Giving Sariah a Voice
Some people in scripture are given pages of dialogue. Others are given only a few sentences, a name, or a brief glimpse into a much larger life.
Sariah is one of those people.
We know enough about her to know that she was a wife, a mother, a woman of faith, and a companion to Lehi as his prophetic calling took their family out of Jerusalem and into an uncertain wilderness. We know that she left behind the security and comforts of home. We know that she feared deeply for her sons. We know that, in one moment of profound anguish, she complained against her husband and believed her sons had been destroyed. And we know that when those sons returned safely, her sorrow turned to overwhelming joy and her faith was strengthened.
But the record does not tell us everything she thought.
It does not record the conversations she may have had with herself in the darkness.
It does not tell us what she whispered when she was afraid.
It does not give us the private prayers of a mother watching her family walk into danger.
That silence became the starting point for “I Followed Faith.”
We Wanted to Meet the Woman Behind the Record
The goal was to humanize Sariah.
Not to change her story. Not to put words into scripture and pretend they were hers. And not to create a fictional character who simply happens to have the same name.
The goal was to imagine, carefully and reverently, the woman behind the few moments we actually have.
What would it feel like to be married to a prophet?
What would it feel like when the man you love tells you that God has commanded your family to leave everything familiar behind?
What does a mother feel when she watches her sons leave on a dangerous assignment and has no ability to protect them?
What happens inside a mother when one child seems faithful while another seems determined to resist?
And perhaps most importantly:
What does faith sound like when it is being lived by a frightened human being rather than described after the fact?
Those questions shaped the song.
“I Followed Faith” became the mother’s prayer—the whispers of her heart.
It is Sariah speaking in the spaces between the recorded events.
A Woman Asked to Follow Before She Could See
Sariah did not simply hear about Lehi’s revelation.
She had to live with its consequences.
Her family left Jerusalem. They left behind familiar surroundings and material comforts and entered a wilderness where the future was unknown. The Book of Mormon records that she eventually recognized that the Lord had commanded Lehi and had protected their sons, but getting to that certainty was part of her journey.
That distinction mattered to the writing.
Faith is often easiest to describe after the miracle.
Sariah’s story gives us something more human: faith while the outcome is still unknown.
So the song does not portray her as someone who never felt fear. It portrays her as someone who felt fear and followed faith anyway.
That became the meaning behind the title.
She followed while uncertain.
She followed while grieving.
She followed while questioning.
She followed while afraid.
And she followed because somewhere beneath all of those emotions was a growing conviction that God was still with her family.
The Mother’s Fear
One of the most important moments in Sariah’s story is the return of her sons to Jerusalem to obtain the brass plates.
For Nephi, Sam, Laman, and Lemuel, it was a command they needed to fulfill.
For Sariah, it was something else.
It was the disappearance of her sons.
The scriptures tell us that she mourned for them and feared that they had perished. Eventually, in her anguish, she complained against Lehi and called him a visionary man.
That moment became one of the emotional anchors of the song.
We did not want to remove Sariah’s weakness because doing so would make her less believable.
Her doubt is part of what makes her faith meaningful.
A mother can believe in God and still be terrified.
A woman can support her husband and still have moments when she does not understand.
A faithful person can pray and still cry.
Sariah’s story allows all of those things to exist together.
Laman and Lemuel Were Still Her Sons
Another important choice was not to reduce Laman and Lemuel to antagonists.
They certainly make choices that create tremendous conflict in the Book of Mormon. Their resistance to Nephi and their repeated opposition to their father’s prophetic direction become increasingly serious.
But from Sariah’s perspective, they were not simply symbols of rebellion.
They were her sons.
That changes the emotional landscape.
A mother can be disappointed in a child without ceasing to love that child.
She can see destructive choices and still hope for change.
She can rejoice in one child’s faith while grieving another child’s resistance.
That tension became part of the song’s voice.
Sariah’s heart would not divide neatly between the faithful sons and the rebellious sons.
They were all hers.
That is the kind of emotional truth we wanted the song to carry.
The Joy of the Sons Who Returned
The story also needed joy.
Sariah’s life was not simply a catalog of fear.
When her sons returned safely from Jerusalem, the scriptures describe her joy and record the realization that the Lord had protected them and enabled them to accomplish what they had been sent to do.
That moment became important because it completes the emotional movement of her earlier fear.
The mother who wondered whether her sons were dead is suddenly holding them again.
The woman who questioned is suddenly certain.
The fear did not become foolish because she was afraid.
The experience became testimony because she lived through it.
That is a very different kind of faith from simply never having doubts.
Her Murmuring Became a Moment, Not Her Identity
Perhaps the most delicate part of the song was Sariah’s murmuring.
We deliberately did not want to make it her defining characteristic.
Her complaint against Lehi is preserved in scripture, and it is important. But so is what comes afterward.
She is comforted.
Her sons return.
Her understanding changes.
Her testimony grows.
That is a deeply human spiritual pattern.
A person can have a moment of weakness without becoming a weak person.
A prayer can begin in fear and end in faith.
A heart can bend without breaking.
So in “I Followed Faith,” Sariah’s murmuring is treated almost like a private confession—a mother admitting to God that she was afraid, recognizing where fear had carried her, and finding her way back to trust.
We Imagined the Voice Scripture Left Unrecorded
This is where the songwriting became especially personal.
The lyrics are not presented as newly discovered scripture. They are an artistic imagining of the emotional spaces surrounding the scriptural record.
We wanted Sariah to sound like a real woman.
An older woman.
A mother who has lived long enough to know that faith does not eliminate pain.
A wife who has learned that supporting someone with a prophetic calling does not mean every moment is easy.
A mother who has experienced both the joy of seeing her children believe and the ache of watching some of them struggle.
A woman who can look backward and say:
I was afraid.
I questioned.
I cried.
I did not always understand.
But I followed faith.
That honesty is what gives the song its voice.
The Music Had to Feel Like Jerusalem
Once we understood whose voice we were trying to hear, the musical language became clearer.
The song needed to feel ancient without becoming theatrical.
It needed to feel Middle Eastern without becoming a modern Arabic pop production.
That led us toward the musical colors of the ancient Near East: oud, ney flute, frame percussion, bowed strings, and tonal colors inspired by Middle Eastern melodic traditions.
The oud gives the song an earthy, intimate quality. The ney introduces a breathy, almost prayer-like voice. The frame percussion connects the music to an older world, while the cinematic strings allow the emotional scope to grow beyond the intimate setting.
The arrangement follows Sariah’s emotional journey.
The verses are restrained and close.
The music feels like someone remembering.
As the chorus arrives, the sound opens.
Her private thoughts become testimony.
And as the song moves toward the Savior and the promised land, the music becomes larger—not because Sariah has suddenly become a different person, but because her understanding has grown.
The Savior Had to Be at the Center
There was another boundary we did not want to cross.
Sariah’s story should not become merely a story about surviving hardship.
Her faith had somewhere to go.
The Book of Mormon places the coming Messiah, the Savior, and the Redeemer at the center of Lehi’s teachings, and that larger spiritual context matters to the song.
Sariah’s faith was not ultimately faith in circumstances.
Circumstances changed constantly.
Her home changed.
Her surroundings changed.
Her sons changed.
Her understanding changed.
But God did not.
That is why the song ultimately moves beyond the wilderness, beyond motherhood, beyond fear, and toward Christ.
The promised land is important.
But the deeper destination is faith in the Redeemer.
The Song Became a Mother’s Prayer
That may be the simplest way to describe what “I Followed Faith” became.
It is not a historical biography of Sariah.
It is not an attempt to fill every silence in the Book of Mormon with invented dialogue.
It is something more intimate.
It is an imagined prayer from the heart of a woman whose story was recorded only in fragments.
It asks us to consider what may have been happening inside those fragments.
The woman who left Jerusalem.
The wife who followed her husband into the wilderness.
The mother who feared for her sons.
The woman who struggled when she could not see the outcome.
The mother who rejoiced when her sons returned.
The woman who learned through experience that the Lord had not abandoned her.
And the believer who eventually understood that faith was not the absence of fear.
It was the decision to keep walking while fear was still present.
Giving Sariah the Voice She Never Had
In the end, “I Followed Faith” is an attempt to give Sariah something the historical record does not give her very often:
a voice.
Not a voice claiming to speak scripture.
A voice imagining the heart behind scripture.
A believable voice.
An honest voice.
A mother’s voice.
The kind of voice that can say, I was afraid.
The kind that can admit, I did not understand.
The kind that can whisper a prayer for her children.
The kind that can ache over the choices of the children she loves.
The kind that can question without abandoning faith.
And finally, the kind that can look back across everything she endured and recognize what was happening all along.
She was learning to trust.
She was learning to wait.
She was learning that faith could coexist with fear.
She was learning that a mother’s heart could break and still believe.
And after all the uncertainty, all the wilderness, all the tears, and all the things she could not see—
she followed faith.