by David Dodd 

In Barfield’s case, something as insignificant as a pretzel unleashed his worldly emotions of pride and anger into a simmering moment of marital destruction.

Who would have though that moment would become the significant sound released from Barfield’s third in-studio release, Worth Fighting For.  

That moment birthed a song, and that song radiated the heart of a pastor hundreds of miles away.  The song will now be included during a pivotal moment of an upcoming movie.   

When Associate Pastor Stephen Kendrick heard Barfield’s song, Love Is Not A Fight, he immediately picked up the phone to ask Barfield if he could include it in his  movie, Fireproof.

Kendrick is not your ordinary Associate Pastor, and his church is not your ordinary Georgia Baptist Church.  In addition to his pastoral duties, Kendrick served as writer and producer of Facing The Giants, a film of a high school football team driven by their faith above football.  They put The Lord before the pigskin, and the results were tremendous. The movie scored big in Hollywood and their follow-up film, Fireproof, features Kirk Cameron as a firefighter caught up in the perils of a troublesome marriage.   

It was a wrinkle in the marriage of Barfield that created the connection, with the help of a pretzel.

Apostles That Rock sat down with Warren Barfield to talk about his latest single and the significant lessons God has been teaching him since his previous release. 

It really is amazing how God connects us all, although I don’t think at the time you went through this with your wife you had that on your mind.  

It was crazy how it escalated.   We had some friends over one night just hanging out and I dropped a pretzel on the floor.  My wife - and I love her tremendously - but she’s a clean freak and so she told me that it wasn’t ok if I dropped this pretzel on the floor; I thought it would be funny if I dropped a whole handful of them, so I did, and it wasn’t funny.  That started a fight. 

It’s funny how it happens, you know, it had nothing to do with the pretzel, it was all about pride.  My wife corrects me and we’re in front of friends and I don’t like that so I do something to show her that I’m in charge.  Then she got her feelings hurt so she blows up again and it’s just back and forth. 

Do you remember your thoughts during the fight? 

It’s amazing how this person who I love so much and who I count as my best friend, it’s amazing how I could hurt her so deeply with just this dumb thing that happened; it opened up the gate.

We got through the fight but it wasn’t pretty.  It was a very humbling thing for me.  The next day I just began to think about how I couldn’t take her for granted I couldn’t take this relationship for granted, that it wouldn’t always just be there, that I had to wake up every day and fight for it.

It began this process in me that eventually became a song.

Did other elements contribute to the writing of the song? 

I got to thinking that the word love defined by our culture confuses me.  I have a close friend who told me he was in love and was engaged, and then in a matter of days he broke off the engagement and was in love with someone else.  That confused me. 

Another friend found out that his wife of seven years, the mother of his three children, had been having an affair with a co-worker for a couple of years.  Everyday she threw, I love you around while destroying everyone she said it to. 

So I began writing the song as a conviction.  I’ve seen the abuse of the word love all around me, but I wasn’t one of the abusers, or was I?  Looking back at that fight I saw myself, and I didn’t like the reflection.  That night my love was prideful and selfish.  I flew off the handle listing all my wife’s wrongs; it failed. 

By the grace of God, my wife and I survived that battle.  Love Is Not A Fight is my conclusion.  There is a definition of love that is very different than the one given to us by our culture.  It is seen in the person of Jesus Christ.  It is opposite of all the things that I was that night.

Love Is Not A Fight Video

 Even though I hear story after story of God taking moments like your fight, taking our own destruction and turning it around as an element to give Him all the Glory, time and time again, I’m continually astounded at the magnitude of Him. 

You’re right, and that’s just one minor element in what He does for us.  It’s interesting how it worked out that a song I wrote in Nashville, at my home, was a perfect parallel to this story these guys were writing down in Georgia. 

I remember sitting down with Stephen Kendrick and having him tell me it’s the perfect song to end the movie Fireproof.   He said he couldn’t have commissioned a writer to write a better song for the moment.

I’m really grateful to have the song in the movie.  God is really showing me a lot of things.  I think between the last record and this record God was using life to strip away a lot of things that I was making too important.  That’s probably the easiest way to say it.  He was teaching me to prioritize the things that really matter. 

One of the questions that I was asking myself is do I spend as much time investing in relationships with my friends and family as I do in my career?  That’s a big one; do I spend as much time in my relationship with Christ as I do in building a bigger house or buying a cooler car?

All this stuff we exhaust ourselves to invest in that will just fade away, that materialistic stuff that we can’t take with us when we go, that we spend our whole life going after and neglect all the things that matter so we can build this empire that doesn’t matter.

And I just really had this conviction that I needed to let God strip that stuff away and teach me what really mattered.

These songs are just sort of me working through that idea and writing about some of those things that I think are important enough to fight for, some of the things that I think stand when everything else falls away. 

Read David’s previous interview with Warren Barfield