by David Dodd

The first single off Warren Barfield’s second CD was divinely inspired by a childhood hero. 

“When I was a teenager I was really into country music,” he tells Apostles That Rock, “and one of the most amazing singers I’ve ever heard was Bryan White.  I was a huge fan of his; I used to try to sing like him.   

When I got to Nashville I was hanging out with some guys and it turned out that one of my friends in the industry is Bryan’s brother and he set it up where we could write together.  I got with Bryan and we wrote the music to Saved at a morning writing session at his house.   

We went to lunch and were just hanging out with each other and I just started asking him his story, trying not too much to be a fan, but at the same time, you know, excited to be hanging out with this guy who I really looked up to and who influenced me as a musician. 

So I was asking him some stories about his life and he began to tell me about how he grew to a hugely successful country artist and in the middle of all that found himself really empty, and how Christ came into his life and changed all that, set him up and gave him something to live for and saved him, rescued him from the hopelessness that he was in.  

I grew up in church and heard a million people say, yeah, I’m saved, you know, but this guy said it in such a way that you wanted to just stop eating your burrito and really pay attention.  I listened to him share his story and it left me so encouraged and excited about the fact that yeah, I’m a Christian, yeah, I’ve been rescued, and to me, just to hear him tell his story it encouraged me in my faith in such a huge way that I began to write the lyrics to Saved.

David wrote in the Psalms about being deep down in the ocean and God reaching from heaven to earth to pick me up and to save me.  I read that passage while I was writing that lyric and decided to make it the first verse of the song.”           

In the liner notes of his first CD, Warren penned this message:  ‘My dreams were too personal to share with anyone but You.  There’s no question as to Who is responsible, now that they’re all coming true.’  He explains the note. 

“Since I was 15 years old I’ve dreamed about sharing my songs from the stage and about sharing my stories with as many people as possible but never really shared it with anyone because if you say that to anyone they just think you want to be in the spotlight.  And it really wasn’t about that, it was about this desire in my heart to share hope with as many people as possible.   

 I compare it a lot to David.  When David was a young man in the field as a Shepard, he was anointed and told that he was going to be king.   I can’t imagine David going back to his buddies in the field as he’s watching the sheep saying, ‘I’m going to be King.’  I imagine everybody would have laughed at him and made fun of him.   

 I really believe that God laid in my heart that I was going to be a singer and I was going to travel and share that.  When you’re a kid and you tell people that, they say, ‘well of course you are, and I’m going to be a movie star.’   So I kept it to myself. 

 I sang and played wherever I could but I never really told people that was my dream.  I never came to town trying to get a record deal, I always just played my songs and traveled and did what I did. 

 When I was 15, the blueprint for me was Steven Curtis Chapman, he was who I really looked up to as far as a person who shared their faith through music in a way that I loved.  I really looked up to him, his music and his art. 

 I got a phone call from the same people that worked with him.  To me it just felt like, wow, I never even told anybody that this is what I wanted to do and these people are the people who are calling me. 

 Steven’s song, The Great Adventure was the first song that turned me on to Contemporary Christian Music and wanting to share my stories and music.  The day my record came out I was opening for Steven Curtis Chapman and he invited me on stage to sing The Great Adventure with him.  For me it was like wow, God has showed me that nothing is impossible, there’s no dream that is too big when He lays it on your heart to go after it.  I knew that no one else could make that happen but God. 

I didn’t make it happen and no one else made it happen, God made it happen for me to make a record with people that I dreamed about making a record with, the same producer that produced all of Steven’s records.  And God let me sing The Great Adventure, the very song that sparked it all for me, on stage with Steven Curtis Chapman.   

That has been in a lot of ways is a high point for me where as God showed me that if He laid something on my heart, it can happen and not to think otherwise. 

There’s also been some great lows as well.  I think we all have highs and lows in our journey and there’s been a lot of lows and a lot of times our lows are defined by how high our highs are.  That high has paved the way for great lows.  

Ultimately I find that the lesson in it is God is in charge of everything and has plugged in the lows for us to realize that the same God that provided the highs is the same God that is walking with us through the lows.  He’s not forsaken us, it’s just a new part in the journey and it’s just as valuable as the highs.”