Genre: Pop/Rock, Worship
For fans of: Linda Perry, Alanis Morissette, Sheryl Crow, Margaret Becker, Kim Hill
Label: Gotee Records

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The opening chorus of the first song on Sarah Kelly's 2008 release, third album Born to Worship, really does say it all: "It's a brand new day/And I'm free to live and I'm free to love/In a whole new way." After more than a decade of wrestling with self-hate and succumbing again and again to abusive relationships, Sarah Kelly is now a free woman, a woman who knows who she is, who she belongs to and what her life and music are supposed to be about. Her new day is just beginning.

"In a nutshell," Sarah explains, "I am a person who has dealt with an addiction, and my addiction was self-hate. I didn't ask to deal with it. It just found me, and I gave in to it. I fell into a pattern of sin, thinking poorly about myself to an unhealthy degree. I wasn't seeing myself how God sees me."

Instead, Sarah saw only negatives in her self-assessments as a teenager and young adult, and her self-hatred led her to three different relationships—all with church leaders—in which she was physically and emotionally abused. She acknowledges that, in some sense, she stayed with these men, seeking their approval because, "I thought if they liked me, as leaders in the church, then God must like me."

Her last and most serious relationship, however, literally brought her to the brink of life and death, but it also forced her to break the abuse cycle, end her self-imposed isolation and step forward into her true calling as a lead worshipper. "Eventually you come to a place where you're either going to commit suicide or you're going to get out of it. Like other addictions, you have to hit bottom. You have to decide, 'I'm going to do what I need to do to clean up my life, to make a better place for myself because I'm worth it.'"

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