A Brand Is a Promise

It was heavy in my hands, that first hymnal. Growing up in rural Iowa, many pew resources were disposable, their tattered edges clinging for dear life to their temporary spine, waiting for their periodic replacement. But that first GIA hymnal I received––Gather Comprehensive, Second Edition––felt anchored, confident, meant to last. Its thick, maroon-colored cover was built to endure the wrath of restless toddlers and hasty page turns. Its opaque paper held a canon of treasured tunes both ancient and new, but perhaps the most beautiful content of these pages was yet to be created. These impressions would be captured over years and years by those who held this book in their hands—their tears of joy and sadness that made permanent splotches and puckers between the staves of music, the smudge of ashes that fell from their Lenten foreheads, the dog-eared pages of someone’s favorite melody, the remnants of oils from hands that traced the embossed cover, the smell of incense that seeps deep down into the binding. I was fourteen then and, of course, I couldn’t know that my life’s work would bring me under the very roof that created these beautiful books. Since I began working at GIA Publications in 2016, I’ve gotten to know just how much work goes into creating a resource of such significance—committees who discern the contents over months and years of dialogue, engravers who are the stewards of clarity and style, licensing and permissions editors who are the custodians of the copyrighted materials, proofers who demand accuracy and consistency, outside censors and readers who confirm the theological and liturgical reliability of texts and rubrics. The printing process itself contains a whole new vernacular previously unknown to me, one of “signatures,” “blue lines,” “headbands,” and “case binding.” But none of that fancy language, not one individual nor the sum of each step in the long publishing process said as much to me about what the book was about or what it was for or what it could mean than the book itself. Not the songs or the editors, not the text or the music, not the proofers or permissions. Just the book. The weight of the book. The weight of the symbol I held in my own two hands. It said “Here. This is important. Now it’s yours.” The weight of that symbol has followed me all throughout my life—through college and my teaching career, through each church job no matter how partor full-time. It follows me here to GIA because I know how important it feels to hold a symbol in your hands, to be entrusted with it. I know the impact it has on the rest of your life’s work. And I know the power it has to communicate who and whose we are––that we are beloved and valued in the Creator’s eyes. I have a palpable sense of the responsibility and privilege of being made in God’s image and likeness, of remembering the feeling of first knowing that I could belong to something, to someone—all of that from just a book.