Ellie Holcomb has spent much of her life carrying what she calls “cups of living water” to others: Scripture set to melody, stories of grace and comfort learned through life and hardship.
But a few years ago, the 43-year-old Nashville native realized she had been walking for so long, pouring out for others so faithfully, that she hadn’t stopped to drink for herself.
“I looked up, and I felt dry as a bone,” she told The Christian Post. “I’ve spent so much of my life drawing from the living water and wanting others to taste the sweetness. And yet, it was so rare that I actually lingered at the well myself.”
The award-winning singer-songwriter and author, mother of three and wife to artist Drew Holcomb, recently released her first album since 2020, Far Country, the result of a long walk through questions, doubt, longing and rediscovery.
“My joy as an artist and as a follower of Jesus is that there is invitation to question and wrestle and remember,” she said. “I have walked with the Lord for a very long time. But you get older, and you see more brokenness in the world and in your own story. I had so many questions I was wrestling with.”
“The thing about wrestling is that when you’re wrestling with Love Himself, you are very close,” Holcomb said. “You can hear the heartbeat of God. God can handle our questions. There’s this idea of ‘worrying in God’s direction,’ of weeping in the direction of God. That is still a form of faith.”
Questions about suffering, motherhood, loss and God’s faithfulness in the face of uncertainty are woven throughout the album’s 11 tracks. Holcomb choked up reflecting on losing her 9-year-old niece to cancer, “a grief that doesn’t have an answer.”
“I don’t understand why that happened,” she said. “I have questions I will probably die with. Why would a child suffer like that? Why does death come so early for some? I don’t have the ‘why.'”
“As deep as pain can take us, there’s a deeper well of love underneath,” she added. “What I can tell you for sure is that God weeps with us. I have known a peace in places where it makes no sense to have peace. I have felt the empathy of God in my most broken places. And that has marked me.”
Holcomb, whose father is a CCM music producer (he also executive-produced Far Country), acknowledged that for many Christians, especially those raised within tradition, doubt can carry a sense of shame, something to be hidden rather than explored.
But she pointed out that throughout Scripture, many of God’s faithful followers wrestled with Him.
“David had questions. Jeremiah had questions. Job had questions. Even Jesus cried out, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'” she said. “And I don’t think I gave myself permission for that for a very long time.”
Holcomb emphasized that what she’s walked through isn’t necessarily deconstruction; instead of tearing down her faith, the artist said she feels as though “the roof has come off,” creating more room for wonder and expansion in her understanding of God’s love.
“I can’t take apart the foundation of God’s faithfulness I’ve known in my life. But maybe the roof is off. Maybe the back wall is open. Maybe all the windows are open. And I don’t know if I ever want to close them again. Because I think God is bigger than we know,” she said. “What if God’s love is bigger than I can understand? That’s the question I’m living with.”
That widening view of God shapes “Wherever I Go,” one of the album’s most deeply personal songs, and one Holcomb says she needs daily. Grounded in Psalm 23, the song is a meditation on being accompanied through exhaustion and the ever-present awareness of unrest and global suffering that social media provides.
“We are the first generation where we don’t have a choice but to know everything,” Holcomb said. “We’re not meant to carry the suffering of the world in our hearts all the time. We’re invited to enter in, but we’re not meant to hold it. That’s God’s job.”
As a mother, she said, this tension feels particularly sharp.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m failing,” she admitted. “All I want is to do this well, to raise these little souls well, and I can’t do that perfectly. But what comforts me is this: wherever I go, into grief, into joy, into anxiety, into wonder, God goes with me.”
“And that’s something my own heart needs to remember every single day.”
The week before Far Country arrived, a school shooting and the assassination of Charlie Kirk shocked the nation. Holcomb recalled watching the news and feeling the same paralysis many did: How do you speak of hope when the world feels shattered?
“How do you get on Instagram and say, ‘Here’s my record’?” she said. “I was weeping.”
The grief brought her back to another national trauma: September 11, 2001, when she was a freshman in college, away from home for the first time.
The night after the attacks, on her birthday, she woke feeling afraid and disoriented. Her parents called and encouraged her to open her dorm room curtains. When she did, they were standing on the lawn outside her window, having driven through the night with bagels, just to be near her.
“It was this reminder that love moves toward us, especially in the dark,” she said. “There are treasures in the darkness. You can’t see the stars during the day, but they are there.”
That, she believes, is the heart of Far Country: the invitation to hold the world’s sorrow and the world’s beauty at the same time.
“I hope this record makes space for both,” she said. “I hope it lets people say, ‘This is heavy and this is hurting’ and also, ‘Love is still here, and it is not done.'”
“It feels off down here sometimes,” she added. “Because this is not where we ultimately belong. We are beloved children of God, and we are being led back home.”
Holcomb said she hopes Far Country serves as a companion to anyone walking through questions or longing and a reminder that even when life feels disorienting or heavy, they are not alone.
“We are all just kids making our way back home,” she said. “And I’m honored to sing alongside people as we do. Before we ever make a mistake, before we are loved by others, before we wound or are wounded, before we take a breath, we are beloved. That is where we come from. And that is where we’re going.”
Leah M. Klett is a reporter for The Christian Post. She can be reached at: leah.klett@christianpost.com
