Rebecca St. James: Praise and Purity
CBN.com LISA RYAN (reporting): Rebecca St. James just celebrated her tenth anniversary in music and ministry. She has had 17 No.1 singles, most of which she wrote herself, has won a Grammy, and has taken home numerous Dove awards. Rebeccas current single, "I Thank You," pays tribute to the military forces involved in the recent Iraqi Freedom campaign.
LISA: How old were you when you first began to sense there was a calling on your life for ministry and that it would express itself through music?
REBECCA ST. JAMES: Probably when I was 12. I was going to a Christian school in Brisbane, Australia, at the time. They had a time of commitment during an assembly at my school, and they asked students to come forward and give their talents and gifts to God. I had already given my life to Him a few years before that but never really said, 'OK, God, heres my gifts, heres my talents, just use me.' But I did that day, and it was soon after that exact same year that God started to lead me in music.
LISA (reporting): When Rebecca is on tour, she takes most of her family with her.
REBECCA: We really are close. We worked out a lot of the bugs. Every now and then there will be a squabble between a few of the younger ones, but most of the time we get along great. Were friends. I mean, we really are good friends.
LISA: When you were in your early teens, your family moved to America but quickly fell on some very hard times. What experiences did you go through and how did that impact your life as young women?
REBECCA: Well, we moved from Australia when I was 14, and then two months after we moved, my dads job fell through. We had six kids in the family at that time, and mom was six or seven months pregnant with my sister and no income, no furniture. We slept on the floor on beds made out of clothes. We didnt know where the next meal was going to come from sometimes. Wed just sit on the floor as a family and pray for what we needed for that day, and we would totally see miracles happen. People would just show up at our house with groceries, put cereal boxes on our doorstep, and just amazing stuff. I think as a young person seeing Gods hand like that was probably one of the biggest ways that God prepared me for ministry because I can say to people, 'God is real. Prayer is so massively powerful. Gods just huge.'
LISA: So youve come to know that God will reach into your life regardless of your circumstances and pull you through.
REBECCA: I think the other thing I learned is that you can be happy with very little. You dont have to have lots of money or fancy houses or lots of things to make you happy. I really encourage people not to be scared of the financial hard times or real struggles in your life because God can bring so much good out of it and so much unity within the family if you pull together through it. I mean, we really had to make the choice: Are we going to let this draw us apart and are we going to be mad at God for all of this trouble happening, or are we going to turn to Him and draw closer in community? Thats what we did and its just been beautiful.
LISA: Tell me about the song and book Wait For Me.
REBECCA: The song is a very personal song that a lot of people have adopted as their own, but its a love song that I wrote to my husband out there saying, 'Im waiting for you. Im praying for you to wait for me, too.' It really received such a response we decided we needed a book on which you could go deeper than a three minute song, so the book really kind of explores how to stand for God when so much of the culture is telling you not to. The subtitle of my book Wait for Me is Rediscovering the Joy of Purity in Romance. The joy is something to celebrate and not something to begrudgingly do, but just to wait as a joyful thing.
