I know. Anything could happen.

I shouldn't get my hopes up. I should pretend it will be just another day. No big deal.

But I can't. If the Lord's willing and the creek don't rise (and there seems to be little danger of that this summer), I am FINALLY going to hear T. Graham Brown in concert. He will be at The Gospel Barn in LaGrange Saturday night, July 29 at 7 p.m.

I've mentioned The Gospel Barn before in this column. It is one of my new favorite places since we moved to the country two years ago. By the way, if you are ever driving through Greenville on Ga. Highway 27, be sure to stop at The Green Acres Restaurant and try their chicken wings. And, yes, the Mrs. is from New York and her husband is a Meriwether County native. But their wings are out of this world.

Back to the T. Graham Brown concert. Guideposts magazine recently did a cover story on T. Graham and his wife, Sheila, which chronicled his victory over an alcohol problem that dogged his career until five years ago. He gives credit for the victory to God's unconditional love for him, and the love and support of his wife and son.

Brown is a Georgia native and has a sound that is native to nowhere. His music has many times been described as part rhythm & blues, part country, part gospel and all heart. His latest album, “Wine Into Water,” features a bit of it all. The title song is about his victory over alcoholism. Brown himself calls the project “the most honest, truest album I've ever done.”

I thought I was going to hear the singer perform in Nashville a few years ago. He was slated to offer some late night entertainment at a convention I was attending, but didn't show. They said he was ill.

Now, I'm no concert junkie. Don't really care for crowds at all, in fact. But T. Graham gave a concert in Tallahassee, Fla. Saturday night, Feb. 6, 1988 — a concert that I desperately wanted to attend.

I was staying at a hotel a few blocks from Tallahassee Memorial Hospital. As I drove back and forth from the hotel to the hospital I kept hearing the concert promotions on the radio. My sister and I began to fantasize about escaping from the painful death watch in which we were engulfed to go hear T. Graham sing “Tell It Like It Used To Be.”

Of course, we did not leave our father's side. Instead we reminisced about how it “used to be” when we were younger and Daddy was healthy and all was well. In a strange way, T. Graham helped us get through a painful time. And the desire to hear him perform has remained with me.

SO! I have plans once more to hear this gifted performer who spans so many styles and categories with such ease. If you want to hear him too, call 1-800-844-6737 for more information. By the way, I understand that Jake Hess, a Columbus, Ga. native, and The Happy Goodmans will be appearing at the same place Aug. 28.

Now, on another note, I had a call from my sister this morning and we found ourselves in an interesting discussion about how easy it is to misjudge people and how careful we should be about judging folks at all. Then we talked for a minute about how God opens and closes doors. He does that, you know.

And she said to me, “I have a book that I keep readily accessible, near my bed in fact, because the author has a way of driving home the fact that failure may be God's way of saying you are on the wrong road.”

She frequently interviews applicants for jobs with her company. She prides herself on being a good judge of character. Nevertheless, there are those individuals who do not always succeed in her line of work, so they move on. Now, I don't know it for a fact, but I suspect she's told more than one individual who has left the company because they found they could not keep up the pace and perform well, “Failure may be God's way of saying you're on the wrong road.”

You might want to chew on that little piece of advice a while or share it with someone else who needs to hear it. We are all in this thing called life together, you know. Another's success or failure could very easily be our own.

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