Ryman Auditorium

SOME OF THE THINGS I love, like the Ryman Auditorium, I’m going to love forever.

And while that may not change, I do. I live in the Harvest House. I am healthier in body and heart than I’ve been in a long time. There’s a really kind single man who seems to enjoy getting to know me (and I feel the same about him). And in all those ways, I am different.

I am loving better than I’ve ever loved.

But I find myself wanting to write a chapter of this book about the Ryman Auditorium, because of what it meant to see Drew Holcomb perform there once again. And I’m laughing because I write about the Ryman in every single one of my books.

And I know me. I’m going to love that room forever, and I am here to tell you the most fun in life comes from loving what you love and letting yourself love all the way in and withholding only when wisdom says to, not when fear is speaking. Yet I’m embarrassed to write about the Ryman again, but there is just something about the way that place holds me. It’s not possible, and I roll my eyes even as the words cross my mind, but it feels like the Ryman loves me too. Like it’s home in some ways.

What is it about the Eden I’ve lost that I find there?

CONNOR AND I sat at breakfast this morning, sitting in eight years of friendship, and we talked about some new decisions he’s been making and the filters he is using. I’ve watched him grow from a college dude to a man, and life just isn’t as easy for him (or me) as it was eight years ago. It made me sad to look across the table at this man who is no longer a boy. This man who has experienced some deep hurts and real wounds that have told him EDEN IS LOST. His frame is the same as when we met. He is still a muscular, tall, athletic man, but the simple days aren’t in his eyes anymore. The tenderness that came from trusting has been replaced with an understanding. And nothing is sadder than that understanding, the one that settles deep into your insides, the understanding of how the world works. An understanding that the search for Eden is current and urgent and sometimes disappointing.

But even as I listened to him, I didn’t want him to live any different. I didn’t want to grab his face and yell “LOVE ANYWAY! GO FOR IT! DO NOT BE SCARED!” Instead, I said, “Yeah, this is sad but this is growing up and it’s just part of it.” I pretty much told him it’s time to search for Eden. But I’m worried there are places he is leaving, where he won’t go back, because the understanding has told him the search is not worth the effort.

SOMETIMES THE SEARCH for Eden is going to require new places, new friends, new experiences. The fun of jumping out of an airplane is something most people only experience once. But there’s always a chance to come back to the places where you felt love before.

That can go sideways. I know. I went on a date at my very favorite restaurant and while that date was great, the relationship wasn’t. And in ways, though it was a safe and sacred and favorite place, chock-full of great memories from years of time spent around the tables, there was a scar upon it after that relationship ended. And I had a choice. I could never go there again. I could let that be the very last time I ever crossed the threshold of the Loveless Cafe. But a life without those biscuits and country ham is not a life I want to live. And I’m just not okay with giving away places that I deeply love.

That decision—“I will not leave that place in my memory”—is one made with the understanding in place. It was a decision that took courage and willingness. It was an adult decision with a childlike view of the way the world could work, even if it doesn’t always.

Because there are places that are lost forever, like my childhood home, so shouldn’t we go back to the ones that we can? Even if it hurts?

I ALMOST LOST the Ryman once.

I was in a section I never sit in anyway, so I should have known. The musician onstage, the one I bought a ticket to see, he and I have a complicated relationship. He doesn’t know that, of course, I just know it. I know it because the music from one of his albums walked every cobblestone street of Edinburgh, Scotland, with me when I lived there a few years ago. His music has since changed direction a bit, and while I was excited to see him live, I knew a new album had released and my guess was it would be a night of new music much more than the album that had meant so much to me.

There was a man in the audience, a man who had bought one ticket by himself and was sitting by himself, a few sections to the right of me. And he and I were in a complicated relationship as well. The difference is he knew it too.

I spent the whole show worrying about him, the man a few sections over, and worrying about the music, from the man onstage, and wondering why it all felt off to me. I wanted the old understanding we had. I wanted the old album that the musician had created that was such a good friend to me in a foreign city. And I wanted to be in that old life, the one across the ocean with the people across the ocean, because I wasn’t worried like this there.

But in that moment, things were off. And it all fell apart with the man in the other section the next day. It fell all the way apart.

Somehow I knew that was going to happen the night before at the Ryman. I kept thinking about it as the music played. And I didn’t know how I’d go back there, to my favorite room in Nashville, because when it was all said and done, something was taken from me that night that I was never going to get back.

WHEN DREW HOLCOMB first came to my office to record the podcast episode that would release the same week as his album Dragons (episode 160), I forgot to hit record on his microphone. He sat down across the table from me and I hit record on the machine but forgot to fire up his microphone specifically. So after we talked deep and wide for an hour, none of the material was usable.

He’s a gracious man. When I called and told him that we would need to do the show again, he quickly made it fit into his schedule. When he arrived at my office, I had a bottle of Belle Meade Bourbon awaiting him because, my word, who agrees to do the same podcast conversation twice?

But the second time was actually better. Way better. And we talked about our experiences at the Ryman Auditorium. And it just seems true, for me as an audience member as well as for Drew as an artist, that this place holds something special.

I travel and speak in places a lot as part of my job. I’ve been in hundreds of churches over the last seven years. Some I can call to mind immediately and tell you a story about my time there. Some I remember when I walk through the door and see familiar faces or rooms. Some, I’m sorry to say, escape me altogether until my memory is jogged by a friend.

A week after our second podcast recording, Drew was playing the Ryman. I bought two tickets and a friend and I went and sat in section 15, row B.

I didn’t realize how close I felt to losing the Ryman until I listened to Drew sing and realized that room still had a place in my heart. It had been years since I thought about the scar on the Ryman Auditorium, but it had also been a while since I deeply cared about an experience there. I had been to shows between the two, but I couldn’t tell you who played or who went with me to the concerts. In all that time, there isn’t a show that totally stands out, except the one where I stood on the stage.

IN BETWEEN THE SHOW when I thought I lost the Ryman and the show where I knew it was found again, I got to stand onstage for the first time ever. My friend Dave Barnes did a concert and comedy show, and afterward, when the only people left in the room were our friends and a few ushers shooing us out, I walked from the back of stage left and up to the front of the stage. All the lights were up in the lower level and in the balcony. The room felt totally empty; the stained glass windows in the back were dark. But it didn’t matter. It was so special.

As I stood on that stage, I scrolled through my memories of the best shows I had seen there. There were many moments etched in my memory so much deeper and truer than that night that left a scar. When Mumford & Sons played the room, the first time Dave Barnes headlined, when Ingrid Michaelson sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and when Ira Glass performed a live podcast. Secret Sisters once spun the room with their harmonies, and The Belonging Co worship night I attended has never left me. In that moment, I knew I had to reclaim that place.

It was too much like Eden to me. It holds me too tightly and finds me on just the right nights. There are too many moments when I’m carried up and away. There are too many memories full of love to let this place go because of one bad memory.

I didn’t realize how close I was to doing that until Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors took the stage and took my breath away.

It’s that balance I’m always trying to find, that line I’m working not to cross. It’s the line between “There is nothing good in this place for you anymore, you should walk away” and the line that tells me to redefine the place and grow memories there again.

MY CHURCH SPLIT when I was a freshman in college, and my family left along with many others that year. It was strange for that to happen while I was away at the University of Georgia. The place I grew up attending would still have services every Sunday and take their students to camp every summer and serve Wednesday night supper in the Family Life Hall. It would all keep going. I just would never be back there. I lost that place in a way I could never have dreamed.

And we were church kids, you know? I used to say, “If the doors were unlocked and the Coke machine was taking quarters, I was there.” There is no place, besides the home on Ebenezer Road, that holds more memories for me than that church building. So it wasn’t that a Sunday morning tradition would change. It was that twenty years later, I can still drive by it, right in the middle of town, and look at any window and tell you what room that is and where it leads and what my experience was there.

Long after my family had left the church, I drove by and cut through the parking lot for some reason. I noticed the doors to the student area, where I had spent countless hours of my middle and high school years, were propped open. So I decided to trespass. I parked my car and walked into the VERY OPEN DOORS. (I did not even touch them and the statute of limitations on trespassing has long passed anyway.) I slowly crossed the threshold on this average Tuesday afternoon and expected an alarm to go off or a person to tell me to leave. But neither happened. So I just kept walking. I stuck my head into my eighth-grade Sunday school classroom, I walked into the bathroom where I had bullied someone and they never came back to church (I feel terrible about it), I passed the place beside the kitchen where some guys had been roughhousing and busted through the wall, I stepped into the room where we had small group for years.

And it didn’t feel like anything. I had this moment. I remember it like it was yesterday, though it wasn’t (again, statute of limitations). The visit felt empty and the building felt empty and it didn’t give me any of the feels or full-heart moments that I expected. It was all empty.

Losing a place happens. It doesn’t cost the memories. It just costs the hope of what could still be there.

BUT AS FOR the Ryman Auditorium, Drew was good and right and I didn’t lose that place. He sang songs from his album “Dragons” and it’s one of the best written and performed albums I’ve ever heard. The audience and I sang at the top of our lungs and I cried once. I looked around the room, sitting in a familiar section with a familiar view, and thanked God for places that hold more than just humans and pews. They hold memories and they hold space and they hold who we were, who we are, and what we love.