Title: Shame? Not when you find Rest in the Lord.

Before he was our son-in-law, Brad Rankin was our guitarist. He traveled with us for a little over 3 years (from 2011 to 2014) before our eldest daughter, Allison, “stole our guitarist” and married him.

In the last year of touring with us Brad really began to focus, daily, on songwriting as an outpouring of his daily devotional times with our daughter Allison.

He kept playing & singing this really catchy melody, which with a little tweaking, would become the chorus to Rest in Me.

I loved the melody and kept trying to sit and develop the song with him but at the time we really didn’t understand each other’s songwriting methods and instead of seeing that each of us was pondering the song in our unique ways, we both mistook each others reactions for disinterest.

Over the years, life happened and Brad literally forgot about the chorus. I would mention it from time to time but it never went anywhere. Until I was approached by Homegrown Worship to release four songs with them.

In June 2019 I went to Brad again asking about the chorus. When I said he forgot it, I literally meant that he forgot the whole thing. Never wrote it down. Never made a sound recording of it. It seemed it was lost forever.

Two weeks later we were meeting to write a middle eight, or bridge, section for the song Whisper. Out of the blue Brad says, “Oh! Did you mean this worship chorus?” and immediately started singing what would become the chorus of Rest in Me.

Fast forward several months. Kaci and I are in Sheffield, England at the studio recording songs for Homegrown Worship. We are contracted to do four songs but there we are the evening before our last day in the studio with only three songs...and the chorus for Rest in Me.

Kaci and I found ourselves in the studio, after hours, with singer\songwriter Loulita Gill. Loulita was in the studio with us to record background vocals on all the songs she co-wrote with us.

When our producer, Aron Bicskey, arrived the next morning he was ecstatic with what he was greeted with.

The interesting thing is, of all the songs we recorded in this session. Kaci, Loulita, Aron, and myself will all tell you the same thing. Rest in Me, the song written in the “11th hour”, is all of our favorite from that Homegrown recording sessions.

- Jeremy Neely