Radio killed the video star

Well, I am extremely happy right now about where Half Past Forever is at this point. It seems like every time I get excited about something, then I just get another thing to be excited about. How completely opposite than the old HPF...it seemed back then that every time I'd get excited about something, that something discouraging would happen back to back with it. I've got to admit that it's nice to be at a place in life where happiness outweighs discouragement.

Over the past few weeks, I've gotten to know a radio guy from down in Columbia, SC (about 2 hours from where I am in Greenville). It's been really awesome to hear how God just completely changed his life. My friend worked in radio for years and then took a job with Universal Records as a radio promotor, which sounds like a pretty cool job. Basically, his job was to go meet with Program Directors of Radio Stations, get them drunk and get them to play the songs his artists at the time were putting out. Great job right? He was in a different city every night, schmoozing people, bullcrapping people and getting artists he believed in to gain popularity by radio plays.

Unfortunately, he hated it. He did it for five years (as a lost man) and had risen to the highest place he could go: head of radio promotions for the East Coast for a major record label, making more than 6 figures. But he was miserable. He found himself telling himself, "there must be more than this"...he had always told himself if he could make this much money he would be happy, but he was still miserable at the "pinnacle" of his career. So, he decided to quit.

A few weeks after he decided to start looking for options, his boss called him in and said, "We're making cuts and we have two option for you - you can move to San Fransisco and make half what you're making now, or we'll pay you a full year's salary and you don't have to come into work any more." He, of course, chose option 2 and decided, out of the blue, to move to Charleston. He didn't know anyone in Charleston, but just felt like that's where he wanted to be.

Soon after moving to Charleston, my friend decided that he was going to try church out...he hadn't been since he was a kid and at 35 at the time he thought he should try it again. There was a Baptist Church right across the street from where he lived so he decided that he would go there the next day. After he had called the church and gotten the service times, he decided to go work out at his gym.

As he was working, he noticed a dude walking into the gym wearing a University of Connecticut basketball jersey. My friend is originally from Connecticut and had been a DJ up there for a few years, and he never saw a UConn fan down in Charleston, so he HAD to talk to him. He stopped the guy and introduced himself and the two guys had a conversation as they worked out.

Come to find out, the guy wearing the jersey had not even worn the shirt in years, but had just uncovered the shirt in his closet and decided to wear it. Also, the jersey man was not even a member of the gym my friend was working out in, but his wife had a membership, so he decided to try it out that Saturday morning. As the two guys conversed, the guy asked my friend what he was doing for the weekend and my friend told him he was going to try church for the first time in years. The guy in the jersey replied with, "Oh, so you don't have a church? Well you should come and check out my church...Seacoast."

So, Kelly went to Seacoast in a movie theater (one of the Charleston sattelites). Unfortunately that first week, the church was dealing with a black mold problem and my friend got deathly ill, but he decided to just try the main campus in Mt. Pleasant. And he loved it. As a lost guy, he loved the church and one Sunday he accepted Christ as his Savior.

Over the next few months and years, God would really try his faith, from losing everything financially to taking a humbling job to going back into radio. And radio is where I met my friend. He recently started a Christian radio program that airs on Sunday nights on a mainstream radio station. With the new show (he is also the on-air morning show) he ran a contest to open up for a band called Sanctus Real and one of our friends entered us into the contest without even telling us and we won the contest. How many "coincedences" can happen in one story?

Well, my friend listened to our music and actually liked it, suprisingly. I mean he really liked it, and now it looks like we're going to be getting some radio play on mainstream radio. How cool is that.

Just when I thought things were great, they got better. Outside of being paid millions of dollars to play music, I can't imagine it getting better than right now.

But then I did say the same thing last week.