shareyourstorynow.org

MALE VOICE 1: Actually I think Joey’s being very modest, but some of the things that he’s been testifying about he actually wrote a song about, which is probably one of my favorite songs on our last album, Feels Good, and it’s called “More Then Ever.”

MALE VOICE 2: Yeah.

MALE VOICE 1: It speaks to all the same issues, all the issues that we’re talking about, realizing I don’t have the power to overcome this stuff. And I need You more than anything else in this world. And it’s a song that kind of expresses the desperation of coming to the end of your road, but also realizing, okay, I have no other choice but You and I’m going full ahead with You. If everything else breaks down I’m going full ahead with what You said and I’m going to trust what You said. And if You say that I can overcome then I’m going to overcome.

And that probably came at one of the lowest points in my life personally. And I really didn’t even want to record it. The guy that I wrote it with, Haller [phonetic] and Hill, I told him at the time, I was like Hal I can’t, I don’t know if I want… ‘Cause I mean there’s transparency and then there’s like bearing all. And this is a bear all song. But that’s what connects people to you is the fact that they realize he’s just as screwed up as I am, wow, how about that. And then they listen to you. And that crosses ethnicities and nationalities. Everybody’s struggling with all the same stuff.

And so I guess those kind of songs made up the majority of our last project. And that’s why I feel so much about it because everybody wrote honestly, and that’s a hard thing to do. And then even harder is to live honestly after the album is mixed. That’s probably the greatest thing, but we have seen the greatest number of victories, even in this last project.

You know, it’s kind of crazy growing up in a pastoral family. I was heavily impacted I guess when our parents divorced. For a pastor’s family to divorce is an absolute no-no, and so a lot of things got planted into my life personally during that time, that dark period in our lives. One of things that I guess a lot of men might struggle with is pornography, and that’s when that seed was planted into my life personally. I think when my parents divorced, the enemy kind of used that to say, “You won’t do anything greater than what happened to them. They’re human and you’re human, and don’t think that you’re going to overcome this.”

Well, it’s interesting to me that a lot of those seeds didn’t actually explode above the surface until I got into Take 6, and I realized that’s when the whole pornography thing just really exploded in my life. You know, traveling on the road and going back to hotels and not really being accountable to anybody, it’s almost like bacteria that grows in those little corners in places, and that’s how it grew in my life, and I remember starting to feel, “Man, I’m not going to overcome this. This is pretty deeply rooted.”

But another thing that happened was I got married, and I prayed and prayed, “God, don’t let me drag this thing into my marriage.” But, you know, those kind of sins are going to follow you wherever you go, no matter how much you try to put a stop to it, until you turn it over to Jesus Christ. I think when I got into my marriage I started seeing a lot of my fears manifesting themselves. You know, that this marriage is not going to make it, either because I’m not any better than my parents.

And one time when I was just out on the floor just bawling, I was flipping to a chapter when I got up and just flippantly flipping through the chapter, and it was 1 Peter 5:10, and he said to me specifically about my marriage, it basically says, “The God of all grace, after you have suffered for awhile, he’ll establish you, perfect you, strengthen you.”

Four things. And immediately the enemy came in, “That doesn’t apply to you. That’s not even talking about marriage. How can you sit there and think that”–he just nailed me, and kept trying to nail me, and God was like “I’m giving you this promise.” And from that point on I literally had to believe what God said in spite of how I felt, because my depressive side always told me through my feeling, “You’re not going to overcome this. You can’t deal with this, you can’t overcome.”

But God doesn’t work in the realm of feeling. Faith always steps outside of the realm of feeling, and belief is always outside of feeling. So if you really believe that, you can know that he says this and however he decides to work it out, I go to bed every night knowing for a fact, He told me it’s going to be established, perfected, strengthened, settled. I’m going to suffer for awhile. He’s already told me I’m going to make it through. Now I’ve got to believe that thing.