We are all the sum of our experiences. Each relationship and encounter shapes us. With every decision we make or path we choose, we're creating a map that tells our story. For some, the roads have been steep, full of jagged cliffs and sharp turns. Others travelers have encountered more gentle terrain or followed a straighter course.

As Sara Groves set out to record her sophomore project, All Right Here, the follow up to her critically acclaimed debut, Conversations, she began looking back at the road she's traveled and where it's taking her. "I started wondering, what are going to be my defining moments? " the New Artist of the Year Dove nominee asks. "Everything that has gone on in my life has contributed to making me who I am."

Naming Groves' many roles is easy: She's a wife, a mother, a songwriter, a storyteller. She's a preacher whose pulpit is a piano bench. And it's work she doesn't take lightly, a job she didn't initially choose but knows now she's been called to.

Some families pass down recipes or photographs or fine china and silver. Groves' grandfather left behind a legacy of serving. Shortly before his death from bone cancer in 1996, he began looking for someone to carry on his work. Wanting to ease her grandfather's worries, Sara assured him someone would come forward to step into his well-worn shoes. Little did she know it would be her.

A godly man, and father of four,Harry Snook spent several decades honing his craft as a carpenter before leaving behind a thriving business at age 42 for a new calling. In a dream, he saw a Vermont community without a church and knew he was needed. He took a drive and found the town just as it had been in his dream, with a boarded up Baptist church overrun with weeds and suffering from decades of neglect. He packed up his family and, using his carpentry skills, he refurbished the building and began holding Bible studies on the property. Soon, he was traveling to three different churches each Sunday, and over the span of his life would pastor seven churches, five of them built with his own hands.

During the Jesus Movement of the early '70s, Sara's newlywed parents joined her grandfather in his work, driving a bus 45 minutes to Atlantic City to reach out to the hippies that lived under the boardwalk. Her mom would play guitar and her dad would sing before offering the simple invitation: "Come with us and change your life or stay here." They filled the bus every week that summer of 1970. Looking back, Sara sees it as one of the defining moment of her grandpa's ministry, a testament to the power of being in the right place at the right time and being willing to follow when God calls.

For Sara, that call came at her grandfather's funeral. He had never graduated from Bible school and never achieved any real fame, but hundreds of mourners packed the church to honor him one last time, telling story after story of how their lives were dramatically changed by his ministry. Some had gone into ministry themselves. Others said they'd be dead if Harry hadn't come for them all those years ago in that bus. Then there was the letter from a woman who was one of two who braved a blizzard one Saturday night to hear Sara's grandfather speak. Sara's grandmother had warned him not to go-no one would come out in such weather-but he made the trip, driving in near-zero visibility to keep his commitment. The woman and her brother were waiting and that night, and during that poorly attended Bible study Harry led that young man to the Lord. At the time the letter was sent, he had four sons and 16 grandchildren who were all serving the Lord.

Sara sat in awe and listened until it was her turn to approach the podium. Working as a teacher at the time, she had been singled out to represent the 15 grandchildren. "As I was sitting there, I just felt this amazing feeling of responsibility," she recalls. "I felt very inadequate and very overwhelmed, but I found myself saying 'whatever it means for my life, I commit now to take this mantle of ministry and I will die trying to carry it.'"

Before long, Sara was finding ways to incorporate her natural gifts into her call. While her grandfather worked with a hammer, she used words. "I feel like one of my strengths is to give people tools. Music can be a tool to come to grips with your relationship with God and your relationships with others. Not everyone is really good with words or emotions and I feel like that's what I do, put words to people's emotions so that they can work through them and go on to the next place with God."

For her latest endeavor, Sara turned to friend and producer Nate Sabin to help take her music where she wanted it to go. "Conversations was very devotional. It reflected my devotional life," she says. "I wanted All Right Here to reflect my whole life. I wanted to be a mother and a wife and a friend and a foe, and I wanted to be a child of God in the middle of all of these relationships, to give voice to the whole human experience and not just a corner of it."

That's why it was important to Groves that a song like "Fly," about her husband, coexist right next to the blues-y spirituality of "You Did That for Me," a track written by Pierce Pettis and Jonell Moser. And that a songlike "Tornado," about destructive relationships, back right up to the more vertical "Surrender." "Because as a Christian that is our experience," she points out.

And just like her grandfather before her, her work is inspiring incredible testimonies, many passed on via the modern marvel of e-mail. "I feel like I'm part of something much bigger than myself," she says of her current work. And so she is. "It's God's math. The Lord multiplies everything so people I've never met before in places I've never traveled to are being affected…. Not that if I quit the ministry, the world would fall apart. But I do know if I don't play my part, people miss out. If anyone doesn't play his or her part in the Kingdom, we all miss out.