Prior to the interview, I had heard bits and pieces of Johnathan’s personal testimony but mainly knew the multi-Dove-winning southern gospel group he leads, Young Harmony. Had it not been for God’s healing hand upon Johnathan, the music industry and millions of people would never have experienced this blessed group. Young Harmony has recorded a total of fourteen projects to date. They have been featured in several national magazines, including the Singing News, New Church Connection, US Gospel News, Reader’s Digest, and many others. The group has received numerous Dove Award nominations, and in 2004 it was named Group of the Year. In 2007, “God Is Still God,” written by Jonathan, was nominated as southern gospel and gospel music’s Song of the Year. In 2008, the group was inducted into the North American Country Music Hall of Fame.
During the interview I sat listening to Johnathan, Noel Walters, and Darlene Chapman recall stories from their group’s ministry and their personal experiences. As I sat there I kept thinking, “Wow, what an inspiration!” At eighteen years old, I was diagnosed with cancer. At the time of this interview, it was a few weeks before my one-year checkup, which is the make-it-or-break-it visit. The Bible says that in everything there is a purpose, and I know without a doubt that the purpose of me having had the opportunity to meet Johnathan was to remind me that God is still with me, and God is bigger than any problem I have.
—Casi Best
Johnathan: I’m Johnathan Bond with Young Harmony. I was born in the Phoenix, Arizona, area on October 11, 1967. I was eight years old when we moved to Dalton, Georgia. I only moved because my parents did. There wasn’t really much choice in it for me [laughs]. I lived in that area until ’90. Then I moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee.
My whole family is in music and has been for years, but I got started in music because in ’91 I had a major car wreck, and I will share what God brought me through. My cousins traveled with a gospel group, and they started asking me if I would go with them. Before you knew it, I was sharing my testimony and singing a song. It just sort of evolved into a trio from there. It wasn’t a plan as far as on my part. I actually had no idea; it took me a while to even realize, “Hey, we have a group [laughs].” The group was me and two of my cousins, Murray and Tuwana McClure. The McClure family traveled, and as my great-uncle and his wife got older, they didn’t travel as much. People would call and say, “Well, what about the ‘McClure Trio’?” and that was the name that we went by for a couple of years. As the McClure Trio, Murray and Tuwana worked full-time jobs and couldn’t travel places. I was still under doctor’s care and wasn’t able to work, so when people would call and say, “Hey, would y’all come and sing,” they couldn’t go. So I’d go do some solo work. Eventually, I just got other people to help me and formed Young Harmony. The McClure family still sings some in Chattanooga, but they’re not traveling anymore.
I’ve always been raised in church, and I’ve always believed in God. I didn’t even know there was an option to not believe in God. I’ve always believed that He was the creator of the universe. Growing up in church, I never realized that I needed Him as a personal Savior. I believed other people did but I was fine. I lived my whole life that way. I’d been to the altar; I’d done everything that everybody expected, but in my heart I had never accepted Him as a Savior. My mom, dad, brother, and sister traveled, singing for many years, and on September 23, 1991, a Monday evening, my mother called me. She said, “Your brother is not going to be able to go with us this coming weekend. I need you to fill in for him.”
I said, “Mom, I can’t do that; I’ve got a lot going on.” She said, “We’re practicing at the church in the morning at ten o’clock, and I will see you there, right?” I went to church with them that Tuesday morning to go over their songs, and I could sing, but I didn’t. All the songs were great songs, but they weren’t personal to me. Then we began to sing a song that my mom and dad used to sing a lot called “Miracle in the Making.” As we began to sing that song something began to happen within me, and I knew what that was, but I wasn’t ready for that. I was scared of that, and I remember when we got done with that song, I brushed a tear from my face, and I didn’t let them see me. I told my mom, “I need to leave.”
She knew what was going on, so she said, “Well, let’s just go over that song one more time.” I said, “Mom, I’ve gotta go to work.” I left for work, and it was raining really hard. An eighteen-wheeler pulled over in my lane and hit my car. When he hit me, he knocked me across the median, and two other cars hit me at a force so great that my seat belt snapped in half. At one forty-five in the afternoon, the emergency services pronounced me dead at the scene.
My mom was on her way from church, headed home. She heard on the radio that there was a fatal car accident on Battlefield Parkway [Highway 2], which was not the direction I was supposed to have been going to work. As soon as the radio announcer said they were rerouting traffic because of a fatal collision on Highway 2, she turned to my brother and said, “That is Johnathan.” Keep in mind now that the DJ said nothing at all about sex, race, car model, car color, or anything.
My brother said, “Mom, that’s not the way that he goes to work.” She said, “There’s not a doubt in my mind that it is Johnathan.” She turned around and went toward the hospital. She knew with the traffic being so backed up that she could get to the hospital about the same time. When she went in the hospital, through the emergency room, she went up to the counter and said, “I’m Johnathan Bond’s mother. He had the wreck over here on Battlefield Parkway just now.” She didn’t ask because she already knew it was me. One of the doctors heard her say my name and came out. He put his arm around my mother and said, “Mrs. Bond, I’m really sorry to tell you that we did all we could.”
She said, “Would you pray with me?” While they were praying, the nurse that was cleaning me up for identification ran out screaming, “Help! This man is not dead!” I had begun to strangle while she was working. The doctor got up from his knees praying and went to help. My mother stayed on her knees. A nurse told me this later, she said, “Your mom stayed on her knees even after they said you were alive.”
I asked my mother later, I said, “After you knew that I was alive, why did you stay on your knees?” She said, “We’ve always taught you if you ever ask someone for help, then you always take the time to say thanks.” They put me in the trauma unit, and I was in a coma. They told my parents what all was wrong with me: My back was broken in nine places, I was paralyzed from just above my waist down, my right eye had dislocated, my skull was cracked, my head was swollen and was hemorrhaging, I had two broken ribs, my arm was broken, my shoulder was broken, I had lost all of my blood except for half a pint, and the most critical part was the eighteen and a half minutes of unaccountable [loss of] oxygen to the brain.
The doctor said to my mother that day, “At best case, Johnathan will live as a vegetable”; however, my mother wasn’t accepting that. Two days later my heart stopped. The medical team ran in with the paddles and got my family out of the room. When they were done, they came back out, and Dr. Tom Odum, the doctor from the emergency room, said, “Mrs. Bond, we did everything we could, but we have lost him this time.” She said, “Do you remember the day he came in here? Would y’all pray with us again?” While they were praying, I came out of the coma. My heart had started beating again, and I was aware, awake, and talking. The wreck was on a Tuesday, and on Saturday I walked out of the hospital, completely healed!
The first thing that my nurse said when I started talking was “I want to serve the Lord.” That was her first phrase to me. She has since been to many of our concerts and shared her own testimony. The paramedics have been to many of our concerts and shared how they never expected anything at all to come from the wreck but how God brought me totally, one hundred percent, from it.
I was under doctor’s care for two years following the wreck. They have never done surgery. They thought they were going to have to do some plastic surgery because of the cut on my face and the scar t
hat was there, the aneurysm, and my head swelling the way it did, but they never did any kind of surgery. God healed me all the way through.
It’s been since ’91, and I never have back problems. I travel and lift all the time, which are the worst things that you can do with back issues. It’s not anything that anyone should get any of the credit for, except God. Through that, that’s how I started sharing my story, and they’d ask if I would sing a song and, of course, I would. If you know me now and knew me then, you’d see the difference. I’m very outgoing and thankful for what God’s brought me through. He has given me the joy of the Lord and my salvation. I have joy wherever I am, and before I was real timid and shy. Anyone that knows me now is like “no way” [laughs].
That’s my testimony. When I look back at it, I’m thankful for not just what He did physically, but also spiritually. I went into the hospital a broken man and came out standing on the rock. We have a song that says, “He took my past and made it whole,” and that’s what He did for me. I’m thankful for that.
I’ve got a little over one hundred songs that I’ve written. They’re all very personal to me. I can tell you exactly what was happening in my life that encouraged every song.
Darlene: Some famous people have picked up his songs.
Johnathan: Mariah Carey, “Inside Your Heart”; Alison Krauss, “I Need Your Grace”; and I’ve got two songs on hold for Christmas [2010] right now, one with Vince Gill and Amy Grant, and the other with Wynonna Judd. The one with Wynonna Judd is “Do You Know Jesus?” and it’s a really cool song. We were at a church, and I just wrote it in the midst of a major battle. I was at a church that I mostly didn’t want to be at because I was in the middle of this struggle. A lady asked the kids, she said, “Is there anything you’d like to hear Mr. Johnathan sing?”
This kid said, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” I was going, “Oh, great.” [Laughs.] Of course, I did it and as I started singing it, I got this other song. I wanted to say, “Hey, can I just take a quick break?” It’s the whole Christmas story, all right there in the song. I got that from being in a place I didn’t really want to be because I had so much going on. That’s something else I’ve learned, too, is a lot of times the reason that we don’t succeed or get through our situations is because if Satan can get us to focus on our problems, then he’s taken our focus off of God. If we can take the time to get our focus back on God and off of us, then we can overcome whatever the situation.
The scripture that says, “Those that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength,” I was always taught that it meant when you’ve done all you can do, just sit and wait on God. I’ve learned to believe that it means those that wait upon the Lord like a server would do at a restaurant can renew their strength. When I’m having a bad day or feeling rough in a situation, then that’s the very thing I do, is say, “God, what can I do for you, because I’m needing to wait on you today?” That’s where my strength has been.
I was talking to one of the little boys at that same church, and he was probably nine years old and seemed like he was by himself. He was in a corner and wasn’t really part of the whole group. I went over to him and I said, “So, what are you getting for Christmas?” He said, “The same thing that I get every year, probably.” He was an orphan. I said, “What if God were to bring you a family for Christmas?” That’s what I started praying for, but when I said that, this song just came to me, “The Gift Made the Difference.” In the song, he was placed into a family, and the second verse says, “I wasn’t there when Jesus was born, but I know what He’s done for me, and the gift made the difference for me.” All the songs have a story and are all personal to me.
These are the two people that I get to travel with, Noel Walters and Darlene Chapman, and I’m so thankful for them. It is just the three of us that travel. We are the band. I play the piano, but I didn’t take piano lessons. Just being around music all my life, I picked it up. I play by ear and read music, too. We were always taught the do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do, so I learned all of that. Growing up, our church had a choir and a band, so I learned by being around that as well.
Noel: I play the bass guitar.
Darlene: I play the piano. I’ve been singing since I was three. My daddy was a pastor, so I grew up in church, so I’ve been playing and singing since I was born [laughs]. That’s just what our family did.
Johnathan: And you’ll see why she’s been doing it a long time tonight. It’s just the three of us now, but I love it! They have been with Young Harmony six months. I met Darlene sixteen or seventeen years ago; she was traveling with a group, and we were friends, and we traveled in the same circuit kind of thing. I met Noel about six years ago, and he traveled with Mel Tillis for about sixteen years. God just put us together at a tremendous time, and we sang here at Country Tonite Theatre in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, our very first time together. I said, “Why can’t this be one of those churches with only like twenty people for our first time?”
When I think about the name of our group, I think, “Oh mercy, we are a little past the name [laughs].”
Darlene: Watch it [laughs]!
Johnathan: The name came about when we were at a church, when we first started singing, and the McClure Trio couldn’t go that night. I had gotten a couple of people to go, and we didn’t have a name or anything. This older lady stood up after the concert and said, “How beautiful it is to see young people in harmony with their calling that God has given them.” When she said that, the Young Harmony part just sorta came out at me. I didn’t think about years to come.
We sing in any venue, from small churches to big churches to restaurants, just anywhere we are led. We got to sing on the History Channel on National Prayer Day in Washington, D.C. Year before last, I had to read all of the “begets” [fathered a child] from the Bible on television. I was going, “Oh, have mercy,” at all these names I couldn’t even really pronounce. One year we were asked to sing at a bar on National Prayer Day. The woman said, “We want you to come, but we want you to know we are still going to serve the alcohol.”
I said, “You be you, because we’re still going to serve what we serve, too.” And it was just beautiful. It was difficult for us mentally. We went in and wouldn’t even drink a bottle of water because we didn’t want to leave the wrong impression. We got there in time to go around and talk to each person that was there. We just chitchatted, got up, and sang, and then we left. It was probably about five or six months later, and I was at Goody’s, a former clothing store, because they had this really big sale [laughs], and a lady came up to me and said, “You won’t recognize me, I’m sure, but I was at the bar in Lookout Valley, Tennessee, when you sang on National Prayer Day. I just want you to know that you made a difference in my life.”
I was just amazed at how God works. Scripture says, “Go unto the highways and the hedges,” and those places are the hedges. I know that you do have to be careful, but we shouldn’t let anything keep us from sharing the good news. We have a job to do.
We were called and asked to sing at a revival, and it was just about a’ hour, hour and half from our house. We truly wanted a spirit-filled service, so we fasted. I can tell you that we don’t miss a meal for anybody, except for God. We’d fasted that whole day, and the plan was that as soon as that service was over, we were headed straight to Burger King. We were going to get a Whopper with cheese [laughs]. As the service was nearing the end, the pastor stood up and said, “We’re going to take up a love offering for the evangelist that has come from Florida. Before we take this love offering, I want you to ask God what He would have you give.” I had in my pocket eighteen dollars. I had a ten, a five, and three ones. I was going to just put three ones in the offering, and then we could eat on the other fifteen. God spoke to me, and He told me to give the eighteen dollars, and I was starving! So what I was going to do was just give eight dollars and let my wife eat later; just kidding [laughs]. Actually, I gave the entire eighteen dollars because that’s what God had i
nstructed me to do. When we left the church and we were on the way home, I told her that I didn’t have any cash and that we were about a hour and half home and surely we can make it. My stomach was just growling. I got on the interstate, and we were headed home, but in about three exits I turned my blinker on, and she said, “Where are you going?”
I said, “We’re going to Burger King.” She said, “But we don’t have any money.” I said, “I know, but the Lord told me to go to Burger King.” We got to Burger King and, as we pulled in the drive-through line, there were three cars ahead of us. I got to the speaker, and I said, “We want two Whopper with cheese combo meals, one supersized, one with Diet Coke, and one with sweet tea.”
We headed to the window, and she said, “Johnathan, what are you going to tell them when they ask for the money?” I said, “All I can say, really, is hold on. The Lord sent me here, so He’ll send the money.” I didn’t know how God was going to do it, but I knew He would. I didn’t know if we were going to have to mop or what, but I knew He would take care of us. We got up to the window, and the lady opened the window, handed out our drinks, she had the bag of food in her hand, and she said, “The lady in front of you just paid for your meal. Have a good evening and come again.” She was just as amazed as we were, too.
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