I didn't wake up that morning expecting to meet Jesus.
It was May 13, 2021. I was at a campground in northern Michigan — sleeping in a camper with my son Cubbie. Just a dad and his boy on a trip. Nothing extraordinary. Nothing that should have ended the way it did.
Around 4 AM, something grabbed my chest.
Not pain exactly. Pressure. Like someone had reached into my body and knocked the wind completely out of me. My brain refused to accept what was happening. So I focused on my breathing. Slowed it down. And after thirty or forty minutes the pressure eased and I dozed off.
It came back.
And then again.
By the third wave I knew. But I didn't call for help. I lay there next to my sleeping son, terrified he would wake up without a father. Terrified I would never see my daughter Juju again. Too proud to knock on the campground owner's door. Too scared of what an ambulance might mean for Cubbie.
So I made the most dangerous decision of my life.
I drove myself from Mancelona to Traverse City. Dropped Cubbie with a friend. And stumbled into the hospital alone.
The first EKG came back normal. For one brief moment I thought maybe I was wrong.
Then the blood work confirmed it. Heart attack. I was taken up for what was supposed to be a routine catheterization.
And in that lab — my heart stopped.
What happened next I cannot fully explain. Not because I don't remember it. Because human language was not built to hold it.
I felt myself leave my body.
There was a warmth — like looking at the sun with your eyes closed, except it didn't hurt. There were angels. And a peace that I have spent every day since trying to describe and failing every single time. Every burden I had ever carried — every fear, every failure, every hard thing — lifted. Gone. All of it.
But before I could go any further — I stopped.
I couldn't go. Not yet. I needed to know my family would be okay.
And then I was shown them. Annetta. Juju. Cubbie. Happy. Healthy. Thriving. Whole. A vision so real and so specific that when I came back I could still see their faces.
They were going to be okay.
And with that — I let go.
As I moved forward I saw shapes in the distance. I thought they were mountains. But as I got closer they came into focus — silhouettes. People. A welcoming committee of every person I had ever loved and lost. My dogs came first. Then aunts and uncles. And then — standing at the center of all of it — my grandparents. People I had never met in this life.
We embraced. All of us together. And what I felt in that embrace is the thing I am most unable to put into words. It was love — but not any love I had ever felt on earth. Purer. Weightless. Overwhelming. The kind of love that makes every earthly version of it feel like a shadow.
My grandmother held my face in her hands.
"You are so loved."
And then she gave me a message for my mother.
That's when I knew something was changing.
Because you don't deliver messages to people you're never going to see again.
I looked up — and standing right there with my grandparents, front and center, was Jesus.
I looked at Him with everything I had. Every question. Every plea. Every desperate hope that maybe I had misunderstood what was happening.
He stepped forward.
He touched my face.
"There is still so much for you to do."
And then it was gone. All of it. The warmth. The peace. The faces of everyone I loved. Gone.
I was back.
I came back angry.
Not at God — I wanted to be angry at God, felt like I had every right to be angry at God — but that anger just wasn't there. Underneath all the confusion and the grief of what I had lost, there was something I couldn't explain and couldn't shake.
Trust.
I didn't choose it. I didn't manufacture it. It was just there — before I could explain it, before I had any reason for it.
That's actually how I knew God was working on me. Because the trust showed up before the understanding did.
For a long time I wrestled with the question every single day — why would God show me what that feels like and then send me back to this? Back to a body that had just been cracked open with an eighteen-inch incision. Back to a brain that would soon be diagnosed with Primary Progressive Aphasia — a rare, progressive dementia that attacks speech, language, memory, and executive function. Back to a life that was about to get harder before it got clearer.
God stayed quiet for a while. He let me wrestle.
And then — slowly, over months and years — He started revealing what the sending back was for. A music-based ministry. Curriculum for leaders. Tools for individuals. A platform built on the belief that music opens doors to encounters with God that nothing else can open.
Every step of the way my response was the same:
God has the wrong person.
Does He even know my track record? Everything I've started and never finished? There is nothing in my history that suggests I'm capable of what He's asking.
And one day — maybe in a moment of weakness, maybe in brutal honesty — I asked Him directly:
"Why is this time going to be different?"
He answered me clearly.
"Because this time you are taking Me with you."
And I said yes.
Not because I felt qualified. Not because the PPA went away. Not because any of it made sense.
Because the same Jesus who touched my face and sent me back was the one asking me to trust Him with what came next.
So I said yes.
That yes is why you are reading this right now.
Every arc. Every song. Every Friday at 7 AM. It all goes back to a cath lab in Traverse City on May 13, 2021 — and a voice that said there is still so much for you to do.
I saw something that day that I cannot unsee. I experienced something that human language cannot contain. And I have never once been called to shout from the mountaintops about what heaven looks like.
What I was called to do is point you to Jesus.
Through music. Through Scripture. Through five songs every Friday that open a door and invite you to walk through it.
That's the assignment. That's the sending.
And the fire that was placed in me that day — the thing that will not let me be quiet, the thing that keeps showing up every week no matter what my brain does or doesn't do — that fire is not mine.
It was put there by the One who sent me back.
His word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot. — Jeremiah 20:9
I cannot stay quiet about what I have seen.
And neither can you.
Because somewhere inside you — underneath the silence, underneath the fear that no one will believe it, underneath the feeling that your story isn't significant enough to tell — there is something you have witnessed.
Something real.
Something that happened.
Something Jesus did that you were there for.
And it is waiting to become someone else's faith.
GO TELL IT.
LISTEN:
Spotify: https://tr.ee/Hd-rsEevCa
Apple Music: https://tr.ee/G8bS3DZvI6
GO DEEPER:
GROUP LEADER GUIDE: https://tr.ee/SOnT7WBcyz
PERSONAL ENCOUNTER GUIDE: https://tr.ee/3Bv0aaBD0g
TEXT CIRCLE: https://tr.ee/bG8qE-2G6q
