by David Dodd

When Mike Weaver was facing the aftermath of a hurricane, the initial devastation turned to comfort, and that comfort came from Proverbs 3:5-6.

"Man,  I’m  telling you what, here’s the deal, when the Bible talks about believing in the New Testament, when it says the word believe, there’s so much of the old language in that word," the Big Daddy says in this exclusive interview with Apostles That Rock.  "I don’t think we can sum it up in one word, and so when I hear the word believe, what I have learned is to equate that within my heart, to trust in with my whole life, you know what I’m saying, in a way that it affects my life, to trust in a way that it affects the way that I live, so when I read the word believe in Scripture, I think about Proverbs 3:5-6  because of this idea of trusting in the Lord with all your heart. 

 The next part I think needs to be underlined in bold, you know - don’t lean on your own understanding.  I’m telling you, every time I get to the place where I think I have it figured out, when I think I have God figured out, or I think I have the situation figured out, I fall flat on my face!

 In all your ways acknowledge Him:  I think that’s just in every day life, I mean acknowledging Him with our decisions, with our actions, with everything in our heart, and He will make your paths straight.

 I think there’s this giant misconception in the church a lot of times that we have to somehow convince God to bless our lives.  God wants to make our lives a great and blessed place, but the truth is we fight Him all the time because what His first priority is, is that we be conformed to the image of Jesus.  So when we trust in Him with all our hearts and don’t lean on our own understanding because His ways are higher than ours, His thoughts are higher than ours, and when we acknowledge Him in all our ways, He’s gonna make our paths straight. 

In the middle of Hurricane Ivan, oh, man, I’m telling you what, we were gone for the weekend, we played in Wisconsin and we came back and literally we couldn’t get back to our neighborhood because the destruction was just so devastating it was incredible; we couldn’t get in for days.

We did finally get back in and found out that my folk’s place where I was living at the time was just turned into an aquarium.  This also housed the offices of Big Daddy Weave and everything was ruined.  It was filled six and a half feet up with this of mix of sea water and raw sewage.  We were only a couple blocks from the beach and a 50-foot storm surge came, destroyed everything.  It looked like a war zone.

When we saw the coverage of Hurricane Katrina a year later, we were definitely hurting for them but we weren’t shocked because we had seen very much the same thing in our own community.  So in the middle of that, you know, you find out what’s really important in life, because there’s stuff that we figured we couldn’t live without because we’re so used to living “the American Dream,” you know, but man, I’m telling you what, in situations like that where everything else is stripped away, you find out what you can live with and what you can’t live without, and the truth is it’s the person, not the things.  It’s the person of Jesus Christ, because everything else we have in life - every good and perfect gift - comes from Him, it comes from above. 

And you know, that devastation is what drew our family together, it’s what inevitably moved me to Nashville and allowed my mind to be open to this amazing woman that I married. 

My folks house has been completely renovated now, you know, so after 25 years of putting up with two Big Daddy’s living with them, it’s been completely reworked and they have a brand new house.  The relationship between my brother and his wife and my folks are stronger than ever because they got to have a really special time because mom and dad lived with them for six months.

The whole thing looked like tragedy, but at the other side of it we see the Hand of God, we see His mercy, we see His grace, we see His blessings show up in the middle of those times, man, and you know what, that becomes sort of like what’s talked about in Scripture, the Ebenezer Rock.  When we sing it in the hymn, “Here I have, praise my Ebenezer Rock,” I thought it was always about Scrooge or something, you know, but suddenly the Ebenezer Rock was a stone of remembrance man, this thing that they had set up to remember what God had done in a place, and so that situation, Hurricane Ivan – that’s the Ebenezer Rock, that stone of remembrance of God’s faithfulness to my family. 

In the middle of that, if you can trust in the Lord with all your heart and don’t lean on your own understanding because it might look bad at first, in all your ways acknowledge Him, just start thanking Him in the middle of the situation and He will make your paths straight."