An Open Letter to Ronnie Dunn

Mr. Dunn,

  I recently saw you on an absolutely horrible  daytime show that used to at least masquerade as a health information program before it  devolved into  celebrity worship and fluff.  You were there showing off your COWBOY tattoo and promoting your new album.  Honestly, sir even though I  once enjoyed your music  I hadn't thought of you in years.  Part of this is no doubt because when I accepted Christ in 1995, he delivered me from  my old music, and so , no offense, you were just a musical echo from my past.  But I remembered  even back then, when people  were giving a summation of your biography as half of the group Brooks and Dunn, they would mention something about you being a Baptist preacher.  Like I said, I hadn't thought about this in years, and my memory is pretty shaky these days, so I decided to do a little  research.
  According to the   Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture , your mother was a "devout Baptist" and you yourself "enrolled at Abilene Christian College in Texas with plans to become a Baptist preacher". Wikipedia  lists you as a psychology major there, and even says you were the youth minister at Avoca Baptist church in Avoca Texas, but you were asked to quit the school because you  were "performing at local bars".  The internet is  pretty silent about whether or not the  church allowed you to continue to serve. I mean  one would hope that a  youth minister  that has been ejected from  Bible college would be asked to resign, but it's a crazy world we live in.
  Now you're not the first to travel this road from the  church house to the  road house. From Elvis to Alabama, to  Nat King Cole to Whitney Houston; it's a pretty common phenomenon.  And the 'almost a Baptist preacher' angle gives you a  certain amount of credibility with dumb Southerners like myself who can soothe their conscience about listening to your  bar music.
  Fame and fortune would soon be yours and  one day little  heathens like myself would delight in your music.  See, I consider that  really ironic.  You had the advantage of a Christian upbringing that I did not have, and yet you chose the sewer that I was already living in. You  picked the darkness after being informed about the light.  You knew about Jesus, and presumably you knew that people like me were going to spend an eternity in hell without Jesus, but other than  giving him a passing reference in a song (in the same line as a reference to beer), you said nothing. In the 19 years after somebody did reach  me with the gospel, as far as I can tell you have still said nothing.  You have never publicly  stood up for Jesus.
  So here we are now, the two of us, almost 20 years later, you and I.  I was once a slave to sin, and have been marvelously delivered by the blood of the Lamb.  You have played the world's music this whole time and danced to the world's tune, and have  been rewarded immensely.  But there you are, presumably saved, presumably heir to the same victory that I  enjoy; with a COWBOY tattoo and  singing a song about wishing you could have a cigarette.
  The role reversal seems  so tragic to me.  You have had the public eye and the public ear for  decades now, and you've used it to  pad your pocket.  Do you really know Jesus? I hope you really are saved, but at the same time, at the Judgment Seat of Christ you've got a lot of explaining to do.


Michael S. Alford
Publick Minister

The Dirtbag Advantage

  I did not grow up in church.  There is a lot in that statement, and I won’t go into details, but as it is, I received Christ when I was 21 years old and now I am raising a whole houseful of church kids.

  Church kids fascinate me, in a way.  I cannot imagine growing up in a house where imperfect people do their best to exalt a perfect God. I cannot imagine a childhood where the Bible being read is not unusual. I cannot imagine what sort of person I would have turned out to be had my parents lived for God.  I didn’t have to be convinced I was a sinner, it was obvious from my life, but what I didn’t understand is that there was already a remedy in place so that I could be reconciled to God.  My kids know this, have always known it and have known it as surely as they know the sky is blue.  It has been taught to them in a hundred different ways and hopefully lived in front of them from the day they were born.

 I have often made the statement that in lot of ways, it’s simply easier to be a complete dirtbag until you’re an adult, and then get saved.  I say this after years of watching church kids, including the ones in my house, and watching their struggles.  I have the advantage of never really having any doubts about my salvation. I don’t have a history of 3 or 4 or 5 professions of faith; I have one.  I’ve never had to  scour my life to find  massive changes that Jesus made as some sort of proof that I ‘got the goods’; those changes are obvious.  I don’t have to be educated about the scars that sin causes; I bear those scars already. I can see trouble coming a long way off since trouble is where I grew up.

  But church kids have an advantage over me, and I think it is a highly unappreciated advantage; no baggage.  Despite the great victories wrought for me and in me by Jesus Christ, I have baggage.  This baggage lingers on in my reactions to things, my thought life, and increasingly in my memories.

  For example, this morning I have had to be exposed to some of the music that I left behind.  I am amazed at the emotional memories conjured up by this music.  There are pains and heartbreaks that marked that part of my life that feel as fresh as the day they happened when I’m around that music.  There is a fresh flush of shame about how I coped with that part of life.  There is remorse for the damage I caused.   All of that has been washed away by the blood of Jesus, but it still lingers in the corners of my mind, ready to pop back on the scene and haunt. That’s baggage.

  It is not God’s will for a man to almost destroy his life and then get rescued at the last minute. It’s God’s will that people live right, and accept his pardon for   things done that were wrong. It’s not  God’s will that he be our last resort, but in his  grace and his mercy, he’ll take us even if we do come to him as a last resort.

  And if you are a church kid and you want to tell me how hard it is to be raised in church, and how oppressed you feel, I will do my best to be polite and nod my head while you blabber on.  I will just chalk your comments up to your stupidity and not hold them against you, and maybe someday, if you catch me in the right mood , we’ll compare baggage.  Any takers?

Thoughts About A Possum

    I just heard that George Jones passed away.  To say that he was an icon in my life was an understatement. His music was so much a part of the backdrop of my childhood that I don't even know how to explain it but I’m going to go with some meager attempt to put this into words.
  I was raised on a steady diet of music, and adopted a surprising amount of my parent’s musical tastes. I enjoyed Elvis Presley's music as much or more as anything that was put out by my generation. Not being raised in the rural South, my wife doesn’t have this problem, but I assure you that my extended family will be as sad over the passing of George Jones as my mom was when Elvis died. He’s part of our culture, like it or not. But Elvis and George Jones are really good examples of the strange disconnect I’ve seen in music and musicians in the last 18 years.
 You see, when I got saved, my entire life changed, not overnight though.  For quite a while after I got saved, I continued to listen to the music I grew up on. But the songs about drinking and cheating and fighting and fornicating didn’t appeal to the new man as much as they did (and still do) to the old man, so God delivered me from my music. I can honestly say that it has been probably over 12 years since I have, on purpose, listened to secular music.  I had to, for the sake of my own spiritual growth, walk away from music that  part of me had a deep emotional attachment to.
  I do still suffer though, from my exposure to  the world’s music in that I  have a really hard time remembering Bible verses, but I can tell you every word from Bananrama’s ‘Cruel Summer’.  It takes  less than  4 or 5 notes of a  song from my past  over a department store PA  to  plant the song in my head for  the rest of the day.  I can tell you who sang it, when it came out, and sometimes what record company.  I can usually tell you where I was and who I was with the first time I heard it.  These are usually memories I don’t want, or don’t need, but there they are, burned forever into the grooves of my mind.
  What I’ve never been able to  understand in my own mind how somebody could know the same Jesus I do ( as Elvis claimed to) and  experience the same salvation I experienced (which Jones  claimed to) and still get up night after night and  sing about ungodliness. If it grieved me to listen to it, how can it not grieve them to sing it and promote it and do interviews about it and sign autographs over it?
  A few years back my grandmother, who straddled the fence on this issue like most Southerners do until the day she died, told me that Alan Jackson had just put out a gospel album.  She had to tell me this because I was making a  concerted efforts to  be  ignorant of what was going on in the  secular music world. I asked her “Does he still sing ‘Pop a top again, I think I’ll have another round’?”  The fact that a singer  growing up in the  post-biblical South can  sing about Jesus on one side of the record and  drinking on the other is proof of how apostate Christianity  is in the American  South. The fact that such incongruous sentiments can exist in the heart and lives of so many people leave me scratching my head and saying ‘Am I the only one bothered by this?’.
  I’ve got tons of examples in my head. There was a song out once talking about the ‘old dirt road’ and  one of the lines is something like ‘it’s where I drank my first beer, it’s where I first found Jesus’.  That puts it out there that one of those would never prevent the other and those events are both equally noteworthy, when in really one is an enslaving affront to God’s holiness  and the other is the best thing to ever happen to a  man.
  I hope George Jones was saved. He claimed to have been and even gave Jesus the credit for delivering him from his self-destructive behavior, even as he sold records containing songs which glorified self-destructive behavior. One thing is for certain, if he wasn’t before, he’s a Bible believer now.