I grew up in the Missouri Ozarks, not the deepest band of the Bible Belt, but hanging on firmly to the northern border. Our house was a mile and a half down a dirt road near Collins, Missouri, population 132. In Collins, deer season was bigger than Christmas. The social highlight of the year was the Labor Day rodeo, where a horse-riding gal would be crowned rodeo queen.
My mom took my sister, brother, and me to church every Sunday, where I played piano for the hymns and sang a lot of “specials.” And just to round out the country song trope, my dad left us, I didn’t finish high school, and no one in my family had ever gone to college.
Country music was decidedly the primary genre of my childhood. As a toddler, my favorite song was “Y’all Come Back Saloon” by the Oak Ridge Boys. My grandad, not a churchgoer, was the lead guitar player in a touring country music band. During those years he made what he later called “a mess of his life.” By the time I was old enough to really remember, he would join us for dinner on Christmas Day and accompany our caroling with his Fender Telecaster and portable amp. Growing up, all I wanted was to become a famous country music performer like Emmylou Harris or Merle Haggard.
When I was 17, I had the opportunity to attend college in St. Louis. Here, I met my first friends of color, learned to parallel park, discovered the existence of skim milk, shopped at a Walgreens for the first time, and got a degree in chemical engineering. I also served as an ambassador for country music.
Most of the students I met did not listen to country music. They often said, “Why do you like this? It’s so depressing.” But for me, song lyrics about cheating, divorce, poverty, murder, addiction, abuse, and going to church on Sunday weren’t depressing. They described my experience. They also assured me that others had felt the same things.
Near the end of college, I met my husband, Chad, who had already been accepted to seminary in Chicago and planned to be a pastor in the PCA. After graduation, we moved to Chicago, I got a job, and he worked as a campus minister at DePaul University while studying for his master of divinity degree.
After our first daughter was born, I left my engineering job to be at home with her. Chad, newly ordained in the PCA, accepted his first call at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Chicago. Still, my love of music persisted. Sometimes, I couldn’t sleep and got up during the night to write songs. I learned to play the guitar, and I started going to open mics around the city.
Ultimately, I wrote enough music for several albums and, with musicians I met at church, recorded it. I began to pursue a full-time career in performing and traveled around the U.S. playing for anyone who would listen.
When our daughter Grace was two, our son, Luke, was unexpectedly stillborn. I was angry and devastated. I wrote many songs that did not reflect the values of the Bible Belt. I left church during songs I couldn’t bear to sing, especially songs describing the goodness and kindness of God, songs describing the peace that trusting God brings. I stopped returning the calls of any friend or family member that told me God had a plan for me. And I couldn’t read any part of the New Testament written by Paul. How could he bear his suffering with such joy and energy?
A few years later, something unexpected happened: I read the entire book of Job. And then I read it again and again. It wasn’t that I thought my suffering approached the suffering of Job. Rather, it seemed to me that the real title of the book should be “How to Be a Bad Friend.” It was a little bit a story about the terrible things that happened to Job and then chapters of arrogant, clueless, and hurtful comments by Job’s closest friends.
At the end of the story, God told Job’s friends that they were wrong. I felt that the story described my experience. I was moved to expand my reading list to include Lamentations and, eventually, the Psalms. The Psalms are filled with words about God’s goodness. I was familiar with those words, and nearly all the church’s worship songs draw from them. But it was helpful to see and sing the words God specifically gave to honestly express my suffering and loss. After all, in the Psalms, the people of God express their anger, their desperation, even their wish to die. And these expressions were not hidden away like a secret. They were part of the Bible!
In 2009, we moved to a different neighborhood in Chicago to plant Lincoln Square Presbyterian Church. I have been fortunate for the past 15 years to be the worship director, the best job I’ve ever had. It makes me happy to help shape the worship service and choose the music we sing, including writing hymns and setting the Psalms to music, which we use as a call to worship each week.
The style of music is, for better or worse, heavily influenced by old country music, and I hope that there are at least a few songs each week that someone experiencing doubt and despair could hear without needing to leave the service. Maybe some of the Psalms might even secretly describe their experience and assure them that they’re not alone.
I love music. I love country music, even mainstream country music if it was produced before 1995. I love the way a fiddle solo sounds and the way a steel guitar undergirds the music like a church organ. I love the three-part gospel harmonies. Most of all, I love the characters in the songs who are down and out, duck their responsibility, suffer, grieve, despair, and still trust in God. They are modern-day psalmists giving words to express how I feel.
Jodee Lewis is director of worship and music at Lincoln Square Presbyterian Church in Chicago.