The Isaacs family is known for their award-winning country and bluegrass gospel. They routinely open for another famous music family, The Gaithers. They’ve released dozens of albums and have fans around the world. But their latest album, Nature’s Symphony 432, is not a celebration of that success. Instead, it grew out of challenging times.
“The last couple years we have been on a journey from pain to praying,” Sonya Isaacs tells Guideposts.org.
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The album, released in early September, blends the family’s signature musical style with the sounds of nature, hence its name. It turned out to be a record of healing. While they were writing and recording the album, Isaacs’ grandmother, the family’s matriarch, passed away. She was the clan’s foundation –the glue that kept them together. During that same time, Isaacs’ brother was dealing with a family member wrestling with alcohol addiction and her sister was fighting her own battle with Crohn’s disease.
As difficult as these challenges were, Isaacs’ biggest loss came just two weeks after her beloved grandmother died, when, at six months pregnant, she gave birth to a stillborn child.
“It was devastating,” Isaacs says.
The family named the baby Ayva which means “little bird.” Isaacs’ grandmother’s name was Faye which in Yiddish translates to “little bird” as well. The two losses felt so connected, the idea of nature so prominent in her own life at the time that she had to write about it.
One song,“Keep Breathing,” was written just a couple of weeks after the stillbirth. Isaacs got together with a group of friends to put her grief down on paper and match it with a melody.
“I just found there was a lot of healing in sharing my testimony that way,” Isaacs says of the song. “God gives you the strength and then breath by breath you eventually get stronger and stronger. [The pain], it never goes away but it gets less and less. And then you live again.”
Another single from the album, “I Love You More,” was written five months after the loss of her child, at a time when she was moving toward acceptance.
“It’s my anthem now,” Isaacs says of the song which speaks to God’s faithfulness in the worst of times. She sings that song on stage night after night and it reaffirms her own decision to trust the Lord’s plan for her life, no matter how painful some of its bends and curves might be.
“You make a subconscious choice. You’re either gonna trust God; you’re gonna trust that he loves you, that He has your best interest at heart or you’re gonna do what a lot of people do and get angry,” the singer says.
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It was a choice she had to face when she first lost her little girl. Isaacs had a three year old son with husband Jimmy Yeary when the couple found out they were pregnant. She had been sharing the family’s journey towards having another baby online.
“Everything was on Facebook,” Isaacs says. “Everything was public on my testimonial page — how good God is and how we were so excited.”
When the hemorrhaging began and she delivered a stillborn baby, she asked herself an important question.
“It’s like ‘Okay now what? Am I gonna still say God is good? Am I still gonna get up on stage and talk about His faithfulness?’”
The answer: “Absolutely.”
The singer has found healing, not only in recording her music but in sharing her story with other women experiencing the same kind of pain.
“For some reason, a lot of women feel shame when they lose a baby,” Isaacs says. “They feel guilty, like they’ve done something wrong. I don’t know why it’s so hard for women and men to talk about losing their children. Maybe it’s just such a deep [loss] that they can’t even go there, but I found healing in sharing my testimony.”
And by holding onto her faith, Isaacs has discovered new purpose in her music.
“By praising Him through the pain, we have found some purpose in it,” Isaacs says. “This album really is a healing album for me, from our souls and from our heart.”
