Words of Wisdom from Jimmy Dougan

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Our family watched A League of Their Own the other night (still a good movie, by the way) and there’s this moment where Tom Hanks tells Geena Davis that baseball is “supposed to be hard. If it was easy, everyone would do it. The ‘hard’ is what makes it great.”

At the end of every Christmas tour we all sit around and play “Highs and Lows,” naming the high points and low points of the month. The highs are easy to come up with; the lows are tricky because the real lows (for me, anyway) aren’t the sorts of things you can just blab about in a group of people. But in 2014, everybody had the same low.

About halfway through the tour, you see, the bus broke down. In Texas. If you’ve never done a tour on a bus, you should know that it’s the one piece of equipment that everyone on the tour relies on heavily not just for their comfort or their transportation, but for their one semblance of continuity in a constantly changing situation. Having the bus break down is sort of like getting a bad leak in your roof on the day that all your family arrives for Christmas; it’s not the end of the world, but it’s a huge pain in the rear. The only way for that many people to do that many shows that many miles apart in that many days is on a twelve-bunk bus. We finish the show, load the trailer, get on the bus, and sleep while the driver (who has been sleeping all day) gets us to the next city. It’s a luxury, yes, but it’s also a necessity. We rely on the bus driver. And the bus.

So that night we went to bed in our bunks after a show without knowing if the mechanic could fix the problem in time to get us on the road. I woke up the next morning, staggered out of my bunk, and looked out the bus window to see not the church where we were supposed to be but the same hotel parking lot where we were the night before. That meant the bus was dead in the water. It also meant that we were about to enter a logistical nightmare. Harold, Stu, and Todd (sound engineer, lighting director, and tour manager, respectively) bore the brunt of the nightmare, because it became their job to figure out how to get 11 musicians and a whole mess of gear to the next show. I’ll spare you the details, but I can tell you it involved a U-Haul truck, two church vans, a six-hour drive, and us setting up, sound checking, and starting the concert in about a 45 minute window. It was intense, and this is me giving a virtual high-five to Harold, Stu, and Todd for making it happen.

That night after the concert we were waiting for our repaired tour bus, our home-on-wheels, to arrive and carry our weary selves to the next show (another six hours away, since we were in Texas and everything in Texas is six hours away), when we got the news that the bus hadn’t been repaired. Not only that, a new bus wouldn’t get to Texas until the next day. To make matters even worse, the next show was a double-header—a show at 4:00 and another at 7:00. What did that mean, you ask? It meant that we couldn’t sleep that night. We squeezed into another church van like clowns at a circus and drove through the dark highways of Texas to Dallas, where we had to set everything up and play not one but two concerts. This is your friendly reminder that we aren’t spring chickens. Most of us are moms and dads in their late thirties and early forties, not college kids on their first road trip.

Here’s the point: we did it. We played both shows, the crowds were effusive, and when the bus finally arrived and we climbed on late that night we were more of a band than we had ever been. At the end of the tour when we named our highs and lows, guess what everybody’s low was? “Those days in Texas when the bus broke down,” we all said. “That was miserable.” Then it came time for the highs. After a few moments someone said, “My favorite memory was when we were driving through the night and we sat up front in the van and sang country songs to stay awake.” “Playing Catch Phrase in the back of the church van.” “When we finished that second show on no sleep and we walked backstage to the sound of the crowd singing the doxology, and we cried.” Those few days tightened our bond like nothing else had in years. It would have been easy to write off the bus breakdown as the ultimate low and move on, but upon reflection we all realized that the high and the low were the same memory.

The hard is what makes it great.

I sat down a few days ago to record my memories of 2015. My initial impulse was to write down all the good stuff, the successes and the happy surprises. Then I started writing down the bad stuff, and I felt a pang of guilt because I was, more or less, complaining. Then I began to see all the ways the bad memories had shaped me and my family, the way they had given birth to redemptive moments. Remembering the good is important, but you can too easily paint a false picture. Remembering the bad can turn into a litany of complaints. The trick is to remember it all, and to remember the hard stuff in the right way, because sometimes the bad is where the great is hiding.

Andrew Peterson is a singer-songwriter and author. Andrew has released more than ten records over the past twenty years, earning him a reputation for songs that connect with his listeners in ways equally powerful, poetic, and intimate. As an author, Andrew’s books include the four volumes of the award-winning Wingfeather Saga, released in collectible hardcover editions through Random House in 2020, and his creative memoir, Adorning the Dark, released in 2019 through B&H Publishing.


1 Comment

  1. Kathy Benton

    Andrew, I love how you closed this. So very true, with echoes of “After the Last Tear Falls…”
    I rediscovered your music over the last year as I went back to the treasure of Rich Mullins’ music, seeking music with depth and truth, understanding, encouragement and edification, that I could sink into and relate to.
    Your songs resonate with me so often, and, as a new Rabbit Room member, I’m not surprised to see that your blog posts do as well.
    2015 was a tough year. Lots of loss, including our sweet 26 year old daughter-in-law to cancer and the sudden loss of the wonderful, 18 year old deeply committed Christian son of close friends…
    Also, lots of facing regrets and hoping and praying for redemption and restoration as I approach 55 years on this planet, knowing that my youngest son has turned his back on God…
    As a distance runner, I can so identify with how you closed this post. The must difficult moments during last Sunday’s marathon, when I was desperately rehearsing Phil. 4:13 and Joshua 1:9 to myself fearing that I wouldn’t finish, or wouldn’t finish strong, are already “old tales,” even small victories to thank God and my friends for, only a week later.
    And I know that those tears shed over the last year will be “old tales” as well, in “the blink of an eye.”
    Thank you for your music, which, like the friends who popped up over the last 8.26 miles to encourage me helped me, you have helped me, by the grace of God, to not only get through a lot, but to sing and praise through it too. Your songs helped give me “faith to be strong, and strength to be faithful.” (I love those words from the song, that I have prayed “with you” nearly every day for the past four months for myself, my son, his wife’s family and my dear friends…) Thank you for being one of the “poets I have known.”

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