CCM reader Rob Vischer from Spring Arbor, Mich., was the winner of our recent Bethany Dillon contest. Over 150 people submitted essays based on the theme of Bethany’s new album, Waking Up (Sparrow). Rob’s winning entry earned him the opportunity to interview Bethany. A version of this interview was printed in the October issue of CCM magazine, but here is the special online exclusive extended cut. Enjoy!
ROB: My favorite song of yours is actually from your first album, “For My Love.” I was just wondering what experience led you to write that song?
BETHANY: Actually, the first half of that song was written about a boy. I think I wrote it four summer ago…four or five. I went to church camp and there was a boy there, and I came home the week after camp and it cured me.
ROB: Cured you of what? Love sickness?
BETHANY: It totally cured it. So, I got like the bones of the song and really liked it… I just finished writing it about what God has purposely wired in a feminine soul–the want to be pursued, and how that mirrored what that set up for Him and His church. So, it ended up being a song about God. But I’m not as deep as I would like to be, so it started out being about a boy.
ROB: What songwriter, author or poet gives you chills and “Man, God help me write like that” moments?
BETHANY: Oh man, the first couple that come to mind are Rich Mullins and Sara Groves for songwriters. And I just started recently reading some short stories and a novel by this woman named Flannery O’Connor. She wrote in the ’50s, and everything she wrote was about grace and very heavy. When I read her books and her stories… I’m moved to a really honest place.
ROB: When you went to India, how did God speak to you through that experience? How did it change the way you go through your day-to-day living?
BETHANY: It changed a lot of things. It’s so sad, but it took something as shocking as that to really put me in the mindset that God isn’t white or American, or speaks English -- that He doesn’t have to operate in an immaculate building with air conditioning. Just being there, for my really fickle heart just to see so much heaviness on the body of Christ -- when I came home, the first reaction I thought was, “OK, I’m going to go through all my clothes and give away everything I don’t use and I’m not going to eat a ton of food.”
I just went to this place where it’s horrible to be American, but that’s not even right either. It’s like, OK, I’m American because He made me American. Just a place of thankfulness and just realizing that He is a lot bigger I think about on a daily basis.
ROB: When was the moment that brought you back in the balance?
BETHANY: I don’t know if I’m perfect in that balance at all. It just sobered me to know that, especially in the life of believers there, when it looks like living in a slum and eating rice and beans and curry everyday or living in corn fields of Ohio [where] I can eat whatever I want -- in either of those settings -- the heart of God is to move us and heal us. To uproot things and to plant things. And not be concerned with [being comfortable]; He’s our comforter. That picture was so powerful there because of the poverty, because that is the same heart of God here.
