Behind the Music
Angelica Hale: Turning Courage Into Song
9 year-old Angelica Hale's "Rise Up" was her first audition for the 2017 season of the TV Show "America's Got Talent" and the first time singing before a live audience.
Angelica’s miracle goes beyond her amazing voice because she was born with a condition that meant she likely would not live beyond five years old. Angelica spent her earliest years undergoing organ transplants to save her life. During long hospital stays, Angelica would cheer herself up watching videos of "America's Got Talent,” and became known at the hospital for her tendency to belt out Whitney Houston songs at all hours of the day and night, her epic voice stunning everyone as impossibly emitting from her tiny body.
When Angelica was 6 years-old, she contracted double pneumonia and her kidneys began to fail. The doctors informed her parents that a child kidney donor couldn't be found in time to save Angelica's life and a priest was called in to console the family. Angelica's mother begged the doctors to take her own kidney for the transplant. The doctors expected Angelica's body would reject the adult kidney, but as a last resort they performed the transplant using her mother's kidney, and transplated it into Angelica's body. As you can see in the video, both Angelica and her mother survived the surgeries, and Angelica has experienced a full recovery from the condition she suffered from during the first years of her life.
I made the same face the first
time I heard her sing. Whaaaa?"
Upon hearing Angelica's story, it explained the raw display of courage given in her delivery of the song "Rise Up," as well as the look in her parents’ eyes as they watched her sing. I also included her 3rd audition where she sang "Girl on Fire" and received the rare "golden buzzer," meaning the judges believed she was so outstanding that she automatically advanced to the final twelve contestants, skipping all the elimination rounds in between.
Angelica then competed against adult contestants for 12 weeks of live performances and elimination rounds, made it to the finale.... and won, taking home the $1,000,000 prize and a recording contract for her first album. Angelica is the youngest winner of “America’s Got Talent” in the show's 12-year history. This girl really is... "On Fire."
Jotta A.: The Unyielding Power of Grace
Thirteen years before Angelica Hale sang on America's Got Talent, a 9-year old Brazilian boy named Jotta A. was encouraged by his choir director to audition for a Brazilian TV show featuring child talent in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The video I included of his performance of "Agnes Dei (Worth is the Lamb)" was his first performance on the show and the first time his voice was heard outside the walls of the church his father pastored in one of the poorest areas of Brazil, Guajará-Mirim.
The show followed a format similar to "America's Got Talent," eliminating contestants after live performances week after week, to reach an eventual winner. Jotta won the contest singing only worship songs every round, which had never been done on the show before or since. The video above was his first appearance on the show and the audio recording next to it of "Amazing Grace" was his finale performance, leading to his win on the show,
Like Angelica's first song - there is a purity inherent to Jotta's first-time performance, and what stood out in particular was at the end of the song - starting at the 2:45 minute mark, the song seemed to transform from a "performance" into something deeper. The expression on Jotta's face also indicated to me that, like Angelica, he had faced challenges at a young age, but had found a way to work through his personal struggles by sharing his gift of worship with others.
After the show aired on TV, Jotta was offered numerous record contracts with mainstream labels to record and publish a secular album. But he turned them down, remaining focused on only singing and recording worship music, his dream since he was a toddler and where he found the most joy, peace and satisfaction. In the decade that followed, Jotta recorded many gospel records, including his Latin Grammy awarded, Geração de Jesus, and became one of the most widely known Christian solo artist in South America.
But we live in a broken world, which often means that things do not work out quite like they should. When fame came upon Jotta suddenly at a young age, he began to struggle with pride. Every girl suddenly wanted to be his girlfriend, including one which ended up becoming a blessing (for someone else) years later in a ironic twist of fate (see box below**) Having grown up in poverty, materialism was also struggle. But when the wealth that allured him as a child became a reality, it left him feeling hollow and desperate to find a way to fill the emptiness he felt inside.
Despite maintaining a sincere faith, Jotta's struggles eventually led him down the broken road of addiction. He suffered silently in shame and guilt, fearing being shunned by his family, Church and community if it was revealed. He'd seen happen to many others before. He saw no path to freedom without losing what mattered most in his life: His family, church, community and the ability to continue using his gifts to serve within each.
But there was freedom for Jotta-- which was how I met him and learned about his story. We both entered a special group the same time, a group for people who love God and their families very much, yet share a common struggle which left us broken. Nicknamed "Broken Free," our group found a surprising gift in this brokenness. It was key that unlocked the chains we shared for so long. Just as Narnia goes "deeper in and deeper still," our brokenness was not the END of the story, but only the BEGINNING. Among our group was immense promise, hope and healing which we found more important than the old news. There is no need to keep reading and repeating yesterday's news, because new life is happening each and every day.
As Jotta foreshadowed 13 years ago in his finale song in the audio above, indeed our chains are gone, our hearts are free. And although healing takes time (Humpty Dumpty wasn't put back together overnight, nor are we), there is no doubt that we are well on our way.
Jotta's life is a more simple now. He's 23 years old and recently married his first love who he's known since childhood. They live with their daughter in Guajará-Mirim and attend the church where he began singing, although his father has since retired as pastor. Finding money to be a burden, he donates most of it to open up new worship centers in Brazil. I was invited to attend a dedication ceremony honoring his father for the latest worship center Jotta opened in Brazil, where he will announce the center is going to be named after his father to honor the legacy of faith he instilled in Jotta from birth.
Jotta and his girlfriend (now wife), ages 14, 17 and 20 (on their wedding day).
Grace Restored
The audio recording to the right is a song he recorded this year at home and posted on Instagram. You may have guessed who he is, but if not, you'll quickly find out in the videos above. Some are very recent, but a few are very old- going back as far as thirteen years ago.
An Ironic Twist of Fate
** When Jotta's was twelve years old, he had a girlfriend named Selena. At the same time, a boy living in Canada was posting songs on YouTube, hoping to be discovered for a singing career. The Canadian boy become very famous, moved to America and one day met Selena that Jotta knew as a child. They became close and considered getting married, but the Canadian boy was now a man, struggling with the same problems Jotta had recently overcome. Selena thought Jotta could help and introduced them to each other in Brazil in 2016. Shortly thereafter, the Canadian reached out to his old pastor for counseling and publicly reclaimed the faith in God he'd had as a child: the God he sang about a decade earlier on the streets of Ontario, Canada and on YouTube. Many people doubted him and said mean things because of what he had done in his past, but thankfully he knew that what others say or think about us is not what's most important.
Epitome of Musical Power: The Universal Langauge of Song
This brother and sister from rural Changbai, China spoke no English when they sang “You Raise Me Up" on this Chinese TV talent show. Their father was a professor of musical composition, but neither child showed much interest in music until they heard this song playing on their car radio one day. They loved it so much that they began practicing singing it together, sounding out the English words until their tones and inflections matched and could be heard and understood as English.
The duo performed the song when they were 8 and 5 years old, singing with inflection, tones and pitches not used within their native Mandarin language, blowing away the audience with voices of an angelic quality that seems unreal at times.
I included the song because of the passion the kids displayed, marveling at their ability to convey the song's depth and meaning despite not knowing the literal translation of the English words. Almost like a prayer from the heart when you cannot find the right words to express your feelings, yet still know that God understands. To me, this exemplifies the powerful quality that music has to inspire us far beyond what the spoken word can achieve.
Once the video made it's way to the internet, they were invited to the United States to perform and eventually caught the eye of Josh Groban, the musician that wrote and recorded the song 20 years ago. He reportedly said that he believed their rendition to be superior to his own.
Well done, xiōng dì jiě mèi 兄弟姐妹!
A Mother's Prayer
A Mother's Prayer: Hannah's Song
This song was written and recorded by a mother as she prayed one night over her sleeping daughter, moved by what an amazing gift from God she was. While pregnant, this mother learned her baby would be born with a serious disease called neurofibromatosis, and that her baby would also be born legally blind and deaf. The doctors advised this mother not to continue the pregnancy due to her baby's "conditions," but she ignored their advice and gave birth to her daughter, “Hannah.”
As she watched her daughter sleep that night, she saw anew what would have been a tragic loss of epic proportions had she done followed the conventional wisdom of her doctors.
In the album notes to this song, she wrote it was meant to inspire anyone who otherwise might be tempted discard another person due to their perceived "flaws," however big or small, to instead pray for and nurture their broken and fragile beings back to wholeness with a love that can only come from the "Great Healer," who has healed each one of us of so much already.
This challenge is just as meaningful for children as it is to their parents. I pray daily that you will grow up loving others with gentle grace, maintaining a strong conviction that anyone God places in your life deserves to be treated with dignity and respect, because in the eyes of God, each and every one us matters much more than we can comprehend. We matter so much that he gave his only Son for us, not because we were flawless, but precisely because we were flawed.
