Steffany Gretzinger is the human embodiment of freedom. She does not care what people think of her. She lives as a liberated child of God. She lays flat on the floor during concerts. She kicks the air while she’s worshipping like she’s kicking off the lies a million generations have picked up. And I don’t think you have to be a Christ follower to appreciate that kind of vulnerability and realness.
Why do I look up to this unpredictable, free-spirited woman?
She’s authentic. She knows who she is, and she doesn’t stray from that for appearances.
In a piece on the making of the music video for “Blackout,” the titular song from her new album, she offers in complete vulnerability, “The Lord, He is teaching me to dance while the tears stream down my face. I found a confidence I’ve never had before.
I can be all the things, all at once. He just wanted all of me, He didn’t ask for it to come a certain way. This album is coming from that. It’s a very confident sound. It is not trying to please anyone. And I think that’s finally where I am. I want to reach everyone, to connect to people, but I am not trying to please them.”
After saying this, she starts laughing about how terrifying that is and asks for a brown paper bag.
Do you see what I mean? She jumps ferociously into her humanity and her authenticity while also remaining very true to a divine and holy calling. She cares about others without letting them dissuade her from who she is called to be, who she is born to be.
The core of her worship is authenticity and getting back to our roots. She’s about the roots. Aren’t roots important to us all? In a talk answering the question why worship? she talks about how her daughter, Wonder Grace, is taking her through “a place of discovery,” that her daughter is walking her through a time of learning where Steffany feels she is “going back to the original blueprint, like [she’s] going back to the thing He [God] designed [her] for. And that it’s something He made [her] to know, but [she] forgot.”
She says, “I think all of this life is us growing up to understand that we need to get little again. That we need to go back.”
She furthers that “[she just is] realizing more and more as time goes on how greatly loved [she] is.”
What she says towards the end of this talk gets me deep, in a place within myself that is hard to pinpoint but which boils up with something when I hear these words: “I think the practice of worship is more for us than for Him… He knew that, in this place, if we would come in worship, if we would come and build Him an altar, we start to remember… That’s what happens when we worship. You start to worship and all of a sudden you remember, oh I’ve tasted this, oh I’ve smelled this. I was made for this.
And you start to remember something that He made you for that maybe you’ve never known here but your spirit’s always known it. Your spirit has always known that you were made for intimacy, that worship was always supposed to look like this. That there was never supposed to be separation.”
Steffany Gretzinger is all about the authenticity of humanity, of returning to the identity of wholeness and connection that we were created for. Regardless of what you believe, that kind of authenticity, wholeness, intimacy, and connection seem to be something we as human beings seek after. We want it. We crave it.
And I think maybe that surrendered authenticity and wholeness and connection can only come when we throw off all the lies and assumptions the world throws on us. That’s when we get real.
For Steffany, that looks something like laying on the floor in worship. That looks something like shaking the whole world off to return to the truth about herself and this life.
I admire what some might call her “eccentricity” because it’s real. Because if none of us held back, maybe that’s what we would look like. If none of us held back in fear, or shame, or expectations, maybe we would sprawl out on the floor in public, maybe we would tell the stories we think nobody wants to hear, maybe we would be true to what we know, no matter the cost.
Maybe we would be real if we knew the truth about ourselves and how greatly loved we are.
