I was born on April 27, 1969. I was born again in the 1980s under the teaching of Frank Barker at Briarwood. Then, somewhere along the way, I misplaced the whole thing. Then in 2009, I was reborn again. If you are keeping count, that is three births, which is two more than most people get and roughly as many as my mother would have authorized.
The first time I was born again, I thought I had arrived. I had the vocabulary, the verses, and the confident handshake. I figured the hard part was over. This is like buying a guitar and assuming you can now play it. The instrument is in your hands, certainly. The music is a separate matter.
Losing my faith did not happen all at once. Nobody holds a closing ceremony. It went the way a house goes when nobody paints it. One day you notice the porch is leaning, and you cannot remember when it started. I kept showing up to life. I just stopped bringing God along, the way you stop bringing an umbrella once it has not rained in a while. Then it rains.
In 2009, God got my attention. I will not pretend I saw a burning bush. It was quieter than that and more embarrassing. A man reaches a point where his own plans have been tried thoroughly and found wanting, and he finally looks up, mostly because there is nowhere else left to look.
WeRockTV started that same year, right in the middle of that change. I had no business plan, no investors, and no idea what I was doing, which is the traditional founding team of most Alabama enterprises. What I did have was a conviction that faith, music, and good stories belonged together. Sixteen years later, I still believe it. I have simply collected more stories, and a few of them came with case numbers.
The mission has stayed the same: Good News. Good Music. Good Works. Good News means hope that does not pretend everything is fine. Good Music means the songs that carried us, from the ones we grew up on to the ones still being written. Good Works means people who actually help instead of just talking about helping. I have done a great deal of talking about helping. I am trying to shift the ratio.
Here is what I have learned about being reborn at fifty-seven. It is not a one-time event. It is more like a subscription. You wake up, thank God for another morning, own yesterday’s mess, and try again. Some mornings the renewal goes through without a hitch. Other mornings you have to call customer service and explain yourself at length. Either way, the account stays open. Grace does not expire, and thankfully it does not check your payment history.
I used to think of faith as something you carried into hard places, like a flashlight. Now I know it is also something you find there. God does not wait outside the door until you are presentable. He walks right in, sits down on whatever floor you happen to be on, and stays. I have tested this on several floors, including some made of concrete. He has not yet missed an appointment.
The old man keeps trying to climb back aboard. Paul talked about putting off the old man, and I can confirm the old man does not go quietly. He knows where I live. He has a key. I keep showing him the plank. He keeps coming back with snacks.
I want to be honest about one more thing. Being reborn is not glamorous. Nobody throws a party. There is no certificate, no ceremony, no choir. Most of the time it looks like a man getting out of bed, saying a prayer, keeping his word, and doing the next right thing. It looks like making the phone call instead of avoiding it. It looks like saying I am sorry and then not adding a paragraph explaining why I was actually right. That second part is where I lose most of my points.
My spiritual history has several chapters. I am not going to rearrange them for promotional purposes. I was found, I got lost, I was found again, and I expect I will need finding a few more times before this is over. If that disqualifies me from writing about faith, then most of the Bible is disqualified too. Peter denied Jesus three times by a fire and still got the keys. I find that very encouraging. I have denied Him more creatively, but I have also not been handed any keys, so it balances out.
I pray for patience now. God keeps answering by providing opportunities to practice. I consider this an unnecessarily thorough arrangement, but I have noticed it works. Patience, it turns out, is not delivered. It is grown, like tomatoes, and it requires about the same amount of sitting in the heat.
Faith, for me, does not sound like a sales pitch anymore. I have heard plenty of those, and given a few. Faith has looked a lot more like a man asking God to get him to morning. It has looked like a phone call to a friend. It has looked like forgiving somebody when I would rather not, and getting back up when lying down seemed so much more reasonable.
I did not come through all of this a saint. I came through lighter, humbler, and more grateful for small things. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich. A phone call that goes through. A friend who answers. A morning outside. A song on the radio. Things I used to take for granted now feel like gifts. I hope I never lose that feeling, no matter how comfortable life gets. Knowing my history, I may need reminding.
If you are in the middle of your own mess right now, here is the part I most want you to hear. You are not disqualified. You are not too far gone. You may just be in the middle of being reborn again yourself. It does not feel like a miracle from the inside. From the inside it mostly feels like Tuesday. Keep going anyway.
“Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.”
2 Corinthians 5:17 (KJV)
— JC
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