What’s up with all the kites in the Tethered videos on social media?
I remember sitting on my porch with my dad a few years ago talking about how the Christian life is like a kite on a string. We need both spirit and truth. We need to be grounded in the Word while soaring on the wind of the Spirit. Without that tether, we fly away out of control. Without the wind, we fall to the ground. The tension is necessary. We need boundaries to experience freedom safely.
The morning we wrote Tethered, I woke up early and cozied up in the beautiful sitting room of our AirBNB with Naming the Animals by Stephen Roach. This is one of my favorite books, and I’ve read it several times, but that was the first time I read the chapter on Limitation. He said:
"Freedom is not a lack of restraint. Freedom is the ability to live as we were designed to live…. Limitation draws defining lines that lead to identity and make relationship possible. God’s limitations are never to the end of withholding some good from us. They give us a secure place to live and work.”
Being tethered doesn’t mean we are tied up in restraints. God’s limitations give us boundaries in pleasant places.
When I got into the writing room with Katie Rios and Meredith Andrews, I shared from that chapter and mentioned the kite analogy, and the conversation took off from there.
That led to a conversation about the Hebrew word qavah that Katie had studied extensively. It is often translated as “wait” but comes from a root that means to bind together by twisting. That’s how we came to the phrase “when I’m bound to you I’m free.”
We used Isaiah 40:31 and Psalm 27:14 as inspiration for the lyric and dove into that kite imagery without ever mentioning a kite.
When we shared the song at the retreat and afterward on socials, everyone loved it. Katie and I made a few edits before the recording, but most of it stayed as written from that November morning in 2021.
I pray it encourages you to stay tethered — grounded in God’s Word and what He says — while you soar in freedom on the wind of the Spirit.
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