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Hope Darst joins the LifeSongs Morning Show to chat with Josh about her new Live Worship album, sending her girls back to school and to encourage the LifeSongs family in this new season!
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Welcome to the LifeSongs Morning Show. Hey, I’m Josh, and I’m so excited to introduce you to worship leader and LifeSongs artist, Hope Darst. Hope, welcome to LifeSongs.
Hello. Thank you for having me.
So glad that you got to join us, especially with your brand new worship project, Hands of the Healer.
Let’s jump right into it. Okay. Where did, where did Hands of the Healer come from? The project, the song, all of it. Well, a couple of years ago, which is funny enough, uh, before my last project. So if anybody’s kind of followed, I had an EP that came out in 2022 called If The Lord Builds a House. And I actually wrote this song for that project.
When it came time to release it or to get ready to put it out, all of us just had like a, kind of a pause in our spirit. And we, we weren’t exactly sure why, but I’ve learned over the years that when there’s a pause to like not ignore it. Cause at the time I’d written this song really just reflecting on all the ways that God had been a healer in my life.
My story is long and has lots of twists and turns, but mostly, you know, God has set me free from years of battling with depression and anxiety. And he has just been a faithful healer in that area. And then also my husband and I were told that we could not have children and we have two miracle daughters that are 15 and 13.
So, you know, I have experienced God be a healer in just so many different ways. In my heart, obviously from salvation, but my father and I were estranged for a lot of years and I had a lot of unforgiveness in my heart. You know, God set me free from that. Those are all these different ways, right? God is a healer of mind, body, spirit, and soul.
So I wrote it just to encourage people that, you know, we’re walking through a season that needed to be reminded like, Hey, God is a healer and you can trust him with your circumstance. I had no idea that that pause that I felt was going to be because ultimately my daughter would end up in a three year long journey of us believing for healing for her.
We still are in that journey. We’ve still not seen the healing that we are believing for. She’s had issue after issue with her knee, led to surgeries. She’s been in physical therapy. You imagine it. She has, we have done it. We have tried it. She ultimately had a surgery. That the doctor thought would fix it.
And instead, what has happened is that she’s lived with chronic pain for the last almost two years. And we’ve tried everything that we know to try in the natural and there just haven’t been solutions. And so it’s probably been of all the journeys that I’ve been in. It’s the hardest because as a mom, like you just want to fix it.
You don’t want your kid to be in pain. I mean, I will tell you, this has revealed the father’s heart to me so differently that like, I’m like, wow, if I don’t want my kid to be in pain, how much more does God not want us to be in pain? And yet I also can see where pain and suffering, it really does develop and strengthen something in us that no other circumstance can.
I mean, it tests your faith like nothing else. And you figure out what you believe in, what you’re made of in seasons of hardship and seasons of things, not turning around the way that you wanted. And so it’s kind of an eye, you know, an ironic. Series of events that here we are three years later and I’ve released this song and I’m right now, I’m the person that I was writing the song for.
Like I’m right in the middle with everyone else. When the song says in the doubting, in the waiting, when my faith feels like it’s running out, I am choosing to still pour my praises out and to put all of it, my body, my strength, my mind, my soul, my fears, my worries, my circumstances into the hands of the Lord.
That the scripture say, bear the stripes and wounds that heal us. You know, I love that God paints that picture that he’s like, I have taken on the wounds for sickness and in death. And. I just have to trust that his hands are the ones that ultimately can heal my daughter. And I believe that for your listeners.
And, you know, I have a history that says he can, we have an empty grave that says he can. And so I have to choose to believe if you’ve done it, then you can do it again. And I just have to keep trusting you and believing. And so hopefully when people hear this song, they’ll feel encouraged to do the same.
We’re talking with Hope Darst this morning on the LifeSongs Morning Show. Hope, you answered every question that I had written out for Hands of the Healer in one fail swoop. I mean, you covered not just the testimony of God healing and bringing healing emotionally and relationally and physically, but also how do you handle the, the doubt that creeps in when you have been praying for so long.
And it’s real. Yeah. So real. And I’ll, I’ll be honest as someone who has always struggled with fear and worry, I want everything to be okay. I want everything to feel okay because that makes me not then worry and not fear like just in real life practical. And I think most people are like that, right? We want all of our relationships to be in good order.
We want our finances to be in good order. We want all of our kids to be healthy and safe and we want to be healthy and safe. And then it’s like, okay, everything’s good. I don’t, I don’t have anything to worry about or be scared about. But that is not the reality of life And god’s really clear about that in his word He says literally in this life, you will have trials of many kinds but take heart I’ve overcome the world And I already knew that scripture a lot of people know that scripture But that scriptures had to become very real to me And I will say on a personal level What this journey with my daughter has really forced me to have to deal with and to allow the lord to work out is going But what are you going to do when it doesn’t get resolved?
What do you do when I can’t fix it? I can’t go to a friend and apologize and restore that relationship. I can’t go take a certain medicine and it fixes the health issue. I can’t take my daughter and do a specific thing and it’s all gone. What do you do when it lingers? Can I figure out how to be in relationship with the Lord and allow him to help me to have peace, literal peace in the midst of something that just still feels unresolved and unchanged.
And it is not an easy journey. And there have been many days where I have cried out to the Lord, why, why won’t you just heal her right now? God, like, I know you can, I know you will. I can tell you every single time I’ve had it out with the Lord, I do walk away from that moment with a sense of assurance and peace that He does care and He does see it.
And I don’t understand His timing, but I have to trust it.
LifeSongs is so happy to have Hope Darst with us this morning on the LifeSongs Morning Show. Hope, you mentioned earlier you have two teenage daughters. Will they both be in, in high school this year?
So I have an eighth grader and I have a sophomore, they start next week.
So my sophomore has her permit. Um, so that’s a whole new feeling of like a kid driving, which she’s a great driver. She took driver’s ed like two weeks ago. And the instructor was like, I don’t know why you’re in this class. You’re a really good driver. She’s like, you should thank your parents. And I said, not me.
I didn’t teach you how to drive. I’m a terrible driver. That’s all your dad. Are they excited for school? My oldest, I think says it well, she’s like, I’m ready for just to have like a rhythm and a schedule. She loves having consistency and schedule, but no, she’s not ready for school. She’s also my overachiever who took a summer course.
The firstborn is always that way. Yeah.
And she took an AP course for this year that had like a ton of summer work. So she was just, it’s like, okay, most of the kids around here are, are fine with just getting free air conditioning because it’s been a really hot summer in new Orleans. You know, my family’s from Louisiana.
Really? Where?
So my mom’s from New Orleans and then my dad lives in Baton Rouge. My family lived in Baton Rouge for several years. I went to LSU for the Tigers. Go Tigers. Um, my youngest brother graduated from there. My other brother graduated from Louisiana college and my dad still lives there.
And my youngest brother married a good old Denham Springs girl. So we are Louisiana through and through.
All right. Well, the next time you’re visiting family, you need to come by and hang out with us.
True, I do!
Hope, thank you so much for hanging out with us, for goofing off with me, but also for sharing your heart about worship, about being faithful in a time of the unknown, of the waiting.
That is so deeply personal, and you don’t have to give that to people, and yet you so willingly do with your entire being, and that means so much. Oh, thank you. You know, my, my daughter and I clearly have had lots of conversations in the last couple of years. And there was this one moment we were in the car and we’d left a doctor’s appointment and it was hard.
It was just a hard day. And I looked at her and her eyes were just kind of filling up with tears. And I just said something along the lines of like, I know today was really, really hard. You know, the only difference between us and someone else That doesn’t know God as we just have hope there are people that don’t know God that are walking through this exact same situation and much worse.
They don’t have hope. And I said, think about all the moments that we’ve set in doctor’s offices and we’ve not had good reports or we’ve walked through really hard things. And yet there was a sense of like, I, I do know I can find hope and peace. In the midst of this, because of God, it doesn’t mean that the situation changes, but like, I’m not sentenced to just being hopeless in this.
And I just, if nothing else, I want people to know that this is the difference is that with Jesus, we have hope. We have hope in this life. We have hope in the next life. I have hope that not only is God with me, but God can actually change this. God can heal you. God wants to heal you. I don’t know what it’ll look like.
I don’t know when, but he will. And I just, if nothing else, I just want people to hear that God, he is worth trusting. He’s worth putting your life in his hands. And he’s the reason we have hope.