7
Cornbread Crumbs

Most insurance companies were avoiding us like the plague, which limited our ability to purchase a vehicle to travel in, so we decided to rent. The RV we rented came from another couple in the music industry who also traveled with their children. They let us rent their home on wheels while they were on sabbatical from road-life. This was a huge gift. The RV was smallish and older, but brimming with life. By the looks of our luggage and junk food, we could have passed for a tribe of eighth grade girls headed to band camp. Five band members, a nanny, a cute baby (who was only four days post-surgery), and a driver. We were a motley, excited crew.

There were enough clothes on board to open a Goodwill store. My type A man prepared the RV as if it were a submarine that would not emerge from the deep for a year. Kitchen appliances, vacuum cleaner, coat hangers, cups, cleaning supplies. Anything our daughter might possibly need tucked away into her own magical wonderland in the back bedroom. Toys, books, stuffed animals, movies, and a makeshift Pack ’n Play Ryan created by using baby bumpers on the RV’s built-in bed so Annie and I could safely spend time together as we drove.

The excitement in leaving the past behind and facing a new adventure was gearing up in our home on wheels. Taking pictures, eating junk food, making spring tour predictions, and planning out practical jokes—we felt like teenagers headed to summer camp. The first drive, on day one of the tour, took us from Albuquerque to Phoenix. The six of us, plus baby, spent much of the morning in the front lounge talking about the album we had just finished recording and flipping through radio stations to see if anyone was playing our new single yet. It felt like the escape I so desperately hoped it would be. I soaked in every glorious moment.

I suppose that’s why I didn’t notice that somewhere in the desert between New Mexico and Arizona the RV started feeling a bit warm and driving a bit sluggish. Perhaps the joy of the moment helped us discount the smell of diesel fumes blanketing the inside of our home on wheels. Perhaps that’s why none of us seemed to be alarmed, or even notice, when the RV refused to creep past the forty miles per hour it was traveling. Slow decay is hard to spot and even harder to acknowledge.

We were in the middle of the desert when the heat began to bear down on us. The nearest city was Flagstaff. The last hour of the drive the RV hovered at thirty miles an hour. The nanny vomited the entire time. We were crawling at a torturous pace, on a torturous drive, and had made a torturous career choice. By this point it was undeniable that we were decaying. If at one point we felt like teenagers headed to summer camp, we now felt like full-grown adults waiting in a hospital as someone we loved died. No one spoke.

We knew we had to make it to a city where the RV could be brought back to life, but the conditions were bleak. With each breath of exhaust fumes in, I let out a breath of defeat. I was suffocating. Weariness, anger, and hopelessness coursed through my lungs. Really, Lord? My anger was palpable. It was one thing to remain faithful to a calling when my life was the only one on the line. But now Annie’s was too. I had never known such guilt.

Our eleven-month-old beautiful little girl, who never asked to be put on airplanes and deserved better than a life lived in the back of an RV, was breathing in the exhaust fumes too. That little girl, on the heels of surgery, with big blue eyes and a smile that changed every orbit she entered, was coughing and sweaty too. The smoke, fumes, headaches, blurry eyes—those were hers too. How could I be doing this to her? What kind of mom allows this to happen to their child?

I was suffocating on the fumes. But what was really choking the air out of my soul was the overwhelming guilt I felt for dragging my daughter into my own cursed existence. In the heat of that muggy, broken RV, I began to fight the final blows of a battle I knew I was going to lose.

We made it to Flagstaff before we finally broke down on the side of the highway, with seven sweaty adults, a baby, and a busted RV.

I did what any mom would have done if she were stranded on the side of the highway.

I googled local churches and started calling until I got someone on the line.

Through tears and absolute authority I said, “Hi. My name is Jenny. I’m a Christian band. I mean, I’m in a Christian band. I mean, I AM A CHRISTIAN and my baby and I are stranded on the side of your highway. And since we are both Christians, YOU ARE MORALLY OBLIGATED to come pick us up!”

Two churches put me on hold. Indefinitely. But one sweet lady, unafraid of my completely psychotic story and voice, said, “Honey, my husband drives a white pickup. He’ll be over there to fetch you in just a bit.”

And he came. The man morally obligated to pick up the Christians on the side of the highway came! He took us girls to the local Cracker Barrel, and he carted the boys off to the airport so they could get rental cars. The manager at Cracker Barrel, God love him, let me set up shop in part of the restaurant that wasn’t being used. The employees were all angels to the slightly crazy woman and her cute baby.

And my eleven-month-old baby crawled around on the floor while I constantly swatted pieces of cornbread crumbs out of her hands and wiped tears and snot off my own chin. Based on all those pretty little books at Barnes & Noble, this was not what to expect for my baby’s first year. This was not what it was supposed to look like when I listened to a holy voice that said, Come follow Me. This was not what I imagined when I decided to chase my dream of writing music that would change the world. This was not what other successful artists looked like. None of it was going the way it was supposed to go.

Tear by tear, cornbread crumb after cornbread crumb, a quiet despair overcame me. This wasn’t the dream. Good thing I learned when I was a little girl, from the strongest man I knew, that sometimes dreams crash and burn. Because I was crashing and about to burn—literally.