Bootleg Prayers

I just wrote this song over the past couple of days. I’m pretty sure I stole the chords and the melody from another song in the podcast. Oops. I was looking for some hope in these days and a friend m…

Here’s a song I wrote to say thanks to my congregation on my ordination.  I wrote it last week—the lyrics basically came out start to finish while I was walking one morning.  That hasn’t happened for…

This song has been in my head a lot recently.  I wrote it more than a decade ago.  I remember sitting on the back porch in our first house, looking up at the rich blue of late evening while it got to…

Whatever you believe about it, I think it’s pretty obvious that we need each other.  We’re made for community.  We’re made for connection.  I think it’s in those connections where we’ll find healing …

I wrote this song back in 2021 when we were still in the throes of the pandemic.  As is the case with a lot of the songs I’ve written in the past several years, I wrote it for a service at church.  T…

Sometimes what we bring with us makes us close ourselves off in fear rather than remain open and curious. I’ve got a suspicion that we have to find that light within us to be able to truly resonate w…

I've been trying to prayer the Jesus Prayer lately: "Lord Jesus have mercy on me, a sinner." While in the past this prayer has been a reminder of my unworthiness, as I started envisioning the presenc…

I used to think faith was about believing the right things. Now I wonder if faith is more about accepting our acceptedness. What if acceptance of our failures and neediness and shortcomings and hurts…

One day while I was sitting out in left field in my camping chair watching the kids field grounders and chase pop ups, I started thinking about the lessons I’ve learned while watching baseball. The g…

This song is one I just finished for our Maundy Thursday service, so it hasn’t been played anywhere yet.  It’s really just an invitation to reflect on this evening of Holy Week from the Last Supper t…

As we approach Palm Sunday and Holy Week, I’m thinking about the strange mixture of hope and heartache that we experience.  Even messages of welcome, acceptance, and inclusion can bring hateful respo…

Since the rhythms of the church calendar tend to set the tempo for a lot of my life, it’s time to talk about Lent. This year have that lovely confluence of Ash Wednesday and Valentines Day.  Like pea…

After a week of snow in Kentucky, we turn our thoughts to warmer climates. This began on a back porch on Sanibel Island and ended up on a driveway in Kentucky. There are places and times when we seem…

Welcome to Bootleg Prayers. A podcast where Aaron Austin as he rummages through our collective sock drawer looking for tufts of hope and threads of sublimity. He'll share songs and stories (and mayb…