Jeff Cassidy
Like so many other people, I accepted Christ and was baptized at a fairly young age…first grade or so. I remember always attending church while growing up. When we came to Spartanburg in 1974, we found a church to get involved in and they had all kinds of activities I remember being a part of each week.
At the ripe old age of ten, Mom asked me if I would be interested in taking guitar lessons. I said sure. At that point, unknown to me…God definitely had a plan for me…and my guitar. I was a natural. I loved to practice…I would practice and play for hours. I tell my kids that back then spending hours playing the guitar was my form of PlayStation or Xbox or “surfing the web”! Several months after starting lessons, my guitar teacher had me singing and playing in my first “rock” band.
My family and I eventually moved on to a new church. Musically, I had grown so much and started singing with the youth choir at our new church and was able to really express my joy about my Lord. As a teenager, I was pretty “normal” (if there is such a thing) but rock music really had its hooks in me…I don’t mean that as a bad thing. It was the rhythms…the beats…and the undeniably all-important killer guitar riffs! And just as any good “rock star” would do, I began letting my hair grow and grow and grow…and grow. You get the picture.
This is where things started heading south. It seemed that the longer my hair got and the more earrings I began to wear, I also began to feel like I was being shunned by people in the church even though I was still there every Sunday…I was still the same me; I just had a different appearance. Well, finally enough was enough…in my mind, I thought I can take a hint when I’m not wanted…I still had my guitar and rock music to lift my spirits for me. So, I quit going to church. I was playing in a new band and we were playing bars and honkytonks or wherever someone would hire us and pay us a few dollars to do it. A few years passed by and my band mates and I heard about a revival at a church in town where the speaker was going to be preaching about and bashing the music that we loved so much…we wanted to hear what he had to say about it so we went to listen.
Well, sure enough…I heard His voice all right…I heard the voice of the Holy Spirit that night and rededicated my life to the Lord!!!
Unfortunately though that didn’t “stick” for too long and without a church home, I once again I found myself drifting away from God and I found myself experimenting with things and putting myself into bad situations which had I continued that approach, it would have eventually led to nothing but a life full of troubles…or something far worse. I was “rocking” all hours of the night and I kept telling myself “I don’t have to be in church. God knows my heart…he knows who I am even if others don’t.” No doubt about it, I was bitter with the “church folks” then. My life was becoming all about playing music and partying. And before I could even blink an eye, I found that my life was more about the partying than even playing the guitar. I still loved my music but basically it became nothing but an excuse for me to party.
My wife Darleen and I were married in 1990 and several years later, about the time our kids were born…two things happened: I put away my guitars to be a father and I began to think about church and God. I mean, how could I not…he had blessed us with two beautiful healthy children. Didn’t they deserve to be taught the word of God and given an opportunity to know Christ and to be saved just as I was when I was their age? But even almost fifteen to twenty years later, I was still bitter, my heart was still heavy and my response was the same…“I don’t have to be in church. God knows my heart…he knows who I am even if others don’t.” Over the years since, we had only attended churches on those “special” occasions mainly for other family members. Then my wife and daughter attended a cheerleading camp at LBBC in 2003. Darleen mentioned that maybe we needed to visit. I was skeptical at first and not real interested but we both agreed to give it a try. Needless to say, our first few visits were unbelievably impressive not to mention spiritually revitalizing! The music during the services was like nothing like I ever remembered hearing in church growing up. I mean, there was an orchestra playing music with the same beats and rhythms similar to the rock music I loved so much!
God began to get His hold on me!
Word got out that I played guitar… but I hadn’t played in well over ten years. The music minister at the time, who I credit greatly for teaching me how to worship God with my music, called and asked me to give it a try. My thought and response was I can’t even read music so I could never consider playing in the orchestra. He convinced me to come by the church and pick up a CD to listen to and then decide. Now, here’s where I got my first glimpse of God’s plan for me really beginning to take shape. One afternoon as I pulled into the church parking lot and was approaching the front of the church, I noticed a dove…not just any dove but a pure white dove. It came into my sight from the steeple and flies half way out the length of the parking lot, makes a u-turn and circles back then disappears back behind the steeple from where it came. At that very moment, I felt my heart stop…I had goose bumps…I thought my eyes were deceiving me. I ran inside and asked if the church had recently released some pure white doves as part of a service or special event…the answer was no. I knew then that God had given me a sign!
After so many years of being away from Him, it was His gesture to me that not only had I found my way back to Him, but that I had found a new home in Lake Bowen Baptist. When I thought I was only visiting a church mainly for my children’s benefit…God knew His reason was for my entire family…but especially for me!!! This was always part of God’s plan for me and it has given me a purpose in my life…playing my guitar, singing God’s praise...serving Him and His purpose with my music in hopes that others may be saved!
God’s peace – Jeff