Natalie Grant: It's Time for a Love Revolution

E-mails. Doorbells. Deadlines. Telephones. It's easy to get distracted by the things that scream the loudest. 

Curb Records recording artist Natalie Grant knows as perhaps few others do that life is a grand balancing act. She has been named the GMA Female Vocalist of the Year four times, and she is also the founder of a nonprofit dedicated to helping victims of human trafficking. She tours regularly. But then, of course, she also has a personal life. 

Grant is a wife and mother of twin three year-old girls, and in December will welcome a third child with husband/producer Bernie Herms (the baby is due on Christmas Day). When asked how she juggles it all, she usually responds with a hearty laugh. "Most days I don't," she admits. "Most days I totally fail to balance it all, but thank God I can get up tomorrow and try again."

And try again she has. Though Grant has amassed an impressive and highly lauded body of work over the last 11 years, August 24 marks the release of her eighth album, Love Revolution. Produced by Herms, Grant says that the project is a result of her compelling desire to call people to action, specifically to a radical love. 

"It's not that I haven't had a compelling feeling behind every album," she says, "but it was even greater this time. I looked up the word revolution. It's a very strong word, and it can often carry a negative connotation. However, I think when you put love in front of it hopefully it softens it a little bit. For me the definition is really about relentlessly and compassionately loving somebody in such a way that brings about a 'forever' change. When you think about that definition that's exactly what Christ has done for us. He's loved us with a relentless pursuit in such a way that brings about forever change."

There is perhaps no greater evidence of Grant's rallying cry of love than The Home Foundation, a non-profit organization she chartered to help rescue victims of human trafficking. It was a trip to India in 2004 that compelled her to get involved. As part of her visit she toured a brothel and was shocked and sickened by what she found. 

"I saw a little rope hanging off the end of the bed," she remembers. "I don't know what even compelled me to ask what it was, because I was probably scared to death to find out the answer. But they said that most of the girls that work are 13 and 14 years old, and they become mothers at a very young age. There is no childcare so they tether their own kids to the bed while they're forced to work. When you think about a 13 year-old being forced to prostitute herself, and then having to tie her child to the bed while she's being raped, it's beyond even any horror movie you could dream up. It's the worst kind of evil you can imagine, and that brings about a righteous rage. There are more slaves today than in any other time in human history." 

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