From the Mouth of a Cave

In 1967, Johnny Cash crawled into Nickajack Cave near Chattanooga, Tennessee, with every intention of never coming out. Years of amphetamine and barbiturate addiction had hollowed him out. He had been arrested seven times. His first marriage had collapsed. The man whose voice once commanded stages across America now weighed barely 150 pounds and wanted to disappear into the darkness.

He crawled deep into that limestone labyrinth until his flashlight gave out. And there, in total blackness, something shifted. Cash later described feeling the presence of God in that cave, a quiet certainty that his life was not yet finished, that the Almighty still had work for him to do. He turned around and began crawling back toward a faint breath of wind and light. When he emerged, June Carter and his mother were waiting at the entrance, as if they had known.

Cash got clean. He rebuilt his life, his faith, his music. The man who crawled into a cave to die walked out and spent the next three decades singing about grace with the authority of someone who had tasted the alternative.

Redemption rarely looks like a single dramatic moment. More often, it begins in the darkest place we have ever been, when we finally stop running and let God meet us there. The same voice that found Johnny Cash in that cave calls to each of us: "You are not finished yet. Turn around. I am the light at the mouth of every cave you will ever enter."