‘Where do the busted angels go?’

When I tuned to the local radio station, a raspy voice, backed by a guitar, was extolling the virtues of tequila. The song was a prayer for deliverance.

The radio playlist that day was saturated with sin and salvation, but the DJs were having too much rowdy fun to have been employed by a Christian station.

The songs I heard that day included themes never heard in traditional church music: tequila, busted angels and devils pulling the strings.

I listen frequently to Macon’s newest radio station, 100.9 FM The Creek. This station is good for the soul no matter the playlist. People who want to shop locally and eat locally-grown food at Macon restaurants will love The Creek. This station is the perfect antidote to the slick, sterile pre-recorded national radio syndicates.

Recently the DJ Divine must have shuffled The Creek’s playlist, because the songs I heard throughout that day addressed guilt, sin and the hope of redemption.

Back to the tequila song: “Tequila is Good for the Heart” is a grainy, bluesy song by former professional boxer turned singer Paul Thorn, the son of a Pentecostal preacher. The despair is real; if prayer doesn’t fix things, there is another solution:

“I went to revival last Sunday

Because I needed to talk to the Lord

I asked him to help me get over you

Then I drove to the liquor store.

I cried out, Father forgive me,

But prayer only takes you so far,

I found tequila is good for the heart.”

This is unvarnished reality, not particularly pretty. The lyrics allude to wrestling with God and the temptation to take a shortcut to deaden the pain. Thorn covers more territory in a three-minute song than a preacher can sermonize over in 30 minutes.

While I was musing about what I’d heard, the DJs cued up “Good with God,” sung by the group Old 97. This hard rocking song describes an insecure man, consumed by a bitter love affair, who wonders about his relationship to God and the ambiguity of life:

“I’m not afraid, I’m good with God.

I got my sins, in fact I got a lot.

I got a soul that’s good and flawed.

I’m good with God, I’m good with God.

Is it too late to save my soul?

Where do the busted angels go?”

Old 97 deals with what traditional religious terminology calls “assurance.” Am I good with God? Am I safe? How can I escape my insecurity? If there’s no escape, where do busted angels go?

Later that day, when I turned on The Creek again — more sin and salvation in the form of “... devil’s in my head, mama, devil’s in my head / baby’s in the cradle and the devil’s in my head.”

The song, “Satan Pulls the Strings,” by the Avett Brothers, cryptically portrays the tempestuous soul who knows goodness and wickedness and recognizes that “God is in the song and the devil’s in my feet.” Most of us can understand such turmoil in our own soul.

Though these lyrics don’t rise to the level of Isaac Watts or Charles Wesley, they describe a spiritual reality that most of us recognize. Even those who rarely attend church or listen to Christian radio will find more than enough guilt and redemption at 100.9 The Creek.

This story was originally published March 17, 2017 at 8:20 AM with the headline "‘Where do the busted angels go?’."