So, I’m from a little town in North East Arkansas with about twelve hundred people. I grew up in a Christian home with a good family. They really taught me what it was to be a Christian and just faith at an early age.
Music was a big part of my life even though I didn’t play an instrument. My dad led music in church. He was in bands growing up. I didn’t really get into music though until my freshman year in college. I had gone off the play in junior college, play basketball. I tore my ankle up which ended up kind of confining me to my apartment. My roommate had brought down an old guitar his freshman year. I taught myself how to play his guitar and from that point on immediately fell in love with music.
So, eventually, I ended up in a southern rock band. I started going into a studio and working on an album. After that album, we kind of took off. We got a booking agent in Europe right after the album came out and booked ourselves a month-long tour all across France, Belgium, and Spain. I remember thinking that I was exactly where I wanted to be. I had made it. I was a rock star. With that attitude and that lifestyle came a lot of bad things. I was living hard. I was miserable. Everybody around me could see it but I was so lost.
Things started changing in my life but I still wasn’t ready to quit doing the band thing.
In 2012 we had a tour booked in Europe. I just remember thinking to myself that it’s time to make a change but I didn’t know if I was strong enough to do it on my own.
We started going to this church and the Pastor and the Worship leader started pouring into my life. I started feeling like there was a way out of doing what I was doing.
I called my wife and I told her I was going to quit my band and we were going to start going to the church that we had been visiting. I felt like God was really speaking to me and telling me that I was using the gifts that he had given me for the wrong reason.
Within a year of going to the church, they had this idea of a new campus that they wanted to start. They took me to lunch one day and shared their story of what God had kind of put on their heart and where they wanted to go direction wise with the new campus. They were really looking for somebody with my story. We were trying to reach people who had never had an encounter with Jesus or maybe had had one at a church and were offended or never found their place.
In 2015 they offered me a full-time position as the director over the campus.
So, when I first started writing songs it was really simple but as I grew older and started experiencing more things in my life and really started feeling like I had something to write about my songs started to transform. It’s a really cool thing being a songwriter. Just being able to document seasons of your life. Just knowing where I have come from to where I am now and what God’s continually doing in my life every day. I can look back over the last couple of months and just see the things that God’s done in my life. To be able to write that in songs and share that with people, to be able to give people hope and to see lives can truly change if you surrender to Jesus if you do what he is truly asking you to do. To be able to write that and share that with people is really why I like writing songs.
All the things I have done in my life and the things God has allowed me to live for, He’s given me a story and He’s given me something to use for His glory. Just knowing that I could one day possibly have a song that could speak to somebody who is in the same situation that I was in is really the reason why I am doing what I am doing.
Discussions