Californian pop jazz singer HEATHER POWERS talked to Mike Rimmer about her music and ministry.

Heather Powers is an exceptional singer with a pop jazz singing style that is pure class. Her album 'Lay Them Down' on Thousand Mile Music hasn't propelled her into the US Big Time but it has brought forth a lot of plaudits from industry people (ie, "one of the most powerful new artists we've encountered," Rob Weiter, The Journey Radio, St Louis; "a fresh voice in the sea of female Christian singers," Tim Eutin, He's Alive Radio Network, Pittsburgh). So who is this attractive Californian whose music so powerfully reflects the trials, defeats and victories of the Christian life? I met up with Heather at Nashville's Gospel Music Week. As she relaxed into an overstuffed armchair I began by asking her where her enthusiasm for jazz came from.

"My dad was a jazz fiend. I actually studied opera and jazz in school so that was where I cut my teeth. Jazz is my first love." That explains the style of the album where the jazz influences mix pop melodies and Heather's gorgeous voice. But her songwriting is a very honest mixture of passion and pain echoing her life experiences.

"I had a wonderful upbringing," she remembers. "My dad was a pastor and I had a wonderful mom and dad who instilled the values of Christ in my life." Her idyllic childhood was wrecked when as a 13 year old she was sexually assaulted and later when she was 15 she was raped. She says evenly, "Those two things just had such a significant impact on my emotional development. But as a pastor's kid I felt I had to try and live this exterior life because everybody was looking at us and taking note of how we behaved, I learned very early to keep things looking neat and tidy. Consequently, a lot of the pain continued to get buried. I didn't have the opportunity just to be real about it. My parents were wonderful but just didn't know how to walk me through something like that. It was a shock to all of us."

Heather was married young and had children when she was very young also. "I made a lot of life decisions based on a lot of emotional immaturity. I wanted to play the roles and have things look like they were okay on the surface. I eventually broke. My life totally fell apart. I walked away from the Lord, I walked away from my marriage, and by God's grace, at a very, very bottom moment in my life I realised that the Lord was the only thing I had left. He really brought me to the bottom and to the end of me and it was the beginning of a journey back. A relationship that was based not on appearance or anybody in the church that had done me wrong but just on the tenderness and the love that Jesus had to offer me."

The journey to rock bottom took Heather through a breakdown where all the emotions that had been pushed down finally exploded out of her soul. She was treated in a psychiatric hospital and became addicted to anti-depressants. As if that wasn't bad enough, her marriage collapsed and she spent months indulging in a drug and drink binge to try and numb the pain. She remembers, "I went and partied and just walked as far away as I could from the Lord because I felt so much shame and guilt. It was about a year and a half journey of coming to the end of myself and realising that God never left. For the first time I really experienced and received what he did for me on the cross."

"Big Green Chair" on the album reflects the beginning of the turning around and Heather like a prodigal daughter walking towards God. Heather sighs and remembers, "It's probably the most powerful story-song on the record. I was literally in a big green chair when I wrote the song. At a very painful moment, I realised that I was mourning the death of my youth After the brutal things that had happened to me as I grew up, I realised that I probably stopped growing up inside."

'Lay Them Down' marks a place in Heather's life where she's ready to honestly tell her story. The struggles of her own life have had a knock-on effect to those around her. She reflects, "It's been a journey! When I started to go through what I was going through, it caused a real domino effect in my family. My mom went through a really terrible season of questioning what God was doing. So did my brothers and sisters. The fact that I walked so far away was very painful for our family because we're a very close family. But now it's amazing because the restoration has occurred not only in my life but elsewhere too. My former husband is also in my band! We still do music together and we have two children, though he's remarried and I'm remarried. But the healing that has happened in our family is healing that only Jesus could have done. There's not one relationship that I have in my life at this point that isn't because of God's grace. I feel that the biggest failures and pain that we have in our life are just an opportunity to be trophies of God's grace and mercy. There are so many people, not only outside the Church, but we have people sitting in our church who are so afraid to be honest because we shoot our wounded. I want people to know that there is freedom in coming to the light and there's freedom in being truthful and honest. The other side of that would be, we cannot shoot down people when they are honest! We've got to be a hospital church." And Heather Powers is definitely making music that helps the hurt find healing.