By the time he was eleven, Johnny Cash had started to sort things out for himself concerning spiritual matters. “I knew there was two distinct ways to go in life,” he wrote in his first autobiography. “The people who had their hearts right—I recognized them as being different from the ones who were playing checkers over at the service station during the church service.”
He sought God’s presence through prayer and music. Songs like “I’ll Fly Away” transported him to another place. “To me, songs were the telephone to heaven, and I tied up the line quite a bit,” Cash reflected.
Johnny attended a revival meeting in Dyess shortly after his twelfth birthday on February 26, 1944. When it came time for the altar call, the choir started singing the hymn “Just as I Am.” In the front row was Cash’s older brother Jack, who he idolized, with his eyes closed as he sang along with the choir.
Up till then, Johnny hadn’t been particularly moved or affected by anything he’d heard that night; in fact, when the song started, he was thinking of cutting out and going home. But all of a sudden he felt his soul touched by the music, the words, and the inevitable choice facing every child of God going back to Adam and Eve: to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, or to reject Him. It was an easy decision. Cash walked to the altar and knelt with the other converts.
I left feeling awfully good that night,” he later recalled, “feeling joy and relief at having made my decision.” He was formally baptized shortly thereafter.
Faith is a wonderful and powerful thing, and young Cash reveled in the peace and contentment it brought him. But he would soon find out that it doesn’t automatically inoculate us from pain, misery, temptation, doubt, pride, and all the other frailties that are our birthright as mere human beings.
