All your life, you will be faced with a choice. You can choose love positivity and gratitude that things aren’t worse or hate negativity and bitterness that things aren’t better. I choose love positivity and gratitude that things aren’t worse.
The fire and excitement may be gone now that we don’t go out there and sing them anymore, but the ring of fire still burns around you and I, keeping our love hotter than a pepper sprout.
Gospel music was the thing that inspired me as a child growing up on a cotton farm, where work was drudgery and it was so hard that when I was in the field I sang all the time.
The things that have always been important: to be a good man, to try to live my life the way God would have me, to turn it over to Him that His will might be worked in my life, to do my work without looking back, to give it all I’ve got, and to take pride in my work as an honest performer.
You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.
I knew that when I left there at the age of 18, I wouldn’t be back. And it was common knowledge among all the people there that when you graduate from high school here, you go to college or go get a job or something and do it on your own.
