and again because it is so bizarre. On my ride home, I stared out of the window – faith aglow. Confusion and embarrassment erupted in my mind as some sort of internal newness altered my perception of reality, my own identity, and challenged my own intellectual pride. I, in a moment, was gifted faith – a faith that was to me, days before, a useful foolishness. As San Francisco rushed by, I was shocked as my very essence seemed radically impacted; my self-ness seemed anew – like my soul was gifted its proper lens after a lifetime of peering through a dirty window.

That weekend I dove into scripture. I needed to know – what is this, what is happening to me, how is this possible? The truths of the Bible seemed truer and profoundly so. While I was in my kitchen – without the influence of music or a passionate sermon or the guidance of anything at all but the stillness within an average Sunday afternoon – I was bombarded with what I would best describe as love. I held myself up by my kitchen counter as my mind flooded with a rich vision; I squeezed my eyes shut and saw and felt the love of my family, the joy I’ve seen of my nieces as they play, a montage of all the laughter, hope, and tenderness I’d ever experienced – involuntarily, altogether – like a trillion watt lightbulb made of pure and glorious goodness and love shone on my heart and I wept because the light was too bright, and the glory too tremendous. I have never felt such love; I couldn’t even imagine it before this happened; I had never felt it before – and it is an inspiration to me now, a benchmark for what love is.

Shortly after this – I heard someone speak Jesus Christ’s beatitudes and I wept. Weeks after that, I went to a church service, heard songs that I’d mocked years before, and I wept. The truth of the gospel radiated from it. “What is happening?” I continued to think. “What alien hand has reached into my soul and changed it?” I told Cameron on the phone that I felt “irrevocably different”. My heart was softer, my empathies more acute, and this is described in the Bible exactly. In Ezekiel, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh”. To Nicodemus, Jesus speaks about our first birth being from the womb and our second being of the spirit. Even in pop culture, around the same time, Russel Brand gave his own testimony having become a Christian himself, “ – it felt like my will was being crushed,” he said, and I thought, yes, exactly; I’d told my brother it felt like, “ – my will was being eclipsed”. Another man describing his own experience – uncannily similar to my own, “I felt flooded with love, so much love.” I now feel full beyond the brim with an unexplainable hope. I feel ever-present anticipatory joy. I feel more love for my family and for friends and for strangers and for beauty and for goodness than ever before. It’s as though the light does not stop shining on my spirit because my spirit now shines with it. I told my mom it felt like I had been shrink wrapped with love, like I no longer needed anything else, period – like I had somehow been given everything.

Before this – I had achieved a peaceful life by any measure of this world. I was over ten years sober, doing what I love, seeing my work impacting others in a positive way. I woke up with peace in my heart and went to sleep with peace in my heart. My life to me felt like a painting of rolling hills – scenic grasslands, a beautiful sun, a small cottage on the ridge. In fact, that itself had become an argument in my mind against any type of established framework for spirituality; it felt to me like I’d reached some version of nirvana on my own. However, after this recent shift of heart, that painting I described feels now real and I’m in it– I can feel the wind, I can hear the grass whisper as that wind rushes through it, I can feel the sun; the peace I felt before was a low resolution representation of the peace I feel now, and with this living peace I can now see what selfish motivations sat in my prior kindnesses, what self-serving intent was braided within my prior loves, and what darknesses – what sin – hid in the un-illuminated corners of my pre-converted self. I was not only gifted living peace, but a proper light to see fully what darkness can sit hidden from a man who is convinced by the measures of this world that he is good. When I look back at that painting, though at the time it felt perfect, I can now see within the brushstrokes the hand of the amateur, and in any perfect strokes I’d managed I can see the hand of God.

I’ve come to find that the driving force behind my mocking or arrogance or intellectual pride that allowed me to dismiss Christianity as a weak stand-in for a weak heart was my own ignorance grounded in my own deep biases against the idea that anything could be the God of me but me – or if there was a God, it had to be a vague God of my own design. On this other side of the spiritual coin, having moved from unbelief to belief, I’ve found the Christian faith to be a faith of extreme courage. It is a faith of truth. It is a faith of goodness. It creates strong good men who can love completely and can reside in that love in the face of death and beyond it. If you’re a friend of mine and wonder – or are maybe concerned about – how this has changed me. It has; it has made me able to love more fully. If you listen to my music and are wondering – how has this changed me. It has; it has made me see truths in music more clearly – melodic, psychological and spiritual – so I can better draw them out. Everything good in me that was, I am now more of. Any darkness in me that was, I am now less of. All thanks to this faith that has been embedded within me due to the work of Jesus Christ on the cross and my trust in that work. It is as though I have found true life – or, as Jesus himself describes it – living water; and if I’m honest, it is more like that living water found me, or like something else drove its hand into the soil of my soul and caused the geyser.

I have friends who are atheist and agnostic, and to those friends – the many rebuttals or questions that you’ve produced while reading or hearing this, you know I’ve thought of them myself – you know that we’ve sat together and talked about them over the years. It will be a joy to chew on those questions with you again on this other side of belief. I won’t hand you a Jesus Christ coloring book and tell you to believe. Though the arrival of my faith is in some sense a mystery to me, the evidence and theology and philosophy behind my faith is rich; I can draw for you the constellation that I see and we can discuss it together, and maybe you will also see the image in that same constellation – and maybe for you, too, the bell will ring, and you can join me in these grasslands; you can, too, hear the whisper of the wind and feel the warmth of this same sun. To be an instrument in delivering this peace to any other person in this life would be my greatest honor. If not, though – if you don’t arrive at belief, you can at the very least have stored in you an explanation of faith that isn’t just, “I don’t know, I just believe,” and in my rationale you might see how Christianity found itself so deeply embedded in the hearts of believers for 2,000 years.

I say now: Jesus is Lord. I have been set free by his work on the cross; his death and his resurrection. That’s ridiculous, says my prior self. As was the creation of the universe, I say. As is consciousness itself, I say. Life is a dense fabric of absurd truths, and the truth does not need my permission, says God. When it was discovered we are made up of atoms, and that atoms are made up of mostly empty space, nobody said – ah, yes, of course, I’ve always intuited I am mostly air.

I’m going to end with two words that I once mocked when I had my heart of stone. I’m honored and grateful to say them now – with love – with this heart of flesh. I say them at what is both an end, and a beginning – a journey that has seen me as the drunk, the fool, the broken, the lost, the found, the loved – once a slave to the world, a slave to Rome – now a slave to Christ; the only freedom there is.

Hallelujah. And amen. And that's it. After I read this, I walked out into the lake. I thought I’d be reading this to maybe 10 people, not 30. I’d been sleeping in a tent nearby – a campground full of other campers and car alarms and cackling coyotes. The wind caused the roof of the tent to slosh above me like I was within a serving of Jell-O; the canvas roared; I slept maybe 3 hours. My defining moment before God, it seems, was destined to be steeped in the type of earnestness only afforded to the ill-prepared, unkempt, and mal-rested. There is, though, no better way to share your heart. Love is sweetest when it steps into the moment naked. Sincerity is best drawn from the hand unashamed of whatever tremor might co-author its calligraphy. A younger me would ridicule all of this – in fact, a year ago I’d likely do the same. When a close friend of mine found out, he answered with a pregnant pause as if to say, “What!?” I was shown a text from someone else, “Lol,” they wrote. When the woman I was seeing found out, she told me she could see me no longer. This belief is not wholly convenient, is my point; sometimes our beliefs are a rebellion against not only our prior views, but against the fabric into which we’ve found ourselves woven.

When I quit drinking years ago I didn’t have a sober friend to confide in. This reminds me of that. On the other side of our best decisions we sometimes find ridicule; sometimes people sneer in reply to our newfound joy. However – our inner-most loyalty shouldn’t be pledged to an estimation of what we think others will like. Our inner-most loyalty should be to whatever clangs the bell of truth – whether we like it or not, whether it’s convenient or not – and that bell for me, in this case, has rung loudly. I may be wrong, but if the fear of being wrong kept everyone from exploring what they believe to be right we’d undo every human triumph. You either fearlessly explore your convictions or you become imprisoned by whatever view is shouted loudest across the dinner table.

Last week my Uncle had heart attack; his funeral is in a month. My other Uncle, his brother, was recently diagnosed with cancer. They think my other Uncle, their brother, has Alzheimer’s. In response to all this, the Straws – who are mostly Christian – have responded with, somehow, more love; like the deeper into what the material world would describe as darkness, there explodes more resilient, defiant, blinding light. It’s as though to my family the water is always in some way warm even when the world is cold, and that warmth cannot be unbuckled from faith.

There is a power, a titanium bond, a platinum resilience, afforded to those in Christ. To have this flag planted in me is to every measure that matters, a gift.

EMPIRE

I’ve signed with EMPIRE. They’re a Grammy Award winning record label who played a part in the careers of Kendrick Lamar, Anderson .Paak, XXXTentacion, among several other household names, and I’m honored to be a part of that legacy. They’re an independent label, too – one of the most successful in the world – and this means, among other benefits, I maintain complete ownership of my music as well as my status as an independent artist; unbeholden to whatever obligations may come with the more aggressive agreements one can fall prey to in the industry.

Though they have offices throughout the world, they were founded in and are headquartered in the bay – where I was born, raised, and where I currently live. Their studios are blocks away from the nightclub I used to run in San Francisco, from where my grandpa would take my siblings and I to tour the city as kids, blocks away from where I just recently went with my family to join my little niece for her first baseball game, Oracle Park, which is also where we (along with my cousins, years ago) watched Barry Bonds hit his record-breaking homerun. The roots that drive beneath EMPIRE are the same roots that drive beneath me.

When my brother came along with me to tour their studios, he said, “I feel like I’m in your documentary.” I could understand why. It’s a beautiful space – a far cry from my first studio; a booth made of PVC pipe and sleeping bags in my parents’ garage – and I’m allowed to use it freely. It’s fitted with multiple recording studios, pianos, guitars, podcast studios, a bar, a beautiful kitchen. On top of that, the people there were passionate and genuine – and this shone more to my eye than the facility itself. One of them nearly came to tears as he was explaining why he’d dedicated his life to music.

The song that drew them into my world was ‘Hole Hearted’. A song I wouldn’t have written had I not gone to Miami – a city I wouldn’t have gone to had I not started this traveling album project – Made in / Place – and also, a song I wouldn’t have written had I not met the girl who inspired it. In my last conversation with her she said something like, “ – maybe we were meant to meet each other,” to which I replied, essentially, “ – I don’t believe in that type of thing.” Yet, due to this project, and due to the changes in my life because of it, I need to retract that answer – and since this project is what amounts to a public experiment, I’ll do my best to publicly explain that shift.

For years I’ve been living as a kind of materialist – anti-spiritual, say – convinced things were untouched by anything except what’s determined by chaos or combinations of random actions and reactions. When I made music, however, in private, though I’d been embarrassed to say it, I could feel something else – a deep communion with something outside of myself. I’ve told my brother it’s like I’m “hearing the song through the wall” when I’m writing music. To a great degree, this project – and the changes in my life because of it – have forced me to view life itself not as the result of random patterns of cause and effect but as another type of song that’s delivered through another type of wall. There is, maybe, some kind of perceivable truth or untruth in the steps we take; as if in the path ahead there are the imprints of what future steps are truly ours if we have the eyes to see them, and in every misstep there is a corrective hand guiding us home.

As I was sitting on a couch at EMPIRE’s offices in downtown San Francisco – with windows looking out into the city and platinum records on the walls – I thought, neither of my parents were musicians, I was the only one of my four siblings to be excluded from piano lessons, I wasn’t taught how to use the equipment I have, there was no point where a particular someone or something inspired me to pick up a guitar and write songs – and I don’t listen to music too often myself; I’m no connoisseur. It’s as though the flint needed to start my fire was somehow sewn into my heart from the beginning. In our unmotivated interests, the direction we move when we are uncoerced, what we reach for without the prodding of greed or pride or envy or insecurity, may be the sign of our knowing there are future steps we have yet to take but should – truer steps than anything pressed on us by the expectations of this world.

Other dreams and motives might be pushed into our hands, or we might be afraid of the road we know we should take, but what we were meant to do is there – held by an invisible hand – waiting for us to submit to it – and once we do, like the key that finally finds its lock, we find the entirety of our being utilized, and all of the sudden whatever money or fame or security attached to it no longer matters. A bird does not need to be paid to fly, nor a fish to swim, nor a redwood tree to stand. In all of us is a function, I think, a true function – it could be as a father, or a soldier, or a barista, or a musician, or a kindergarten teacher – but it is there, waiting for our fear to melt away, for our false dreams to lose their hold, and for our pride to unfasten from the wheel so we can slip into the mold that was cast for us. This is, to the modern ear, sort of a radical thought. “What do you mean? I’ve authored myself! I am the master of my destiny!” I understand, I used to think that; as my life unfurls, however, I’m not so sure. To say I at one point decided ‘music is my thing’ would be a lie. It just one day arrived as fact by the still small voice in the truest place of my mind – or maybe the truest place of my spirit would be more accurate.

This phrase comes to mind; it’s a beatitude spoken by Jesus Christ. “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” Peace and purpose come from submission, not from pride – from servitude, not from conquest – from giving all you have to others, not taking all you want from them. In my submission to my deepest and truest inclinations, and my applying those inclinations to the service of others, I’ve felt peace and freedom, and in the stories I’ve heard about the positive impact my music has had on listeners – I have felt purpose. What I’m doing isn’t the result of ambition, it is the result of submission. It is not the result of goal-setting, vision-boarding, or trend-watching, it is the result of my aiming to help others in the best way I know how, etched onto my heart by a hand I cannot see. I have not carved my way or found it, I have yielded to it, like how the earth yields to the pull of the sun – and in the same way the earth finds its perfect position because of that submission, I have found mine; and yours is there, too – your truest orbit – where your peace and freedom and purpose are interlaced.

Beneath a sky full of stars in Alaska, or on a bayou in New Orleans, or on the beach in Miami, or in the eyes of all those I’ve met, in the beauty both within and without, there seems to be a through-line – a great and invisible other-ness; a common divine thread. It has made me think, to what might we owe the result of our dancing across unknowable improbabilities toward their improbable ends? In what wind, I’ve wondered, do we unknowingly glide?

My next song will be the first song I release with EMPIRE. I began writing it in Anchorage, AK. It’s called ‘Man on the Run’. If they can help me bring one more person into the light, I’ll consider it a fruitful relationship. Meeting them, even, and being inspired by the love they’ve shown me, has been a gift.

I hope my music will continue to be the soundtrack to your rising sun.

Kai Straw

San Francisco, 2024