Mark Schultz Quotes

That makes me feel good. Thank you. The first single is number one for seven weeks and is up for song of the year. I'm not going to complain about it.

I picked about five or six from each record so almost half of each record has the stories behind the songs. What I'm also looking forward to is that there is a running narrative with it. From the day that I packed everything in the back of my car and left Kansas State University after I graduated and drove to Nashville to make it in the music business ... all of the crazy stories about what happened to me my first five or six years in Nashville. The first place I lived, the first neighbors ... it tells a lot of the background that went into writing these songs as well.

I think that's exactly right. There's a guy that I talked to who said that what set Jesus apart, asides from being God, was that He was a man who was intimately acquainted with sorrow. He knew sorrow so well because He was taking on the sorrow of the world and there was a depth about Him. So when you had a conversation with Him, you felt like you were having a huge encounter with someone who was completely and totally in tune with how you were instead of someone who was just trying to skim over the top and have everybody think that He was a great guy. That's powerful.

I never thought of it like that. I was a youth director for almost ten years. I learned from those kids. I never wanted the kids in the youth group, as they got older, to look at something that I've done and say "Man, that doens't look like the Mark Schultz that we knew". I think that if you're doing things for other people's reasons, that's not good. I think that you should know in your heart "This is who I am and this is who I want to be." For me, that is what I learned from those kids.

The deal for me is that I know that when I do the songs that I write, God's smiling on that. When you think about the body of Christ, there's some people who are the hands, some who are the knees and some who are the feet. Everybody has a different job. My job, and where I feel God the most, is not in writing hymnal music. It's writing the stories that I've seen and the kids in the youth group and their families and the experiences they've gone through.

One of the things that I'm excited about it the relationships that I have here. It's hard to keep relationships going on the road. They've been really rich for me these last few months. To really be present in real conversations is a blast. Pretty soon I'm heading out to go to my Tai Kwon Do class. I just started, not to get a black belt or anything, just so I can touch my toes and be more flexible. (laughs) I take a class with a bunch of home-schooled kids so it's me and about 25 kids under the age of ten. It's a blast.