Once Upon a Farm

by Rory Feek

  That doesn’t mean that I don’t have times when I get confused and disappointment clouds my mind. But it is always tempered with love. With the love that Joey gave me and she left with me. That I feel still. The love that God gave me. That He gives me still.

  It is a strange thing to feel such loss and gratefulness at the same time. The truth is, I believe I would be in a much different place if I had lost Joey because of something I did or didn’t do. A worse place. Much, much worse, I think. I know me, and I would’ve probably tried to climb inside of a bottle and not come out. My grief would’ve been so great. My disappointment in myself unbearable.

  Instead, I find myself waking each day, thankful for the chance to have loved Joey and to get to love Indiana and watch her grow. Thankful for this day . . . even if I don’t get any others.

  Happy Mother’s Day, Dad

  Some moments Hallmark doesn’t have a card for.

  I keep my guitar picks on my desk in a little bowl that Heidi made and gave me one Sunday when she was probably five or six years old. It’s pink, handmade out of clay, with big gray letters on the outside that spell out the words Happy Mother’s Day, Dad.

  It’s one of my most prized possessions.

  For more than ten years, from 1990 until the early 2000s, I was a single father. I can’t tell you that I was a great father. I tried. I think I was a good father, but if I’m honest, I was still a young man struggling to find myself while the girls were growing and finding out who they were. I made so many mistakes and was so selfish. At times I was more concerned about being a great songwriter than being a great father. In a lot of ways I think the girls raised me while I was raising them. But they were so forgiving and loved me unconditionally. They still do.

  Now Heidi and Hopie are adults. Both beautiful, loving, intelligent women. Thankfully, they are more mature and secure than I was in my twenties. I have often wished I could go back to when they were young girls and give them more of my love and more of my time and attention. I guess it’s natural to always want a do-over, but everyone knows those never happen. You can’t go back. You can only go forward. So I have been trying to be more present in their lives. To be less selfish. And the past couple of years, I think I’ve made a little headway. At least I hope I have.

  I love being a father. I always have. Joey always said that’s part of what attracted her to me when we first met. But neither she nor I had any idea how important that would be to us years later.

  For years after Joey and I got married, I dreamed that God might bless her and me with a baby. A baby we could love and cherish and raise together. A child who was part her, part me, and all Him. And part of that dream was that I might be given a second chance at being a father.

  So when Indiana came along, it was a dream come true in more ways than most people know. But then, life happened.

  And in the fall of 2015, when Joey and I found out that the surgery and the chemo and radiation treatments weren’t working and that, more than likely, she wasn’t going to live to see another spring . . . Joey sat beside me on a glider on our back deck and cried and cried. But not because of the news that the cancer had spread and there was nothing more the doctors could do. She cried because Indy was going to lose her mama and, even more so, because I was going to be a single father again.

  Joey knew how hard it had been for us all those years before she came along, and she was upset that she was going to leave me in the same situation. I remember her tears falling and her saying, “I don’t want you to have to raise a child again by yourself . . . it’s not fair.” Though I was worried about the reality of what was probably in our future, I tried to smile as I wiped Joey’s tears and said, “It’s okay, honey . . . now we know why God chose me to be with you.” I realized then that God knew what was in store and all those years by myself with the girls was Him preparing me for the job of caring for Indiana.

  Still, Joey was angry and disappointed. The truth is, we both were. But we just did what we always did when we were confused and hurt and scared . . . we got on our knees, held hands, and prayed. Soon our tears were replaced by hope and trust that God’s plan was perfect and that somehow, someway . . . everything would be okay. We never cried over that again. We just celebrated every day that we were given together and tried our best to prepare for the day when those days together would be no more.

  And now my beautiful wife sleeps in a bed of clover behind our farmhouse, and once again I’m doing my best to be a mama and papa to our little one. And to our older girls. It is a strange thing to be here. Again.

  Boots and Bibles

  As for me and my horse . . . we will serve the Lord.

  —Joshua 24:15 (John Wayne translation)

  There’s a bunch of pickup trucks parked at our place now on Sundays. There has always been one or two. My Silverado or my brother-in-law’s King Ranch. But these days there are dozens. A hundred or more. And stepping out of the trucks are boots of all sizes. Men’s, women’s, and little bitty cowboy boots, worn by families who park and walk across the gravel to our big barn—going to church here every weekend.

  Cowboy church.

  It happened by accident. Well, for us it did . . . we accidentally wandered into a church service . . . but I’m pretty sure that on God’s end it wasn’t an accident. Our middle daughter, Hopie, had seen a sign on the side of Lewisburg Pike, the road we live on, that said “Cowboy Church,” and she said, “Dad, we ought to go sometime.” Then a couple of weeks later, she brought it up again.

  Joey and I had done more than our share of church hopping during the fifteen years we were together. We didn’t mean to; it just worked out that way. When we got married in ’02, our hope was to settle into a little church somewhere in the area near where we lived and grow old in those pews. It’s what we longed for, but we never found it. Maybe we didn’t look hard enough or were looking for the wrong things. Joey wasn’t a fan of most of the contemporary worship music that is played and sung at a lot of churches, and I wasn’t either. And some churches were too small and narrow-minded and some too big and too progressive for what we believed.

  So, for us, Sunday mornings found us driving somewhere new each week, going from church to church . . . trying different ones, farther and farther away from where we live . . . looking for a home but never finding it. Hoping to find the promised land but somehow feeling like we were stuck in the desert for forty years.

  Hopie would be the one who would lead us there. And it was right in front of us, within a dozen or so miles of where we live.

  The pastor is a robust man with a big smile and an even bigger heart. Wearing a black cowboy hat, he was on the cafeteria stage welcoming people when we walked in the elementary school door. The sign on the easel said “Cross Country Cowboy Church,” and they had been holding their Sunday services there for the last year or so—moving all their stuff in and out of trailers before and after their 10 a.m. worship time. Hoping for a day when they could afford to build and move into a permanent building of their own. Hopie and I and Indiana found a seat near the back. Always near the back for me. I’ve never been a front row kind of guy. I feel most comfortable hidden in the back or the side of movie theaters or churches or anywhere else where people are gathering.

  The band that was on the cafeteria stage wasn’t just playing church music, they were playing our kind of church music. Country with some gospel and hymns mixed into it. Hopie and I looked at each other and said at the same time, “Joey would love this place.”

  And she would have. The older woman seated a row in front of us was in a Carhartt coat, and the men around us were wearing Wrangler jeans and boots. The whole setup and service was western themed. Even the childcare area. A few minutes later they went into something called “breakaway,” when they give folks time to have a donut and coffee and visit with each other before the regular service starts. Indy held my hand as we walked to an area just down the hallway from the school cafeteria that said “Barnyard Babies.” Hopie and
I looked at each other again.

  I cried the whole way through the service. Not because the message was so amazing or even the music (although it was) but because I knew that if my wife could’ve been there next to me . . . somewhere in the first ten minutes, she would’ve squeezed my hand and said, “This is it, honey . . . this is the place we need to be.”

  Hopie and Indy and I came back three more Sundays in a row, and on the third one, at breakaway, I shook the pastor’s hand. “I’ve got a barn at my place that we’re not using right now,” I said. “Why don’t you come by sometime this week and take a look at it?” Clearly knowing who I was and our story, the pastor smiled great big. “I’d love to,” he said.

  By February they were holding their church service in our concert hall—the big red barn that used to house junk cars and boats I tinkered on and was filled with lights and cameras for making TV shows and performing concerts. It had lain pretty empty since our last concert together in October 2015, a year and a half previously. And now, all of a sudden, there was life in that hall. Lots of it.

  There still is.

  It’s been six or seven months now since that first church service in our barn, and each week it gets a little better. Feels a little more like home. They do two services now. One at 9:00 a.m. and another at 10:30. And the music is off the charts. Hit country music artist Craig Campbell and his wife, Mindy, lead it, and they, along with another wonderful singer named Bailey Rose, do most of the singing. It is a rural church, most related to by folks who live on farms or grow small gardens or have horses or cows. People who long for a value system that used to be easier to find. Easier to be part of. The message they preach is simple, filled with humility and heart. That little cowboy church is probably not going to change the world, but it will change some people’s world. It already has. Mine included.

  Indiana and I go to the early service most Sundays. We walk hand in hand across the driveway together, and around through the front doors of the barn. Since she’s walking well now on her own, she takes off the moment we walk through the door and starts waving and greeting people she knows and lots and lots of folks she doesn’t.

  Then we usually find a chair next to cowboy Danny Smith or our neighbors Allison and her mama, and Indy will go row to row exploring and saying hi to people. And picking up the tithing envelopes that are sitting on empty chairs. Unfortunately, she’s probably not helping the church’s bottom line any, but she’s a great ambassador of love for them and for me.

  Like I said, I try to hide in the back if I can. Find a spot on the side where I can just listen and watch and not be made a big deal of. I know there are probably some folks who come because they are fans of Joey’s and mine. Because they want to catch a glimpse of us or of the story that they’ve watched on TV or read about. And they are always nice. Sometimes they’ll ask me to sign my book that they brought with them from Iowa or Texas, which I do, or take a picture, which most of the time I don’t. Hopefully, they understand that I’m just a normal man worshipping the Lord on Sundays. No different than anyone else in that barn.

  Except that probably what it means to be having a church service in that building is different for me than for other folks. It’s a beautiful thing to see the building filled with people bowing their heads in prayer but even more beautiful if you’d been here in early 2006, when they poured the foundation for the barn, or when we moved all the junk out of the way and pointed that first camera at my wife while she sang “If We Make It Through December” in the fall of 2011. And to know that a year and a half ago, we were bowing our heads in prayer for Joey’s funeral service in that same forty-by-seventy-foot building.

  It has been a hell of a journey to end up with such a heavenly story. I sit in the service and sometimes, just like when we first visited the church in the school, tears will stream down my face. Listening to the incredible songs being sung and the beautiful message being shared, thinking to myself . . .

  Joey would absolutely love this.

  Fire Kids

  Somewhere between heaven . . . and burning in hell.

  She doesn’t believe in God. At least that’s what she tells me.

  Heidi is so much like me it’s scary. No, not in that way . . . I do believe in God. But she’s like me in the way that she questions everything and analyzes life to the nth degree. She is a thinker, just like I am. She wants to know why when someone tells her something is so. It’s just in her nature. So when it comes to faith, she’s gonna take her own path even if from a distance it doesn’t look like any path at all.

  I’ve heard it said that not believing in God is still believing in something. I’m not sure I can completely wrap my brain around the full meaning of that, but I think I understand it enough to know that choosing not to believe is still a choice. And that is, in fact, Heidi’s choice. At least it was the last time I asked her about it. Or the last time she was sitting in the backseat of the car with her boyfriend, both of them talking about the corruption in politics and the same in the church . . . which wasn’t that long ago.

  She’s frustrated by the whole thing, and the truth is, I can’t blame her. There are what seem like a thousand different religions or churches across this country and around world, telling us that they are the “only real truth” and everyone else is wrong. It’s a mess. But, then again, that’s nothing new. It’s always been a mess, or least it has been for hundreds and hundreds of years.

  My hope was that my girls would be filled with faith. Not just faith like I have it but stronger. Deeper, with more conviction and compassion. Heidi has the compassion part, but the faith isn’t something she is interested in.

  “There’s no way that your Jesus is the only way,” she has told me. She usually follows that with, “No disrespect to you or what you believe, Dad . . . but it’s BS.”

  Her boyfriend, Dillon, feels the same way. Raised in Florence, Alabama, by God-fearing, churchgoing parents, Dillon, too, has taken his own path. “I just don’t buy it . . . none of it,” he’s said more than once. Together, Heidi and Dillon have a band they call “Firekid,” which I find kind of funny because according to most Christian scholars, their lack of belief means that they’re gonna burn in hell because they don’t believe the way they’re supposed to.

  I know that’s not funny, and I don’t mean to make light of it, but it is kind of ironic . . . the name Firekid and all. I would be upset if I hadn’t done a lot of fire-kid living myself in the past. There was a time in the late ’80s when I gladly answered, “I belong to the church of human secularists,” when people asked me what church I went to. That seems crazy to me now. I can’t imagine saying those words in a million, gazillion years, but I did. For a couple years. And I was proud of it.

  I feel the same way about Heidi and Dillon as I do about Hopie. I can’t judge them, especially with all the mistakes I’ve made in my life. No matter what Heidi or Dillion does, they’re gonna have a hard time even coming close to the sinning I’ve done in my past. My list of unforgivable things that God has forgiven me for is huge, and Heidi knows it. Heck, everyone knows it. I filled my last book with those mistakes I made.

  So, instead, I’m trying a different approach. I’m just gonna love them. Both of them.

  I’m not sure how yet exactly, but that’s my plan. And it’s not a plan to convert them to what I believe because that’s not my job. My job with them, just like with Hopie and little Indiana, is to love them. Unconditionally.

  Now, that word bothers me . . . unconditionally. Because it’s so broad. It covers so much ground. So much sin. Even mine. But it also inspires me.

  My nature is to give love to those I approve of. To those I, well . . . love. But I’m not sure that’s actually what love is. Love . . . true love . . . is something that you give away generously, and people don’t have to do something to qualify for it, they just get it. So that’s the goal. To love them well.

  For starters, I try to listen. Even when they’re on an anti-Trump or pro-life or imm
igration or whatever rant. I don’t have an opinion. I can give you one (and sometimes I might), but, for the most part, it’s not an educated one. It’s just my thoughts. I purposely don’t watch the news and don’t follow much of anything that’s happening out there in the world. Joey and I decided years ago that we would concentrate on our little world . . . the one inside the walls of this house and the fences around the property. Our “news” might reach all the way across Columbia to the coffee shop that our buddies own or into the drive-in at Lewisburg, but it really doesn’t get much broader than that. Truthfully, it’s not about the geography or size of our little world; it’s about the people in it and what is happening with them. They are who Joey cared about and who I most care about still. They are the world that shapes mine and the one that I can have the biggest impact on.

  Heidi, on the other hand, is all about the world that spans the globe and beyond. The possibility of life on other planets in other dimensions and where science might lead us. That is what she is interested in and what she trusts . . . science. What she doesn’t trust is prosperity gospel preachers and noninclusive churches or people. And she doesn’t trust the Bible.

  What else can you say when someone questions the Good Book?

  But, to be honest, I get it. I get it all. I don’t blame her. I don’t blame either of them. This world is a mess. Everyone preaching love but spewing hatred for each other. That’s why I turn it off. Why Joey and I didn’t have a TV in the house for more than ten years. It was too much. Information overload. Our hearts had started to become numb to it all. And so to protect ourselves, our minds, our hearts . . . we live without it.