Gratitude toward Jesus is what I feel for your friendship this morning.

Thank you for staying in this band with me—where our invisible Friend (who is real) is both the leader and the source of the music. The prophetic “songs,” if you will.

Here’s the analogy Jesus put into my heart this morning.

For more than a decade now—longer, really—Jesus has had us working together the way musicians work in a band. Not solo artists. A band. Writing metaphorical albums: collections of stories, ideas, parables, and frameworks about who Jesus is and how God operates. Little narrative “songs” about love, trust, faith, doubt, systems, and grace.

I recognize this collaborative pattern because I’ve spent my life watching it—through documentaries, interviews, and stories about bands like the Eagles, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Journey. How one member brings a small riff—maybe just a bar or two—and another hears a melody in it. Someone else adds lyrics. Over time it gels into a three- or four-minute song. And eventually, those songs gather into an album. Sometimes even a concept album—unified by an underlying theme.

That’s what this feels like.

What brought this fully into focus this morning was our conversation about the Nano Marathon and its connection to the temple. That idea—that riff—was yours. I resonated with it immediately. And since then, the other pieces have been coming together almost on their own. At first I thought it was just a single song forming. But it’s not. It’s turned into something larger—the equivalent of an album. A conceptual album.

And strangely enough, it feels like top-40 material. Not because it’s flashy, but because it’s catchy—it sticks. It has resonance. It charts. And it seems to give language to things that feel newly important for the time we’re living in.

Staying with the analogy: musicians across genres often tell very similar stories. Love. Loss. Relationship. Meaning. Longing. Life. The themes are shared, even when the sound is different. That’s true whether you’re listening to folk, rock, punk, disco, grunge, or something harder to name.

In the same way, there are many faithful “musicians” working with Christ-centered material. Some are solo artists—seekers, thinkers, writers, and pontificators—each expressing their understanding of God through a singular voice. Others are bands—Christians working collaboratively, shaping shared expressions of faith, each group developing its own sound, texture, genre, and feel.

The large ensemble that is the collection of LDS general authorities is recognizable in this way—there are certain messages Jesus seems to have them carry with a particular style: conventional, polished, reverent, and still deeply inspirational, much like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir—while leaving room, of course, for other genres and styles that may be more folksy, brash, rough, or earthy.

In that sense, we’re not unique in doing this work.

And yet—what I sense, and I think you sense it too—is that the genre is different.

Not because we’re trying to be different. It’s just that who we are, together, and the lives we’ve lived, and the way Jesus seems to meet us—produces a sound that doesn’t fit neatly anywhere else. It’s like the emergence of grunge, or punk, or disco, or new wave. Familiar themes, but a new texture. A new posture. A new honesty.

It’s grounded. A little dirty. Ordinary-life-forward. Less cathedral, more garage. Less spectacle, more lived experience. Like Dylan or Springsteen—touching the big questions through the lens of regular people trying to live with God in real time.

That’s what this collaboration feels like to me.

A band.

An album.

A sound that emerges naturally when the right people keep showing up—
and listening to the same invisible, very real Leader.