This Life I Live: One Man's Extraordinary, Ordinary Life and the Woman Who Changed It Forever

by Rory Feek

  When Joey and I finished talking, June hugged her daughter, me, and the girls and told them that she would support us and would take Joey shopping for a dress when the time was right—that is, after I asked Jack. And Joey.

  The next evening all of Joey’s family showed up at the house, and June cooked a huge meal. Joey’s Aunt Wanda and Uncle Shirl were there and Joey’s three sisters and their husbands, boyfriend, and kids. I loved them all. It was like being dropped into a life that I’d always dreamed of but had never known. After dinner Joey’s daddy got out his twelve-string guitar and played while she sang “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You” and “Coat of Many Colors.” She also sang “In the Garden” with her mother. It was magical. To me it was.

  Later that evening, long after everyone had gone home after the dinner, we called Joey’s daddy and asked him to put on a pot of coffee. Then Joey and I drove to his house and sat with him at his new place, and I asked him for permission to marry his daughter. Jack was caught off guard, to say the least, and explained that she had been dating a different guy just a couple of months before. He had thought that guy was going to be the one popping the question about popping the question. He worried that we were rushing things. We agreed that we were. But Joey also said, “When you know, Dad, you know.” I think he tried to talk us out of it, but he probably realized that our minds were already made up, and he gave me his approval.

  When we got back to her mama’s house, as Joey stepped out of the truck, I took her hand and asked her to take a walk with me. By now, it was about 2 a.m. In the dark, we walked down the lane she grew up on. The road where she had ridden her bike a thousand times and gone trick-or-treating, house to house, on her horse, Velvet. We walked and walked and dreamed and talked. The moon was bright, and it lit up the sky and farmland like it was daytime. When we got to the other side of the four-way stop, I got down on my knee.

  “Joey Marie Martin, will you marry me?” I asked. Tears rolled down her cheeks. I knew what this moment meant to her, how long she had been waiting for it. Not from me but from God. Of course, she had known I was going to ask her sometime. Today, or tomorrow or the next week, but she didn’t know it would be right then. Right there. A few feet from us was the white metal cross marking the place where her heart and her family had been shattered into pieces years before. I wanted to change that for her. To let that be the place where a beautiful new life began and not just where one ended.

  We were both still crying when I heard her sweet voice say, “I will.”

  Thirty-Five

  ALTER CALL

  We were married two months later, on June 15, 2002. It was her brother Justin’s birthday. He would have been twenty-five. It was also the fifth wedding anniversary for my cousin and best man, Aaron, and his wife, Jill. Their life and love story had paralleled ours for many years, and having our wedding on their anniversary was just one more God-wink in a long list of them.

  I wish I could tell you that I paid for our wedding, but I didn’t. Joey did. She had received a fifteen-thousand-dollar bonus for signing her record deal a few months earlier, and she took that money and used it to pay most of the costs for the wedding and the reception. I had made a good bit of money in the past couple of years on royalties from songs I’d written but, unfortunately, hadn’t been very responsible with it. Joey just stepped up and took care of it all. In the coming months we would have many conversations about money, and she would put her foot down and set me on a better path toward financial responsibility—but for now, she didn’t say a word. She just wrote the checks from her account and made our beautiful wedding happen.

  The ceremony was at a little church in Mount Pleasant, the same small town where Joey and I had met and where I’d had my songwriting studio at the time. Her mother was her maid of honor, and her sisters and Heidi and Hopie were her bridesmaids. Rufus, Joey’s trusty hound, was the ring bearer. We had about three hundred people in attendance, and afterward we held the reception a block away at Pearl’s Palace—the same place where Joey had bounded up the steps and landed in front of me the night I met her at my songwriters’ show.

  It was a magical day. Joey looked like an angel in her wedding gown, and though I felt a little foolish in the tux I was wearing (instead of my usual overalls), I mostly felt honored to be standing beside her. To be taking her hand and walking her down the aisle. Black-and-white and color pictures from that afternoon and evening fill the pages of a beautiful handmade album at home now, but the memories I have will last a lifetime.

  Joey’s mama and daddy played and sang “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You,” and we lit a candle for Justin. When the “I Dos” had been said, we descended the steps of the church, with rice raining down, and climbed into my old ’56 Chevy to make our getaway, with fifteen Dr. Pepper cans tied to the back bumper—a reference to how much I loved Forrest Gump, the fictional character of a man I aspired to be more like.

  Joey and I were ready to start our new lives together. To see what God had in store for us. We knew He had brought us together, and we had stepped out in faith and trusted Him. We had no idea of the choppy waters ahead of us, before the wind would finally die down and smooth sailing would carry us halfway around the world on a song and then back again.

  Thirty-Six

  SEXUAL HEALING

  Our first time was on our wedding night.

  It’s true. That might not seem like a big deal to most people, but it is. Especially since I was thirty-seven years old, had two teenage children, and had done more than my fair share of living by then. Purity wasn’t a word, or virtue, that I had even considered making a real part of my life, but it was what Joey and I now wanted most of all. To start out our marriage, and our lives together, right.

  I had been told by my Christian friends for years and years about how God designed love to be pure and how saving yourself for marriage was the right thing. But I always thought, Surely God and my married Bible-thumping buddies don’t understand how hard it is these days. How much sense it makes to “take ’er for a few test spins” before buying the car. I’d done a lot of test-driving in my past, and the outcome was always the same. I got bored with the car long before I ever got to the point of signing papers to own it. That made it easy and convenient to move on, but it didn’t make for something long lasting. For the thing that I wanted more than anything. Forever.

  For a while I thought all I really needed was a virtuous woman. Maybe that would make the difference. One who had the character and strength that I didn’t so she could help me make the right decisions and do the right things. But that didn’t work. Instead of the girl helping me, I just corrupted her. I hated the truth of it, but the problem was inside of me. So, the solution had to lie there also.

  My whole life, I had always wanted to be with a great woman. Someone I was in awe of. A woman with integrity that I had complete respect for. But as it turns out, in order for me to be with a great woman, I was gonna have to learn to be a great man first. A man of honor and character. Of God. Someone who put others’ needs first, before his own. If I was honest with myself, that seemed too hard to achieve. Impossible, actually. So I gave up. And gave in. And I gave it to God.

  Sexual sin, selfishness, lust, greed . . . they’re all part of the same thing. The desire to make it be about what we desire, instead of what He wants for us. Once I started letting Him have it and really trusting Him, the hard decisions became a little easier to make. And good and honorable are things I just became, not because I set out to become them but because I set out to become His. By following and trusting Him, He molded and changed me into something worthy of His love. And, in turn, worthy of the love of a woman like Joey too.

  Saving ourselves for our wedding night wasn’t easy for me or for Joey. But it wasn’t difficult either, in a different way. Joey and I wanted God’s blessing on our marriage, more than we wanted what we wanted. We did our best to keep ourselves out of situations that would get us in trouble, and, of course, we got ma
rried four months after we started dating. That helped too.

  As we lit candles late that special evening following our wedding, we took each other’s hands and kissed . . . we stopped and knelt down beside the big king-size bed I’d just bought for us. Unspoiled and clean, like our commitment to each other. The bed where we would lie together for the next fourteen years and dream of making music and a life together and, in time, holding a baby in our arms. And we got down on our knees and prayed.

  We prayed that God would bless this union. And bless this house and the children in it. That He would put and keep His hand upon us and guide us where He wanted us to go.

  ’Til death do us part.

  Thirty-Seven

  HONEYMOONERS

  The honeymoon was hell.

  Not completely, but it definitely wasn’t heaven for us. Not even close. A friend of mine had offered to let us use his cabin in the Bitterroot Mountains outside of Darby, Montana, for a week. So we arranged for Heidi and Hopie to be at their favorite summer camp while we were away. Joey and I packed a few things, dropped off the kids at Camp Marymount, and hopped a plane, headed west for ten days of newly married bliss together in paradise.

  What awaited us in Montana was reality. The truth of where we were and the issues we hadn’t faced yet. There were two large problems that we hadn’t dealt with.

  One, Joey was a singer with a career that was about to take off—at least, it looked like it would. There was a good chance she would be going out on the road soon, for days, weeks, and months at a time. And I didn’t want to be left at home, in the same situation I’d been in for years—raising kids by myself without someone to share life with. And I didn’t want to be with someone in the music business. I’d already done that. More than once. And it hadn’t ended well. It always turned into lies, then cheating, then my heart being broken in a gazillion pieces. I didn’t want that to happen.

  Two, Joey didn’t want children. And I had two. Two teenage girls who desperately needed a woman in their lives. A mother. But Joey didn’t want to be a mother; she just wanted to be my wife. It was nothing at all against Heidi or Hopie. It wasn’t them. It was her. When God had passed out the gene to girls that made them want to make, have, change, and raise babies, Joey was in the line getting the “sing like Dolly Parton” gene. It wasn’t in her, and no amount of talking or arguing or pleading would put it there. For the next ten years, I couldn’t put a baby in her arms. She just didn’t have a maternal instinct in the least.

  Something inside me told me that this was a big issue for her, and that one day it would come back around on her, and she would have to deal with it—but it definitely wasn’t going to happen on our honeymoon or anytime soon. Just like I wasn’t ready to deal with my fear of Joey being away from me on the road, doing God knows what with a bunch of musicians that I didn’t trust.

  And so our honeymoon was tough. We had some good moments. Some nice dinners and a wonderful hike up a mountainside. But mostly it was hard. Me plowing head-on into these issues and her avoiding them. Me trying to get her to come my way and understand my needs . . . while having no interest in understanding hers.

  We each had our own agenda, and we carried them into our marriage. My friend and pastor, Mike Rosser, had met with Joey and me at a Cracker Barrel a few weeks before we got married to talk with us about the upcoming ceremony he would perform and to make sure we understood the commitment we were making. He asked a few questions and listened to us argue for a while, then said, “Oh, no, you two can’t get married! This is a disaster. You have too many big issues to work out.” He pleaded with us to put it off for a while, to take our time and work through the potential problems before we made a big mistake by getting married. We told him that we had faith and felt strongly about getting married now, and somehow these things would work themselves out.

  But down deep inside, I don’t think Joey or I thought they would. How could they? They were too big. My insecurities and her headstrong ways. So we cried a lot of tears in Montana, and then we came home and cried a bunch more.

  Joey thought that I understood that this was who she was and how it was going to be. I didn’t. I wanted her to throw it all away and quit singing.

  I thought Joey understood my situation—that the kids needed a mom and I needed a wife who was going to be home with us. She didn’t. She thought that since I had been a single father for so long already, I would be fine with her being gone and we could just have a long-distance marriage if that’s what it took.

  I wasn’t happy, and neither was she.

  I remember driving down the road one day, talking with Joey and telling her, “I’m pretty sure that the only way that this can work is if we are both willing to give everything up for the other person . . . our hopes and plans and dreams . . . if that’s what it takes. If that means that my songwriting is getting in the way of our marriage, then I walk away and do something else. If it’s your music, then you walk away. Whatever it takes. If we aren’t willing to do that, and we put anything above our marriage, we are going to fail.”

  She just kept looking out the window, listening, then finally turned her head my way and said, “I’m sorry, but I’m not willing to give up my dreams for you.”

  And that was that. We were in a free fall. Sorta.

  What actually happened was that our agendas went into a free fall. What she had planned fell apart. The record label didn’t think she was ready to be a star and wanted her to sing in a smoky bar an hour away, five nights a week for the next six months. She told them no. And my agenda of Joey being a stay-at-home mom for the girls went away too. Neither of us got what we wanted.

  Within six months Joey’s record deal had fallen apart and disappeared. She was left brokenhearted, still working full-time at the horse vet clinic with no hope or prospect of her dreams ever coming true again. I had pulled the kids out of the mediocre schools they were in and was trying to homeschool them, all the while resenting Joey for not stepping in to help. I was disheartened and disillusioned. This whole marriage thing was turning out to be lose, lose, lose.

  Mostly for the kids, though, I think.

  Thirty-Eight

  LOVE DOESN’T EXIST

  Just before Joey and I started dating, Heidi had come to me and said she wanted to talk. She knew I had just broken up with a girl that she liked and was going to start dating this new girl named Joey. She had heard me telling other people that something inside me was telling me that this was magic.

  She’d had enough. She was now fifteen and wise to the world—at least to mine.

  “It doesn’t exist, Dad,” she said to me that night in her bedroom. “The kinda love that you write songs about . . . it isn’t real. It sounds nice, and I’m sure for some people it happens, but not for us. And not for you.” She went on to tell me that the girl I had been dating was nice. She was fun. And maybe that was enough. That I should stay with her so we could be happy for a while and not have all the drama we’d had in the past.

  I completely understood where she was coming from. I was the one who had drug them through all the things they’d been through. But I also knew that God had been working on me, on my character. Preparing me for something great, maybe. So I told her that she might be right. “Maybe this one will turn out like the others, but maybe it won’t,” I said. “Just watch and see where this goes. I believe that this thing with Joey might be magic. A God thing. I might be wrong,” I said. “But let’s just watch and see. That’s all I ask.”

  She had watched, and she was watching still. Both of the girls were watching us cry and hurt and hearing us argue and plead with each other, and with God, for some answers. Now we were in a worse place than before. Married and lonely. Together and apart. Committed to nothing, really.

  Joey and I were at a low point. There was nothing left of us or our hopes. We were both empty. We couldn’t cry any more tears, and there was nothing left to say that we hadn’t said. But still, we were together. We hadn’t gone anywhere
, or threatened to. It had been about a year since we’d said our vows, and we had hung in there. That was about all I could say. But it was something.

  From that low point, God began to build something. Something very special. Something bigger than us, bigger than our separate hopes and dreams. He took our agendas from us and gave us His. To love Him. To trust Him. To serve Him. And each other. And we did. Little by little, we grew closer. First to Him and then to each other. Our wills gave way to His will. And I remember one day looking up and seeing my wife—really seeing her. She was in her garden, picking asparagus that she’d grown, with chickens running around the yard and an amazing meal on the table. And I remember thinking, She is incredible. My wife is amazing.

  And she was. I hadn’t really known that before. Not really. I hadn’t wanted it. I think I had a vision of what I thought an amazing wife would be, but it was nothing compared to what I was now seeing in Joey. This woman was true. And honest as the day is long. Hardworking and humble. So humble. It’s like I woke up one day and realized that I had won the lottery. Out of all the men in the world, God had called the six numbers I held, and the prize was Joey.

  Within another year or so, we were the most in-love two people you’ve ever met. Our empty cup now runneth over. It poured out of our hearts onto each other, then splashed all over anyone else who was near us. It was sickening almost. For the first time it hit me: I, Rory Feek, was married to a great woman. A really, really great woman. And, for some reason, Joey thought the same of me. How did that happen? I don’t know—it just did.