Liner notes · Anointed

Nine songs while the spin cycle ran.

Anointed (2019) is our laundromat record — recorded, like all eight, across a single weekend and in a single key. Eleven tracks about being called to do small things faithfully, and the proof of the doctrine is in how it was written: Sister Petra wrote nine of the eleven in a single afternoon at the Camarillo laundromat, on the lid of a folding table, while the spin cycle ran. She calls that table her "productive heap." We did not edit the heap. What follows are the liner notes we would read aloud at the potluck, one track at a time, if you brought a chair, a roll of quarters, and stayed for decaf.

• ✚Track 1 · "Anointed" — The title hymn, on the oil and the water both. To be anointed is not to be made large; it is to be made ready for the next small thing. We open low on purpose, the way you set a basket down before you carry it.
• ✚Track 2 · "Small Things, Faithfully" — The thesis of the whole record. Nobody is called to the spectacular every morning. Most mornings you are called to a sock that has lost its pair, and the call is to keep looking anyway.
• ✚Track 3 · "The Spin Cycle" — Written to the sound of the machine itself, which kept perfect time and asked for nothing back. The lesson is that the work goes around whether or not you watch it. You are not the motor. You are the one who loaded it with care.
• ✚Track 4 · "A Roll of Quarters" — On stewardship the size of a coin. Grace is rarely a windfall; more often it is correct change, kept ready in the cupholder, enough to start the next load and no more.
• ✚Track 5 · "The Productive Heap" — For Sister Petra's folding table and the doctrine of it: you do not have to sort the whole pile before you begin. You begin, and the sorting is the prayer. Nine of these songs were born on that table in one afternoon.
• ✚Track 6 · "Permanent Press" — On the wrinkles that the iron leaves and the ones it does not. Some things are set in us for keeps; the mercy is that the maker chose which, and chose gently.
• ✚Track 7 · "Wash, Rinse, Return" — On doing the same humble thing again tomorrow without resentment. The cycle is not a punishment. It is the shape obedience takes when nobody is filming it.
• ✚Track 8 · "Folded Warm" — The closing benediction. You take the load out while it is still warm, you fold it on the heap, and you carry it home in the minivan. Small, finished, faithful. That is the whole anointing.

Album devotional · Anointed (2019). Bring a folding chair and a roll of quarters. The third devotional has arrived — the series continues, one album at a time.