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Sorry about the mess!" Twila Paris says as we hop into her SUV, strewn with empty water bottles and baby paraphernalia. We're on our way to, of all places, Wal-Mart. "I haven't had a chance to clean out the car," she explains. "J.P. sleeps really nicely in it, which means I do a lot of driving!"
J.P. is Jack Paris Wright, her almost 12-month-old, long-awaited son.
As J.P. coos and settles in for a nap on the winding country road toward our shopping destination, Twila, Twila's sister Angie, and I discuss decorating tips, favorite movies, C. S. Lewis, and speeding tickets. But the best discussion is when Twila describes spending a night on a tour bus caring for a very sick J.P. who had vomited all over her. When she finally was able to get him cleaned up, she frantically tried to find a breath mint. "Here I was with baby spit-up all over me—and I was thinking about my breath!" she says, laughing.
From the outside, Twila, 43, appears to have the perfect life. She's written more than 200 songs (including "We Will Glorify," "We Bow Down," and "Lamb of God"), has won 5 Dove Awards, and is considered by many to be our foremost modern-day hymnwriter. Besides two newly released cds—Greatest Hits and Bedtime Prayers (both Sparrow), she's also written Bed-time Prayers & Lullabies (Harvest House). Twila's been happily married to Jack Wright for 17 years; she has her infant son, J.P.; and she lives near her close-knit extended family in her beloved state of Arkansas.
But alongside her lion's share of success and joy, Twila's had her share of heartache. Unknown to either of them, her husband, Jack, contracted hepatitis C—a chronic virus that affects the liver—before they were engaged, and lived with an incorrect diagnosis for close to eight years (they'd been told he had chronic fatigue syndrome). Because of his illness, Twila was forced to deal with a husband too ill to handle even the day-to-day details of life, spending much of his time on bedrest, and the possibility of them remaining childless because of uncertain health risks. "Life certainly didn't turn out the way I'd planned when I thought about being married and having a family," says Twila. "But as time went by, I discovered something important: God has a time-table for our life. And it's much better than our timetable. Even in the midst of our disappointment, he has good things planned for us."
So after years of praying for a child, yet seeing that hope unrealized, Twila wrote a collection of lullabies and accepted the role of Elizabeth, Mary's older cousin and the mother of John the Baptist, in the touring musical Child of the Promise—only to discover God's perfect timing and his sense of humor: At the age of 41, Twila was pregnant. "I think God typecast me in that role," says Twila. "I'm just glad I wasn't playing the part of Sarah!" (Sarah, of course, being Abraham's wife who got pregnant in her nineties.)
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