When I think about the developing world, sometimes called the third world, I’m not sad. It doesn’t conjure up images of distended bellies and crowded city dumps, shoeless children or rusted orange slums. Instead, my mind goes to Kiran and Yanci and thousands of sponsors, and thriving selfless churches, benevolent pastors, miracles. And how all this has changed me.

In 2005 I saw Jesus in El Salvador. Once home He began patiently, slowly, began teaching me, freeing me, inspiring me in frightening and wonderful ways.

He changed my tune. And my reasons for writing them.

I was explaining all this to a friend a couple years ago and had one of those embarrassing artsy moments – one of those times when I started talking like a song writer instead of a normal person. I said my life since El Salvador had added dimension, like it went from a cassette of a guy with a guitar to being in the front row at the symphony. More complicatedly and beautifully big, clear, bombastic, LIVE!

He looked at me the way I imagine you’re looking at your computer screen. This is what happens when you ask songwriters how they’ve been. I’m warning you.

Anyway, I thought to myself back then that “Third World Symphony” would be a great album title someday. And so that’s what I’m naming my next recording – the one you’re helping me make remember?

Because these are songs that were put into me and squeezed out of me by a new kind of living: Learning to follow Jesus in the first world, aware and engaged with the third world for the benefit of both.

Good title? Make sense? What do you think?