The Voice That Called Him Back

In the mid-1960s, Johnny Cash was destroying himself. Amphetamines had hollowed him out — he dropped to 140 pounds, missed concerts, and once nearly died when his Jeep caught fire in a California forest. The man in black was disappearing.

But June Carter refused to let him go. She flushed his pills. She sat with him through the shaking nights of withdrawal. She spoke hard truth when everyone else had walked away. Years later, Cash would say simply, "June saved my life."

Their love became one of music's most enduring stories — he proposed to her on stage in 1968, and they spent thirty-five years making music and life together. When June died in May of 2003, Johnny was shattered. He passed just four months later. Those closest to him said he simply could not bear the world without her.

There is a love like that pursuing every one of us — not from a spouse or a friend, but from the Almighty Himself. Paul writes that while we were still lost in our own destruction, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8). He did not wait for us to get clean first. He came after us at our worst, the way June went after Johnny in his darkest season.

That kind of love is already reaching for you. The only question is whether you will let it in.