During college, I wouldn’t bat an eye at driving four to five hours one way for a concert then driving back home the same night. We’d drive to New Orleans or Little Rock to see bands like the Juliana Theory or to Lake Charles to see acts like Pop Unknown or Baton Rouge to see The Gloria Record. On a trip to Lake Charles, I remember talking with someone who had travelled down I-10 from Texas, I think, talking about how he’d roll his window down, in the dead of winter, and play bands like The Gloria Record to feel alive and feel the music, especially when Chris Simpson sings, “The way that feet moved slow through Denver December snow/ Past cars that got stuck in the road.”

Every fall, without fail, I think about The Gloria Record’s self-titled EP. It reminds me driving through town or on interstates amidst the crisp fall air, the falling leaves, the overcast skies that would turn to dusk then darkness at an early hour. It feels like fall, that changing of the seasons as we prepare to stay inside and hunker down for the winter, even in places like North Louisiana which rarely, if ever sees snow or ice storms.

Before there was The Gloria Record, though, there was Mineral, the band that Chris Simpson and bassist Jeremy Gomez originally played in from 1994 to 1998. Before the accessibility of music online and discovering music online, one learned about new artists from the radio, music store, friends, or other avenues. I discovered Mineral during, of all things, working as a counselor at Royal Ambassador camps as a summer missionary. At one of the camps, there was a Girls in Action group as well, and one of their counselors told me about Mineral, giving me a recorded tape of their debut album The Power of Failing (1997) backed with Christie Front Drive’s self-titled album.

Coming from an evangelical background, I grew up with some form of worship music, whether that be traditional hymns or praise and worship music. However, while hymns impact me, mostly due to their, for the most part, theological grounding, praise and worship has never impacted me in the same manner. For me, this has to do with the superficial coffee shop nature of praise and worship lyrics that I encounter mixed with the emotional pull of the instrumentation, a pull that relies heavily of the emotional appeal of music to swell and dig deep into our psyches.

That summer when the counselor gave me The Power of Failing, I played the cassette on repeat constantly as I drove the backroads of Louisiana from camp to camp and elsewhere. I’d put the tape in, sing along, and let the waves of music carry me along, ebbing and flowing as my tires traversed the uneven asphalt. I’d experience, with songs like “Dolorosa,” “Take the Picture Now,” or “Parking Lot,” moments of worship. These songs, partly because of the music, but also lyrically, spoke to me in a way that the praise and worship music I’d hear in church didn’t. They addressed fears and anxieties. They spoke to my base of knowledge that I had learned from the church.

Lyrically sparse, “Dolorosa,” whose title comes partly from the Via Dolorosa (the path took Jesus took to his crucifixion), builds musically over the course of its five minutes as Simpson sings the same lines over and over again. Simpson pleads with Jesus, “Rejoice my soul, how long will you wait?” and proclaims that he longs to see Jesus and touch His face. The song ends with tremolo octave chords traversing a dive into controlled chaos as Simpson screams, “Jesus, I hope you’re coming back soon.”

I came of age during the 80s and 90s and amidst the End Times rhetoric. I’d always hear, “Jesus is set to return soon. We’re in the last days.” I’d have people I know say things like, “Who knows if we can have that trip next year. Jesus will probably be back.” That type of language put fear into me. It didn’t cause me comfort. I wanted to see Jesus, yes, but there’d always be thoughts about what I would never get to experience if he came back when I was in middle school or high school.

The tension between birth and death lies at the core of “Dolorosa” and so much of The Power of Failing, this spiritual longing for connection with God that occurs over the course of one’s life. In The Journey, Lillian Smith writes, “I believe every good life has a good relationship with death. Just as it has a good relationship with birth. There is a connection here.” As I listen to The Power of Failing, this is what I think about, the ways that birth, life, and death interconnect, how they serve as beginning and end with no real beginning and end because of memory and the continuation of the stories we tell.

We fear death, the unknown, just as much as we fear birth, at least if we could remember our births. Fear and death have a place on The Power of Failing, but Simpson confronts them in much the same way that Smith does, as parts of life that we must encounter. On “Take The Picture Now,” the penultimate song on the album, Simpson sings of heaven. “laughter that seems unending,” “green grass fields,” and “happiness and hope for tomorrow.” He sings of tears running down his cheeks as he meets Jesus, and as Jesus wipes away those tears.

Before reaching that point though, pain, suffering, and life occur. The album concludes with “Parking Lot,” a song where Simpson begins by singing, “I wouldn’t mind if you took me in my sleep tonight/ I wouldn’t even put up a fight.” Yet, he must endure life, rolling around in the mire and coming to terms with the fact that he is nothing more than a “grain of salt in the salt of the earth.” However, even that realization is “grace” and the song ends with a worshipful image where Simpson sings about standing naked in the sun with outstretched arms as he laughs at himself.

When I listen to The Power of Failing, I think about that moment in my life when I encountered the album. It aligned with so many of my thoughts and beliefs at the time, causing me to fear the End Times and in the same moment having me look past the earthly suffering to Heaven. The album still speaks to me, but in a different way now. It speaks to me about birth and death and what lies between, the dash on the headstone as Stavesacre says. It makes me think about my faith, both where it came from and where it is now.

Twenty two years after The Power is Failing, Mineral reunited and released One Day When We Are Young Single, a two song album where Simpson expresses so many of thoughts I’ve had between 1997 and 2019, the thoughts about my faith, where it has gone between those dashes. He begins “Your Body is the World” by singing , “When I was fourteen I thought you could save me/Thought there were no maybes/Believed everything/One day, when I’m young I’ll see.” These lines reflect the growth I’ve encountered to, specifically in relation to my faith. They reflect my questioning, a healthy part of faith because we engage with the spiritual instead fo taking things as they are fed to us. I worship just as much with “Your Body is the World” as I do with a song like “Take the Picture Now” because each song speaks, spiritually, to me as I think about God and our connection with God.

Lillian Smith wanted the final paragraph of The Journey read at her funeral, and the final sentence sums up that dash between birth and death that will one day be on our headstones. About that dash and the journey it takes us on, she writes, “To find the point where hypothesis and fact meet; the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality; the place where fantasy and earthy things are metamorphosed into a work of art; the hour when faith in the future becomes knowledge of the past; to lay down one’s power for others in need; to shake off the old ordeal and get ready for the new ; to question, knowing that never can the full answer be found ; to accept uncertainties quietly, even our incomplete knowledge of God: this is what man’s journey is about, I think.”