Johnny Cash, Redemption and Easter

During his career Johnny cash recorded more than 1500 songs, sold fifteen million albums and was a major influence on Elvis. For ten years he had an addiction to drugs, often taking handfuls at a time.

During this period he went to jail, wrecked cars and lives and ended up in deep depression. In desperation he decided to commit suicide.

His plan was simple: crawl deep into a cave, wait for his flashlight to go dead and then lie down and wait to die. Hours into a dark cavern he set his plan in motion only to have it interrupted in a place that had never seen light.

There in the pitch black he would share that God visited him and pure radiance flooded his soul. The next miracle was finding his way out of the cave without a flashlight. More incredible was finding his mother and June Carter waiting by his car, having driven from California to Tennessee to find him.

Of the cave he would write that the absolute lack of light was appropriate, “for at that moment I was as far from God as I have ever been. My separation from Him, the deepest and most ravaging of the various kinds of loneliness I’d felt over the years, seemed finally complete.”

The Man in Black would choose his clothing as a reminder of where his life had once taken him, and as a way to identify with people still lost in the dark.

In the gospels there is a story about Jesus healing a man who was blind from birth. Jesus had performed this miracle on the Sabbath; something certain religious leaders felt was taboo. They find the man and ask him how his eyes were opened. The Gospel of John records his simple answer, “The man they call Jesus” (John 9).

While in exile Napoleon Bonaparte would share that though he and Alexander and Caesar founded empires by military might, Jesus founded one based upon love, and that millions gave their lives to imitate him. He wrote, “I think I understand something of human nature; and I tell you, all these were men, and I am a man; none else is like Him: Jesus Christ was more than a man.”

The Passion Week finds Jesus spit upon, mocked, punched, beaten, whipped, stripped naked, marched through the streets, called a traitor, put on trial three times and then finally crucified.

He testified that his mission was to show humankind, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12).

Wherever you find yourself today, know there is one who is more than a man who will walk where know one else will walk, talk of things no one else will talk, and whose light shines brightest in the darkest of places.