Barry Blaze: Always A Worshipper
01-17-2008
by Kevan Breitinger
While the name Barry Blaze may not be immediately recognizable to you, chances are you’ve heard of his band Code of Ethics, the very popular dance/pop band that rode out a string of hits throughout the ‘90s, touring with Newsboys and Petra, among others. Born into a musically gifted family, Barry’s natural artistic orientation kept him on the forefront of musical creativity in the Christian music industry. In 2001 Barry put his touring and writing on hold to join the worship staff of a growing church in North Florida, a position he felt strongly to be right in line with God’s plan for his life at that time. What he did not know yet was that he was heading into a period of deep stretching, growth, and new understanding.
On a beautiful May morning in 2005, Barry was riding his motorcycle into one of his favorite Florida views, a long causeway bridge with graceful palm trees on either side. But that particular morning the beauty came to a drastic halt. A sudden Florida rainstorm blew in quickly and unexpectedly, catching Barry midway across the long causeway. “Suddenly buckets of rain poured down, and the wind was blowing sideways,” he shares. “I was trying desperately to slow the bike down or stop it, but the slower I went the harder the wind would try to lift the bike up, so I was really caught between a rock and a hard place.” As Barry speaks you can hear the cost of his recounting that morning, but he wills himself to go on. He had told me earlier in the conversation that talking about the accident was like “picking a scab,” but it was ok, because it was now “part of who I am. We all have a God story, and I’m all about telling His story.”
No one saw the actual crash on that rainy bridge, but they figured later, by the remnants of his helmet, explosively split both front and back, and the extent to his injuries, that he had hit the side of the bridge first with his head, before falling back headfirst to the pavement. “It basically destroyed the bones in my ears. My eardrums were immediately punctured, and when my head hit as suddenly and repeatedly as it did, I had a lot of brain trauma as well.” The fireman and his nurse wife first on the scene, coincidentally the passengers immediately behind the accident, did what they could to keep him alive, but their hopes were not high.
Fortunately, Barry remembers little of this. What he does remember is waking up in the hospital in the middle of that first night. “I had this really incredible sense of peace. It could have been the morphine,” he laughs, “but it was the most clarity that I had all that week. I even smiled, because I just knew that I wasn’t dead, that God was at work, and that whatever He was doing, it would all come together for good. Sounds really strange, doesn’t it?” he asks. “There’s no way I would have that type of thought on my own,” he adds.
Barry’s injuries were actually worse than he knew at that point. Beyond his auditory damage, his eyesight was also endangered, the head trauma causing holes in the macula, or center, of his eyes. The surgeries involved in repairing these injuries were quite extensive, five just for his eyes, one of which caused a detached retina, treated by two weeks face-down in a bed with a gas bubble resting on his eye. As you can imagine, Barry found the recovery period challenging. “I had never been hurt or even sick before, so after getting out of the hospital and resting for a month, I thought I could fix the rest of it. I didn’t know the extent of the damage, and I’d never dealt with anything like this before. So like a typical guy,” he admits, “I wouldn’t stay in bed. I wanted to get back to work, back into life. I had been leading worship at my church for three years. We had a vital ministry, and I felt like a lot of people were depending on me. But I still had vertigo, and I couldn’t see or hear well. I’d get up and go to the office, but after an hour I’d have to go home. It was so frustrating, and then the surgeries started.”
Barry’s voice is hushed as he describes the up and down progress of his recovery. “It was difficult because the surgeries took so much life out of me, so much stamina. They’d operate on one eye at a time, and I’d be blind in that eye for a month, and slowly recover. But then they’d do another surgery, and I’d start all over again. I had eight surgeries in total,” he says quietly, “and each one did that. So I had two years of recovering a little bit of ground, but I’d always fall backward. Finally the church made me stay home for 3 months. I couldn’t stand up straight, I was in constant pain, and I still suffered from vertigo. They said man, you gotta stay home, and they got someone to fill in.”
“I finally had to turn it over to God, but that’s always hard,” Barry confesses. “I had to say, ‘OK, I will try not to be angry
about this, or ask why.’” It was that surrender that ushered open the door to his new album, Patiently Waiting. “The title track came to me one night when I was on a steroid treatment. They use it to rush internal healing, but it doesn’t allow you to sleep. I was really wrestling that night with the idea of losing my hearing,” he shares. “I thought, I’ll never really hear the complete beauty of music again in the same way. Once you have nerve damage, the nerves never come back in the same way. I have perpetual ringing in my ears, always loud and annoying. As a musician especially, I used to love to put on headphones and just drink in the beauty of music, no matter what kind. And I realized the things I used to enjoy in this life are probably over, unless God chooses to heal me. So I have to let it go, I have to pick up what’s left and go on and use it for His good. I really desperately wanted to hear from God. You know how it is,” he adds, “when you’re longing for that personal touch? I was thinking all that inside me, and suddenly that song came to me in its total form. I just got out of bed and went into the other room and recorded it; that was it. It doesn’t happen like that very often,” he says, “so I knew it was God saying ‘I’m here. I’m still working through you, writing music through you, although you might not hear it in the same way you used to. But the beauty of music won’t go away, because I’ve placed it inside of you.’”
“So I took away from that the fact that I now am sure who I was created to be in Christ,” states Barry confidently. “Number one, I realize that I’m a worshipper. Coming to church ministry has really changed the way that I do worship. My entire thought process is vertical now. Before I was always talking about God, but now I want to constantly talk to God. That has completely changed in me. And number two, I realize that I was created to be an artist. For some reason, I used to think that if I was to go into church ministry I had to lay down who I was, my personality as an artist. But now I see how impossible that is, as Barry the artist and Barry the worshipper are one and the same. That’s been one of my greatest gifts, and it’s why I’m back writing and recording music.”
Barry’s excitement is contagious as he shares one more important insight gained along this rocky path. “I’ll always be a worshipper and I’ll always be involved in a local church. It’s now extremely important to me. Before, living in Nashville and touring so much, those lines sometimes became kind of blurred for me. We always attended regularly, but we were also always heading out the door, too. Now one of our greatest gifts is to be involved and have friends who love us in community, and it’s a big part of what brought us through all this.”
When I mention to Barry that it sounds as if that rainy May morning has brought a lot of such gifts into his life, his joy is as quick as his reply. “Yes, there’s no question about it,” he responds. “God has got the whole road mapped out for us.” Even the bridges apparently.
For more of Barry Blaze’s story please visit www.barryblaze.com, or click here to read our review of Barry’s exciting worship album, Patiently Waiting.
Comments
No comments have been written about this yet. Be the first below!