Cash

I just read this article by Ted Olsen from Christianity Today on Johnny Cash, what an amazing life story!! I wanted to share it with you:

"How did the coolest man in the music industry become that way while singing about Jesus and the cross?
The most obvious answer is that Cash was nothing if not authentic. "I believe what I say, but that don't necessarily make me right," he told Rolling Stone in 2000. "There's nothing hypocritical about it. There is a spiritual side to me that goes real deep, but I confess right up front that I'm the biggest sinner of them all." (This "chief among sinners" attitude is what drew him to the Apostle Paul, about whom he wrote the novel The Man in White in 1986.)
The attitude was encouraged by one of his best friends, Billy Graham, who advised him to keep singing "Folsom Prison Blues" and his other outlaw tunes with the gospel songs. "Don't apologize for who you are and what you've done in the past," he told Cash, who was ten considering becoming a full-time evangelist. "Be who you are and do what you do."
Cash had integrity in the moral sense, certainly. Once sober, he made up concerts that he'd skipped or fudged during his amphetamine binges, for example. But Cash had integrity in the sense of being a whole. In his liner notes for American Recordings, Cash lists 32 subjects he loves in songs, from railroads and whiskey to Mother and larceny. But in all these songs he was really singing about one thing: the connection between sin and redemption. He saw that on either side of sin was enjoyment and death, and that on either side of redemption was Death and Enjoyment.
Cash never denied the pleasure of sin, and many songs reflect that pleasure honestly-but unlike those in other outlaw tunes, the subjects of Cash's songs rarely sin without consequences. "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,' regretfully sings the blue man in Folsom Prison. "I took a shot of cocaine and I shot my woman down," sings the prisoner of "Cocaine Blues."
Even Cash's love songs carry the theme: In "I Walk the Line," he worries about his own infidelity. In "Jackson", he tries to cover it up. "Ring of Fire", written by June Carter Cash an sung by Johnny while the two were flirting but married to others, carries unsubtle references to damnation.
But for Cash, the worst consequence of sin wasn't what happened to the sinner. Nowhere is this clearer than in the final moments of the MTV award-nominated "Hurt" video, where the lyrics "I will let you down/I will make you hurt" are illustrated with Christ's crucifixion.

In a 2000 interview with Rolling Stone, Cash compared drugs' spiritual consequences with their physical and emotional devastation: "To put myself in such a low state that I couldn't communicate with God, there's no lonelier place to be. I was separated from God, and I wasn't even trying to call on him. I knew that there was no line of communication."
Though he'd professed Christ at age 12, Cash wrote that by 1967, "there was nothing left of me...I had drifted so far away from God and every stabilizing force in my life that I hfelt there was no hope." He decided to crawl into Nickajack Cave on the Tennessee River, get lost, and die. "The absolute lack of light was appropriate," he wrote. "My separation from Him, the deepest and most ravaging of the various kinds of loneliness I'd felt over the years, seemed finally complete.
"It wasn't. I thought I'd left Him, but He hadn't left me. I felt something very powerful start to happen to me, a sensation of utter peace, clarity, and sobriety...Then my mind started focusing on God. He didn't speak to me-He never has, and I'll be surprised if He ever does-but...I became conscious of a very clear, simple idea: I was not in charge of my own destiny. I was not in charge of my own death."
He found his way out of the cave, determined to get clean and sober. He made a good start, and he's been honest about the slips and relapses along the way-and not just with drugs. "They just kind of hold their distance," he told Rolling Stone. "I could invited them in: the sex demon, the drug demon. But I don't. They're very sinister. You got to watch 'em. They'll sneak up on you. All of a suden there'll be a beautiful little Percodan laying there, and you'll want it."
"The connection with God makes it all worth it, he said: "The greatest joy of my life was that I no longer felt separated from Him. Now He is my Counselor, my Rock of Ages to stand upon."
Cash, many obituaries suggested, seemed obsessed with death. It was something he denied, "I am not obsessed with death; I'm obsessed with living," he said in 1994. "The battle against the dark one and the clinging to the right one is what my life is about."
Living, he knew, was death to self. His favorite verse, he often said, was Romans 8:13 "For if you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live."
A paradox? Not to Cash, who encountered death shortly before accepting an altar call. His brother Jack, two years his senior, fell on a table saw, cut from ribs to groin. "Mama, don't cry over me," he said, as Johnny and the rest of the family stood by. "I was going down a river, and there was a fire on one side and heaven on the other. I was crying, 'God, I'm supposed to go to heaven. Don't you remember? Don't take me to the fire.' All of a sudden, I turned, and now, Mama, can you hear the angels singing?"
She said that she couldn't, and Jack squeezed her hand.
"Oh, mama, I wish you could hear the angels singing," he said, and died.
Like Christ, Cash felt no shame or theological dissonance at crying in the face of death. But make no mistak: he never forgot the joy waiting on the other side.
Now, on the other side of the river, the Man in Black wears glorious white, reunited with his brother and face-to-face with his Lord."