Cash Got Grace

     On November 2, 1967 I was two years old and my grandfather owned a Texaco station in Lafayette Georgia, right down the road from the Walker County jail where Sheriff Ralph Jones had arrested and incarcerated one of America’s most famous musicians, Johnny Cash.  It was huge news in the small North Georgia town, and a story I heard repeated numerous times as I grew up.  I can still hear my Uncle Kenneth today, “You know, I know people who have stayed in the same cell that they put Johnny Cash in.”

     The remainder of his life Cash would point to that jail cell as the place where he accepted his inability to control his behavior and began to understand the gracious nature of God.  Before coming to Lafayette, Cash constantly switched his trust from drugs to his own inner strength.  However, sitting in a jail cell created by his own sin, he was reminded to trust in God’s grace working through him.  Two days after his release Cash walked down the isle of a church in Hendersonville, Tennessee and dedicated his life to Christ. 

     Can I tell you something which has always bothered me and I have never quite understood?  A lot of Christians I grew up around didn’t like Johnny Cash; in fact, a good many insisted that he was never a Christian at all.  He spoke, wrote, and sang about salvation found in Christ for almost forty years.  One of his closest friends was Billy Graham the most famous preacher of his lifetime.  But still, he drove many fellow believers crazy.  Why?  Well, although Cash was a Christian he was never religious.  While he and Billy Graham were indeed close, he had other friends also; friends such as Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and Kris Kristofferson.  Although he sang about Christ, he also sang about sin, pain, and loneliness.  Cash ‘got’ grace and, to be perfectly honest, grace can drive the religious crazy sometimes.  For this reason, I believe, allot of ‘Christians’ didn’t like Cash very much.  His authenticity and honesty made the religious look, for lack of a better word, hypocritical, and religious hypocrites tend to not like it when they are revealed for who they really are.

     Denis Haack writes that “Cash never hid the myriad struggles in his life - addiction, divorce, failure - but faced them with disarming honesty.”  He “believed in grace, because he had experienced it, in his marriage to June Carter, in agonizing recovery from addiction, and supremely in Christ, whom he worshiped as Lord and Savior.” 

     On the cover of one of his last recordings Johnny Cash stands with one dog at his right and another at his left.  One is black with a white stripe and the other is white with a black stripe.  Cash named them after the two dynamic forces of each of our lives:  Sin and Redemption.  He told Rolling Stone, “When I was really bad, I was not all bad.  When I was trying to be good, I could never be all good.  There would be a black stripe going through.”  Sounds a lot like Romans chapter seven to me.  Sounds like a man who ‘got’ grace, a man who understood that each of us are sinners saved only because of the gracious gift of a merciful God.  I wish more of us understood the gospel as well as this frail, fallen, sinful man did.  Johnny Cash ‘got’ grace, have you?

*Resources used for this post were:  The Man Called Cashby Steve Turner.  “Johnny Cash Clouded by Pain, Colored by Grace.”  by Denis Haack in By Faith July/August, 2005. “Cash Talks Love, God and Murder” Rolling Stone, June 30, 2000.