Tony Cummings reports on the CCM star STEVEN CURTIS CHAPMAN's battle with tragedy

Steven Curtis Chapman with Maria Sue

For years journalists have begun articles about Steven Curtis Chapman by listing his extraordinary achievements in the US CCM marketplace - 56 Gospel Music Association Dove Awards, five Grammys and a stream of more than 20 albums whose hit songs have been a mainstay of Christian radio since the singer/songwriter first emerged in 1987. But in recent times a single event in Steven's family life has overshadowed everything else and brought mass media attention to the Tennessee-based songsmith. For on Wednesday 21st May 2008 five year old Maria Sue, one of Chapman's six children, was killed in the driveway of the family's Williamson County home, having been hit by an SUV driven by her teenage brother Will Franklin. The stark awfulness of the tragedy gripped America. National television crews were sent to the scene of the accident while in August Chapman gave an interview on the hugely popular Good Morning America where he and his wife Mary Beth courageously spoke about the accident.

Talking to GMA'S Robin Roberts, Mary Beth recounted, "The girls had been playing on the playground and she (Maria) was excited that he (Will Franklin) was coming home. He is so great with the girls. They just love him. And she was running to see him and ran into the path of the car." After being struck by the sport utility vehicle Maria Sue was rushed to a Nashville hospital, where she later died from her injuries. In the GMA interview, Steven Curtis was asked to recall the words he spoke to his 17-year-old son as he was getting into his car to go to the hospital. He replied, "I really don't remember this. It was actually Dave, Uncle Dave, who told me. He said, 'You rolled the window down and very loudly yelled, really with as much strength as you could muster, 'Will Franklin, your father loves you.' I just really had a deep concern in my heart that I wouldn't lose two children as a result of this because I knew what Will was struggling with."

Now Steven Curtis Chapman has recorded his first album since the tragedy, 'Beauty Will rise', about which Christianity Today's Mark Moring commented, "I don't think I've ever encountered a piece of art where hope and pain are so beautifully intertwined." Chapman announced the news of his new album on his video blog (chapmanchannel.typepad.com) from Maria's Big House Of Hope, the special needs healing home recently opened by Show HOPE, the adoption and orphan care ministry founded by Chapman and his wife Mary Beth. The facility is named in loving memory of their five year old daughter and is located in Luoyang, China. Maria's Big House Of Hope will care for orphans with medical impairments, such as cleft palate, clubbed feet, urological disorders, blindness and neurological disorders.

From the rooftop of Maria's Big House Of Hope, Steven shared details on his blog entry about how the songs for his album came about. "I am standing on top of the building that because of its name, represents something that we never would have scripted, asked for, or imagined. But, we are right in the middle of part of the beauty that God is bringing from the pain and ashes of our last year. I began this process a couple of months after May 21, not really knowing if I would ever feel like I could sing, stand on stage again, or express the emotions, the grief and the loss in music. But, in the days that followed, I felt that God was allowing me to write my own songs, and that's really what these are to me; a collection of my own songs, laments, ponderings, and God meeting me and my family in the grief and in the midst of our journey of the last year. It's been an amazing, wild process; very raw, real, honest."

In an interview with Christianity Today, Steven spoke further of the songwriting process which led up to 'Beauty Will Rise'. "I was hiding out in the valley of the shadow of death, just crying out to God. Man, I've never been so thankful for the Psalms. I'm not sure I really even got the Psalms until I walked through this. Obviously the Psalms were a great comfort before walking through the valley, but all of a sudden, I'm just so thankful for God's honesty to us, to allow us to look into the heart of a schizophrenic worshipper like David, because that's what I've found myself to be. To go in the same breath, 'How long, O Lord. Where are you, God? Are you doing anything about this? Do you even hear me?' to 'But I'll trust you. Your love is better than life. I worship you. I praise you.' How can you do that? But I have, and my family has. I almost get this image of David beating on his chest when he's saying, 'Why are you so downcast within me?' He's thinking, Heart, come on. Get with it. You know what's true. Hope in God. It's like that for me, where my heart and mind are going into this dark abyss. But then I say, Wait a minute. Come back. Come back to your senses. For me, that's where these songs came from."

Steven admits that there was nothing typical about writing the songs for the album. "I ignored every rule that I've ever had for myself for making records. I've always been a rule follower. Even when I was a kid, I tried to do everything by the book. Over the years writing songs, I've developed some rules-always thinking of the listener and always putting myself on their side of the speakers and going, Okay, my job is to try and put this thought in a way that they're going to be able to grab hold of and stick in their own pocket in their own life, in their own heart and experience. I've done it so long, these things just come automatically. But here, I ignored the rules. This wasn't me writing songs. This was me just screaming and crying out to God. Nobody heard these songs, not even my wife till most of them were recorded. No record guys. No managers. I am prone to reshape and refashion things to try and please as many people as I can, to get as many nods or smiles out of as many people as possible. But this was such a completely different thing. It was important that it was coming straight out of my gut and out of my heart. That was a strange, scary process, but it was important that whatever it is-good, bad, ugly-it's true and it's real."

Steven explained how he'd decided on the title 'Beauty Will Rise'. "We were in China last May when the earthquake hit [the 2008 Sichuan quake that killed 70,000], though we were sitting in the Shanghai airport when it happened, so we didn't feel it. But when we came home, we heard about all the devastation. And then two weeks later, our earthquake hit [when Maria was killed]. And that was a real connection for me, in a way, to pray. In a lot of ways it was one of the ways we survived. When I turned everything inward, with the pain, questions and devastation in our own family, I felt like I was going to cave in. But when I could pray for other people, when I could say, 'God, these people are feeling the same thing. Please give them the comfort that we are finding in your promises and the fact that we're going to see our little girl again. We know that hope. These people don't; they're in a more desperate place than we are, because they don't know. Let us share that with them.' As I thought of that, I had this desire to go back to China-which we did this summer-to the earthquake zone and sing over these people the hope that has sustained us. I was connecting our day of loss and destruction to theirs and saying, 'You know, today the world went wrong. But out of this, if I really believe God's Word and God's promises, God will bring beauty out of these ashes. And this is our hope. This is our comfort.' And as I wrote that song [the title track], it just captured the heart of what I would say in this album. That this is the promise. Beauty will rise out of this. I'm not going to pretend to know what that's going to look like. There's going to be a lot of it that we won't even see until heaven. But this is what I know to be true."

The song "Faithful" includes the line "I am choosing to believe." Christianity today asked Steven whether he and Mary Beth had ever shaken their fists at God or considered turning their backs on him? The singer responded, "I could talk about it for two years and not even scratch the surface [in answering that question]. But I'll refer again to the Psalms, specifically those where David is crying out, God, how long before you take away this pain, before you right these wrongs? And then almost in mid-despair, you get this sense of David literally making the choice, again, in saying to his own soul, Why are you so downcast within me? Remember this. Hope in God. Trust in God. This is your anchor. I've used that analogy, too, so many times-having this hope as an anchor. We've come to realise dropping that anchor has been, and will continue to be, a daily, sometimes an hourly, process. It's not a one time thing: I've dropped that anchor. It's, man, wait a minute, I'm getting blown away here by the hurricane of grief and questions and doubt. What am I going to do? Am I just going to drift out to sea? Or am I going to drop the anchor again?

"We have absolutely questioned God and had our doubts and said, 'Is this whole thing true? Is this real?' I sat on our tour bus last summer and called Scotty Smith, my pastor, after spending a very difficult night of wrestling with God. We were getting ready to go do an interview with People magazine or Larry King or somebody, and I was just in tears, calling my pastor and saying, 'Is it really true? Is it really true? Can God be trusted? I'm getting ready to drive this stake in the ground again with people and say it, but I really I'm not feeling it.' I needed hear my pastor speak truth again to me. I needed to hear somebody say again, 'Here's what's true.'"

Steven says that in his and Mary Beth's dark night of the soul Christian books were a lifeline. He said, "We received a lot of books from well-meaning folks, but grief is so unique. Our pain is as unique as our DNA, very specific the way you're going to work through this. But there were a handful of things that really grabbed my heart in a dark place and bring me back. Jerry Sittser's book, A Grace Disguised, was very helpful. He went through an incredible loss of his own-his wife, daughter, and mother, all killed in an accident. He's professor of theology at Whitworth College, so he's got a deep theological understanding of death and hope and grief. But all that went out the window for him, and this is his real journey. I think it helped us because it was so painfully honest but also so incredibly hopeful. Others that helped were A Grief Observed by C S Lewis, and Brennan Manning's Ruthless Trust."

A tangible way in which the Chapman's are seeing beauty rise is the establishment of Maria's Big House Of Hope. Steven explained, "Maria's Big House Of Hope and Show Hope represent so much pain and hope mixed together. When we walked through the doors of that place to do the grand opening, we stood there and just wept for the longest time, because there's some part of me going, I never wanted a Maria's Big House Of Hope to exist. I want Maria here, and I want her at home in my home. So much of what makes it so profoundly special and important is the fact that it cost so much for it to have this impact. Even the impact it's having in China has been big. All these Chinese government officials came, and they know why it's named Maria's Big House. They know we've lost a daughter, and they know she's Chinese. The next morning I'm walking down the streets of Luoyang, and they have these newspaper stands where you can read the daily paper. And every one of them, front and centre, has the story of Maria's Big House Of Hope and me standing there singing. They've got the whole story of why it is there, what it's doing, and even the lyrics to the song 'Yours' that I sang at the opening-including the verse about how we've walked the valley of death's shadow, the verse I wrote after Maria went to Heaven. Maria's Big House has been an incredible gift from God for us, a place that we've been able to pour our hearts into-a tangible thing that we get to see and touch and feel and taste what God is doing out of this."