Jeremy’s first exposure to the realities of Third World poverty had come a year earlier on a Compassion International trip to Honduras. Before the trip, he says he would have agreed with the scriptural mandate to care for widows and orphans. But seeing, firsthand, the extreme need and the life-changing impact a few dollars a month makes, made him passionate about personal involvement.

Jeremy describes a life-changing encounter in Honduras: “These people were basically living on garbage,” he says. “We went into a shack that had 12 people living in it, and there was a boy there who was 14, and he weighed maybe 45 pounds because he had spinal meningitis when he was a baby. … His parents couldn’t do anything but wait for him to go be with the Lord. We laid hands on him and just prayed for him, and I said, ‘Hey, one day you’re gonna be with Jesus. No more tears, no more sorrow, no more pain.’ And I just wept. It’s hard for me to see that anyway because I’ve experienced death and experienced that kind of thing, and it’s tough.”

That same intermingling of temporary sorrow with eternal hope has long been evident in Camp’s writing. In fact, if you look at his body of work, there seems to be an almost circular connection between his first project, "Stay," and his most recent, "Beyond Measure."

Like a Storybook With Dreams

“I remember when I first started [writing and recording 'Stay'],” Jeremy says. “I was so broken. I just remember being in the pit of despair in my life when Melissa died. I remember saying, ‘Lord, I don’t know what to do. This is confusing. I’m hurting. My heart is broken. I feel so empty and weak.’ And having Him say, ‘Perfect. Now I can use you. I’m going to be the one that fills you up. I’m going to be the one that walks through with you and gives you the strength and gives you the words to say and the songs to sing.’”

Now Jeremy seems to be resting in a new kind of brokenness:  this time, a brokenness that comes from a grateful and amazed recognition of God’s unwavering presence and faithfulness. It’s the joyful brokenness that comes from catching a glimpse of the longed-for redemption of our tears. And it’s where the title song of his new album, "Beyond Measure," was born.

The key moment happened in an interview when Camp was asked, as he often is, to share his testimony. As he told the story, he recounted his late wife’s words, that if even one person were somehow drawn to Christ through her death, it would be worth it. But this time, he suddenly found himself overwhelmed and had to stop the interview.

For the first time he saw a “bigger picture” of how the tragedy of her death had already been used by God as a means of bringing the reality of a sympathetic Christ to thousands of people. In fact, his whole ministry, in some ways, could be traced back to the sorrow and confusion that surrounded Melissa’s death.

“It just hit me; it completely floored me,” he says. “I felt like this fog kind of cleared, and I had to stop. … God had just opened up my eyes to show me the thousands of stories and people I’d talked to, how God has radically done things in people’s hearts and how people who have been through atrocious things and things that just blow your mind, how God has really used the songs and the ministry to dig deep into [their] lives. It just started humbling me. I got on my face, and I was just crying. I thought of my family, Adriane and Isabella, and I thought, ‘I wouldn’t have even thought of having a family years ago because of everything that had happened,’ and I just started to feel so grateful for what God is doing in my life.

“There’s a scripture in Ephesians that says ‘He has done exceedingly more than all we can ask or imagine,’ and I think that was a huge thing God was showing me. ‘Look what I’ve done.’ And it just blew me away and humbled me completely and broke me down.”

¹Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from "Solzhenitsyn:  A Pictorial Autobiography," p. 88, The Noonday Press, 1974



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