Sara Groves

Since her debut, Conversations, released in 2001, Sara Groves has become one of the most critically-acclaimed artists in the Christian music industry. Candidly truthful and compassionately hopeful, Sara's music takes listeners on an intimate and honest lyrical journey.

Groves is a great artist, but she has many other life roles as well: She's a wife, a mother, a songwriter, a storyteller. She's a preacher whose pulpit is a piano bench. And it's work she doesn't take lightly-a job she didn't initially choose but knows now she's been called to.

"I feel like one of my strengths is to give people tools," says Groves. Music can be a tool to come to grips with your relationship with God and your relationships with others. Not everyone is really good with words or emotions and I feel like that's what I do: put words to people's emotions so that they can work through them and go on to the next place with God.

"I want [my music] to reflect my whole life. I want to be a mother and a wife and a friend and a foe, and I want to be a child of God in the middle of all of these relationships, to give voice to the whole human experience and not just a corner of it."

Groves' work is inspiring incredible testimonies, many passed on through e-mail. "I feel like I'm part of something much bigger than myself," she says of her current work. And so she is. "It's God's math," says Groves. "The Lord multiplies everything so people I've never met before in places I've never traveled to are being affected.... Not that if I quit the ministry, the world would fall apart. But I do know if I don't play my part, people miss out. If anyone doesn't play his or her part in the Kingdom, we all miss out."

Sara's newest album, Add to the Beauty, releases October 4 and is dedicated to her Granddad and Grammie who "lived as such brilliant examples of what it means to add to the beauty." Groves comments on the theme of the project, stating, " The kingdom of God doesn't just come in the rally or worship event. It comes when we speak respectfully to our spouses, and refrain from letting our anger spill over onto our kids or friends, when we have an opportunity to gossip and refrain, when we open up our homes, when we mess up royally, and have the stuff to go apologize, when we refuse to blame everyone else for our own problems. In the everydayness of the kingdom, we are invited to be brilliantly beautiful, all of us moons with no light of our own, invited to shine."

Sara Groves will be touring with Jars of Clay this fall. For more about Sara, visit www.saragroves.com.

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