“Reveal Your Love” by Esterlyn, Saturday, March 12, 2022
Creation Festival is the largest Christian music live event in the United States. Starting in 1979 in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the festival’s franchise expanded to include a version for the East Coast and the West Coast, as well as the Sonshine and Icthus Festivals. Creation Festival has featured the biggest names in CCM and Christian Rock. In 2008, the Creation Fest franchise took to the road in a tour headlined by Kutless, Thousand Foot Krutch, and Pillar. Several up-and-coming bands opened or were part of the pre-show. A new band from Boise, Idaho, Esterlyn, were party of that show. Their debut album Lamps represented on stage with several vintage lamps situated around the band’s amps and gear. The band played with a young energy you’d expect from a group of band dudes-turned worship leaders-turned national touring musicians on their first tour.
RESTORING ME, GUIDING ME, CLEANSING ME. I didn’t go to many concerts when I was at Missionary College, partly because Chattanooga didn’t get many national tours and partly because my schedule was quite full as a double major and working 16+ hours a week. I did somehow end up at the Creation Fest tour with my friend, one of the few Christian music enthusiasts in my friend group. Before attending the show, concert goers who bought their tickets online got an MP3 sampler of the bands on the bill. A song by Capital Lights, Worth Dying For, and Esterlyn’s “Reveal Your Love” was part of the mix I didn’t know. The show was ok. It was meaningful to me at the time because I got to see several groups that I either missed or that were now too holy for Cornerstone. It was a small club downtown, loaded with local youth groups. I don’t remember seeing anyone drinking or if they even opened the bar. Kutless was doing their rock thing again, TFK didn’t suck yet, and some of the opening acts were surprisingly good, including Esterlyn and Capital Lights. However, surprisingly Pillar was awful. They had just lost their longtime bass player and the new guy didn’t know the songs. And don’t even get me started on KJ-52.
RESTORING ME, GUIDING ME, CLEANSING ME. I didn’t go to many concerts when I was at Missionary College, partly because Chattanooga didn’t get many national tours and partly because my schedule was quite full as a double major and working 16+ hours a week. I did somehow end up at the Creation Fest tour with my friend, one of the few Christian music enthusiasts in my friend group. Before attending the show, concert goers who bought their tickets online got an MP3 sampler of the bands on the bill. A song by Capital Lights, Worth Dying For, and Esterlyn’s “Reveal Your Love” was part of the mix I didn’t know. The show was ok. It was meaningful to me at the time because I got to see several groups that I either missed or that were now too holy for Cornerstone. It was a small club downtown, loaded with local youth groups. I don’t remember seeing anyone drinking or if they even opened the bar. Kutless was doing their rock thing again, TFK didn’t suck yet, and some of the opening acts were surprisingly good, including Esterlyn and Capital Lights. However, surprisingly Pillar was awful. They had just lost their longtime bass player and the new guy didn’t know the songs. And don’t even get me started on KJ-52.
I WANT TO GIVE YOU ALL OF THE PAIN I’VE KEPT INSIDE OF ME. I liked “Reveal Your Love” because of the song’s ambiguity. Is it Jesus or a girlfriend? I’ve written about this trope in Christian music and how I was baffled by it. I wondered who could be so perverted to think that young men in their sexual peaks would think about having sex with the maker of the universe? No, it wasn't that at all. Esterlyn was a band about missions, about adopting children from non-Christian nations and placing them in Christian homes. The infectious guitar hook was probably written for corporate worship and the song would be sung in church by guys with long hair, tight jeans, and fog machines, but to me it wasn't about worship. Whenever I slid into the back pew of the "rock 'n' roll services" around Collegetown on Sabbath morning it was too anti-social of an event for me--everyone with their own friends and their own group, everyone with their stale donuts. I didn't want to talk to anyone and yet I wanted to be a part of something. "Reveal Your Love"playing in the parking lot as I left the crowded service early, all along my invisible passenger, lover of my soul riding beside me, guiding me.
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