Recently, I had the distinct pleasure of catching up with Jenny Simmons who recently finished her first book, The Road to Becoming. You might know her from her band Addison Road however, these days she’s touring solo and sharing the crazy story of a dream that came true but came crashing down suddenly at the height of its record sales. In our hour conversation, through the sing-song twang of her perfect-pitched voice, I found myself crying and laughing with her as she told me story after story of heartache, redemption and the in between that lives within the two.
1. We’re so excited about your new book, The Road to Becoming! What compelled you to write the road to becoming? Were there people in your life that encouraged the idea for the book or was it a labor of love you had in mind for some time?
Well before I was an author I was a musician first so the book was definitely not something I had in mind, which is all the more perfect as to why it now exists. I was in a band for eleven years with my husband called Addison Road and the book starts where the band ends which was a pretty unfortunate end. Relationally, we’re all still the best of friends but we had this horrible year where everything that we owned was stolen four different times and we ended up bankrupt and unable to keep doing what we were doing with the band. It was pretty shocking because we had a No. 1 single on radio, sold 100,000 albums and we were doing sold-out tours. In all respect we were at the top of our game doing what we all dreamt of doing and what we thought we were created to do and then it just suddenly unraveled. So the book was born out of the unraveling of my dreams and I wrote it because a year or two after the band disbanded, I had to keep performing. I had to get the band out of debt so I would perform and I would tell the story of what it was like to watch everything I had hoped and dreamed for unravel and the spiritual journey on the other side of that. There were so many people that resonated with my story and would come up to me in tears after these shows and say “thank you for giving me permission to grieve” or “thank you for giving me permission to be lost” and because so many people resonated with it I thought, I’ve got write this down. People definitely did encourage the process and would say, “you have to write this into a book, people need to know it’s okay to walk through these seasons” so I wrote it to let people know it’s okay to walk through it.
2. Love that, “giving people permission to grieve”. In regards to grieving, I heard an interview where you spoke about the ways in which Jesus took time to grieve and that we often times rush past grief by distracting ourselves. Grief is so hard to press into, to sit and feel, so again thank you for writing the book and encouraging us to have that permission.
The hard part is that we don’t give ourselves permission to do that. Other people do a little bit better job of giving us permission but for me it was the next stage after the loss I had experienced; being lost and not really knowing what to do with my life next. That’s what I found most people around me didn’t really know how to handle. They wanted to fix me really fast because they were uncomfortable with this concept that I didn’t know what to do next. And I could have rushed it and ended up doing something I wasn’t meant to do or created to do and hated. I think a lot of people do that, they just want to put a band aid on it so they just rush into the next season and end up making terrible decisions that could have been avoided if we had the courage to sit in the lostness. Also, I think the people around us don’t want us to do sit and be lost, they want us to get jobs and be productive and be happy again because what does it say about God if He doesn’t fix it right away? But actually God doesn’t offer to fix it right away, He offers to sit with us in it and be present. In my circumstance, He didn’t say, “Here let me fix it and make it all better for you.” Often times, He doesn’t automatically fix it for people but we can rest assured He will always show up.
3. Earlier, you said the book started where the band ended. I find that idea really profound; that things can be born out of loss. Are there other losses that you’ve experienced but have given way to new life?
Yeah, so this is going to be more than you want to know. Last year at this time my sister was pregnant with twins, their names were Maggie and Ellen, two little girls. They were born October 2nd and passed away right after they were born. I’m actually in the middle of writing my next book, which talks exactly about that: life that comes out of death. As an artist, I especially see a lot of death having had the opportunity to tour the country. You see a lot of people healed from cancer but then you see a lot of people that don’t beat it this side of Heaven so as a traveler you see the good endings and the bad. For my family, losing Maggie and Ellen was the hardest loss we’ve had to walk through. But on the other side of it, there’s just no other way to say it except to say we’ve seen profoundly orchestrated love and care for our family that we would have never experienced. Life doesn’t spring up right away, you have to learn how to live after loss and keep breathing and keep getting up out of bed. It’s in those little tiny moments of faithfulness and courage and bravery to keep living that you realize the life around you is keeping you afloat and giving you something to live for.
4. My grandfather just left for Heaven this past May and he was my favorite person and one of very few men I’ve been able to respect; so grief is familiar territory for me right now. While I know there isn’t a formula or anything, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to grieve well. I’m curious, how have you witnessed others grieving well?
I think there are several really good examples. First of all, Sheryl Sanberg, who’s the vice president of Facebook, recently lost her husband very suddenly on a family vacation. She wrote a blog a month after his funeral, which went viral, and I found it to be so profound as she discusses the Jewish tradition for grieving. The day she wrote this was the end of the first 30 days of morning. In their faith tradition they give themselves 30 days to grieve and mourn. They wear black for 30 days and refrain from eating and at first I thought, wow that’s extreme but then I thought, how beautiful! I wish we would sit one another down and say “listen you just walked through a death, allow yourself to grieve and wear sack cloths and ashes for a whole 30 days.” She talks about laying in bed at night and wailing and her mother lying next to her in bed through her pain. There was something so profoundly human and real about that and I think that’s why it resonated with so many people and went viral like it did.
I also think naming the grief is undeniably significant, especially for people who have lost infants at birth or before birth. We don’t know what to do with that because it would seem as though it hurts even more but the thing my sister said really early on to us was, “please don’t ever forget my girls, please don’t think you were never their aunt and please don’t forget that they had names. As often as we can speak their names will bring me healing”. So as painful as it is to say “Maggie and Ellen” and write about them like I knew them and loved them with all my heart, there’s something about being able to say their names out loud. I think sometimes in our mourning we would rather forget and then we forget to say their names but I think there’s some beautiful healing and closure that happens when we’re able to just speak their names and the things about them that brought us life.
5. So in the grieving and the mourning, how have you experienced God’s graciousness through the recent heartaches of these losses?
I could tell these stories forever. It’s amazing to me the way that one experiences God differently after the loss of something. Whether it’s really big ways where you step back and say “gosh that just seems like such a miracle” or those tiny ways often overlooked. In one of the sections of the book there was a particular plane ride I was on with my daughter. It was after the band had just broken up. I was on the road performing shows trying to recoup money. I was just so exhausted. In my despair I hadn’t been able to sleep but finally, after countless nights with very little sleep, I was able to close my eyes and I had this vision of my dad saying, “hey come sit in my lap” and I was like “what? That’s so weird I’m a grown girl” and that was it. In this little dream I sat in his lap and the next thing I know the flight attendant is waking me up and my daughter was in one of those little baby wraps on my chest sleeping and I had passed out on that airplane sleeping for the first time in weeks. It was such a tiny moment where I was taken aback and realized God was wooing me to sleep. And it wasn’t this huge miracle but sometimes it is a huge miracle like when my sister’s girls died. We couldn’t find anyone in the church that was able to lead the ceremony for the funeral because they were so emotionally connected and my sister was in the hospital crying “who’s going to do the funeral” and I said “you know we’ve just got to trust that God will provide someone but we have to think outside of our church because everyone here is too emotionally distraught so think bigger. Think back home in Texas, college, or seminary to someone that you would want to be on stage and lead worship” and she said, “Fine Matt Maher”.
I don’t know if you know who Matt Maher is, but he’s like the Christian equivalent to Taylor Swift, he’s as big as they get. While Matt is one of my good friends I knew he was touring along the east coast and my sister lives in this tiny little town in Oklahoma. So I told her, “well not Matt cause he’s touring on the east coast right now, there’s no way he’ll be able to” and she looks at me and says “well you said to pick anybody so that’s who I want”. I knew he was unavailable but I felt the need to at least honor my sister’s request by asking and because we’re friends I was able to text him to see what his schedule was like. I said I know you’re on the east coast but is there any way you could come do this funeral and he wrote back and said “I’ve been so frustrated about this one show I had no idea 3 years ago when I booked it I’d end up on the east coast and it’s been such a hassle but now I know why. I’m there.” He had a one-off for the same weekend as Maggie and Ellen’s funeral just 20 miles down the road form the church that had been in place for three years. Three years?! That couldn’t be anything else except divinely appointed. Just in big ways and small ways God’s fingerprints are all over it.
6. In your book you talk about “the land of in-between”. I love this. I have a lot of female friends who find themselves in the exact same place whether they’re in the tension of working a day job and consistently working their dream job or the tension of dating and marriage, etc. What advice do you have for these women, myself included?
My first piece of advice is to let people into that. I think we’re really good at telling people “look at what God did, look how He answered my prayer.” We kind of give people the end of the story and a lot of times we don’t want to let people into the chapters. At one point in the book, there’s a chapter where I talk about how I don’t want to let people into my in-between seasons because what if I fail? And what if the answer that I really hoped and prayed for doesn’t come to pass? I have all of these what-ifs and I think if we don’t let anybody into them and it’s a really isolating, lonely and defeating place. I believe God has given us one another to cheer each other on whether we have the answer yet or not. So in my own in-betweens I would literally have to reach out to people and call them to say “I’m just really in a funky season, I have no idea what’s supposed to happen in my life, I don’t have any plans, I just need you to pray for me right now.” I felt crazy doing it but they would say that it was the best way for them to know how to pray for me and that they were standing with me whether I had an answer or not.
Also, I would advise not rushing your time in that space. It’s so hard not to when everything in us wants to get to the other side but look for little signs everyday that God is still near and that He is still faithful. If we can sense that, then we don’t have to worry about when it’s going to work out. If we can just say “you know what, I’m choosing that everything in my heart and soul around me says that God is still faithful and present. I just have to relinquish control, open my hands and let those dreams fall where they may”. There’s a verse in scripture I used to highjack. It’s from Matthew 11:28 “Come to me all you who are weary and I will give you rest”. I used to take this verse and I would read it as “come to me all you who are weary and I will give you an answer”. And I had to realize that’s now what it says, it says I will give you myself, I will give you rest. Jesus is the epitome of rest and peace. I am not called to answers I am called to Jesus.
7. What are your thoughts on dealing with the expectations that others have for you. I’m thirty and am still discovering my passions, but for some reason, at thirty, we think we should have it all figured out (whoever made that a rule?). We are allowed to be thirty and allowed to still not know right?
It’s so funny in the book I write that if you want to unnerve people, when they ask how you are, just tell them, “well it actually kind of sucks right now, I don’t have a job, I have no idea what comes next and I wake up and watch Regis and Kelly in the morning while eating excessive amounts of cereal.” I would rather do that and wait than rush the experience because on the other side of that are people who are thirty that are miserable. That are in miserable marriages or working for companies and corporations they don’t believe in and ethically selling their souls just so they have an answer and so they don’t have to live in the tension of saying “I don’t know.” Rather than saying “I don’t have the answer right now”, we’ve bought into this lie that it’s better to say “well I do this, this, and this” even though it’s not anything we were created or made to do.
8. What are some challenges you have faced in being a woman of faith in the industry?
The biggest challenge for me is comparison. There are some days I wake up and the best thing I can do for my soul, my family and myself is to turn off all social media. I don’t want to see how cute and pintresty your house is, how perfect the kids are, how hot your husband is so I think, the biggest challenge for me as a woman, is reminding myself daily that I am running my race and nobody else’s. I’m never going to be as organized or as pinteresty as my sister and that’s okay. We can be happy for them and cheer them on but we can’t let those things suck our soul out and constantly live with our eyes on other people. I know I can ‘t live that way. I think as women in this day and age that’s a huge obstacle for us and we’ve got to remember, we are the runners of our race.
9. Being a millennial, where can we as women find our understanding of self-value and worth?
That’s a great question and my best answer isn’t a response but rather a question to ask yourself, “Have you talked to Jesus about it?” In my book there’s a pastor I talk about a lot and she’s the lady I called the night the fire happened. She’s a New Yorker so she’s blunt and in your face. I love her. I spent three years with her as my mentor and she just says, “have you talked to Jesus about it?” and so it’s now stuck in my heart. It’s the only legitimate answer I have which sounds so simple and cliché but I’d call her when I had my daughter and I would say “I don’t know how to do this, I don’t know how to be on the road living out of a tour bus with my daughter, am I messing her up? Is she going to need therapy?” And she would say, “have you talked to Jesus cause he knows how to parent better than you do”. So now I say that to people all the time when they’re struggling with their identity; Have you actually honestly spent time in God’s presence asking ‘What do you have to say about me? What does your voice say about me?’ Tune everyone else out; what does he have to say about you? If you don’t know, open Psalms 139 and put your name in the passage.
10. Lastly, I’m curious as to what your favorite scripture is right now in this season?
Another good question…Isaiah 43. I read it everyday. I can’t stop reading it. I read it this morning and the part where it says “Forget about the former things, don’t dwell on the past, do you not perceive it I am doing a new thing? Now it springs up I am making a way in the desert, I’m bringing streams into the wasteland. “ All of a sudden when I was reading the word spring struck out to me. A spring of water isn’t very glamorous; it’s calm and still. I read that and thought I need to be happy and grateful and looking for the spring, the tiny bits of water bubbling to the surface to the ground. Sometimes we’re waiting for this gushing river to pour down but I read that verse and I thought this spring of water is what I’m looking for.
Interview By Bridgette Bassa
Visit www.jennysimmons.com now to purchase your copy of The Road to Becoming