Before you think you’ve arrived at the wrong BLOG, I have decided to expand what I include here to some of the things I have been writing about spiritual things that are in step with my personal Music Business Background. I believe many people in the arts industries – movies, acting, writers – are going to begin to awaken to their need for more heart stability that can only be found in the Lord. They are just people.

Personal Spiritual Views
on the frame of my music background

Written and first published June 20, 2026

I have been laboring under a couple of wrong ideas about my calling as a Christian. One is that I always had to “turn the other cheek” in relationships that have proven to be so chronic in disrespecting me that I began to shrink as a person in dread of what would be done next. I thought to be a witness to how good the LORD is, I had to take abuse silently.

The other thing is about crying. I have cried a lot over the years – I’ve never not allowed myself to cry – but over the past months I have been crying so much. The TV shows I’ve chosen to watch have wrung so many tears out of me – relating to the sadness of the characters I was watching like McLeod’s Daughters is one example from several.

Human relationships can be so full of sorrows. I wondered if I was losing it or doing the wrong thing watching TV programs that made me cry, but I also had the impression that God was giving me a pressure valve to let it all out. All the stored up personal tears.

Some of the TV situations I cried over, I had nothing in my life like the characters went through, but tears still poured out of my eyes for their pain. It was empathy for the things other people experience and grief over. There is nothing wrong with letting ourselves feel the sorrows of the human experience – for ourselves and for others. I would rather freely weep than be so blocked from feelings that I rarely cried. The world in which we live, there is plenty to cry over.

Before you think you’ve arrived at the wrong BLOG, I have decided to expand what I include here to some of the things I have been writing about spiritual things that are in step with my personal Music Business Background. I believe many people in the arts industries – movies, acting, writers – are going to begin to awaken to their need for more heart stability that can only be found in the Lord. They are just people.

Personal Spiritual Views
on the frame of my music background

Wrote & published this June 5, 2026

Funny. I was searching for images to depict “Persona Non Grata” running across some that showed T-shirts with that phrase written on it. I thought, Perfect! As in, BEEN THERE, DONE THAT & HAVE THE TSHIRT.

As I kept scrolling through to locate the perfect example I ran across my favorite musician-performer of my pre-Christian days, Gino Vannelli and his album Persona Non Grata. It was an album I never knew of, so I was surprised. But it works perfectly.

Gino should have been a major star but he ran into too much jealousy in the industry to break free from it. The more excited women became about him, the more critics panned him & concert promoters passed on him. His stage performance was sexy to the max, women loved it but the music industry always was essentially a male-dominated industry and they hated Vannelli.

Personal Spiritual Views
on the frame of my music background

Before you think you’ve arrived at the wrong BLOG, I have decided to expand what I include here to some of the things I have been writing about spiritual things that are in step with my personal Music Business Background. I believe many people in the arts industries – movies, acting, writers – are going to begin to awaken to their need for more heart stability that can only be found in the Lord. They are just people.

An unexpected pivot toward Tears for Fears
because I’m tired of just preaching to the choir

On September 14th I wrote on my Facebook page about how music was the major idol in my life when I returned to God in last months of 1983. Music became my life in my teens and by my 20’s I was building my life on the music business.

In the mid 1970’s I worked my way up from concert reviews to become the editor of a concert music industry trade magazine. At times I attended 4 concerts in one week. Even in the few years I did that job, it became a blur all the shows I saw and interviews I did: Billy Joel, Boston, Gino Vanelli, Cheap Trick, Styk, Al Jarreau, Genesis, Journey, Springsteen, Rush, Black Sabbath, The Ramones and even Parliament Funkadelic. Departing that job I loved because of a new boss who wanted favors I was not willing to give, I did promotions at the newly opened Dallas Agora showcasing up and coming artists like Pat Benatar and Dire Straits. Stories. I’ve got a few. I just rarely think on those things.

By 1983 my life was crashing on the rocks of life. That’s when the guy I lived with, a former drummer/lyricist of a 3-piece power rock band signed in 1971 to Capitol Records, was in bad shape due to a degenerative spine disease. It would be that guy, my husband of the last 43 years, Tony, who would drag me back to church in 1983. He was desperate for physical healing. We married within a couple of months before our first visit because I didn’t want church people giving me a hard time about shacking up. I did not yet know that it wasn’t church people I needed to please, it was God.

So we got married and experienced powerful personal touches from God straight off. Both of us, experienced healing and the power of the Holy Spirit sweeping through our bodies. One time sitting there in church Tony felt the Holy Spirit ‘whoosh’ through his body from left to right and at the exact same time I felt the Spirit ‘whoosh’ through my body from right to left. We were stunned and our reaction was to turn in the direction the Spirit had exited our bodies. Our heads jerked in that direction and we were looking at each other in utter shock.

This happened within weeks of starting to attend and neither of us had ever been exposed to anything like that before. These personal touches from God were a powerful witness to us that He is real and we were in the right place. As I wrote in earlier posts:
“I devoured the bible. Read it through 5 times the first year. I read it like I was drowning and it was the only thing that could save me. It was the only thing that saved me.”

“The other thing I did in that first year was to put down my idol of music. I turned the music off, quit listening and quit following what was happening in the business. I went cold turkey to break that idolatry off of my life.

I didn’t start listening to music again until the late 1990’s in another rough spiritual patch I went through because of bitterness and unforgiveness I had stored up in my heart. The music idolatry was gone though.”

Now I include this because many Christians are dead set against popular music. I’m not, as long as it is music appreciation and not idolatry, as it often is. I suspect many are pearl clutching over this article, but think what they will, it is not for their sake that I write.

That’s the set up. It is the background to all the rest of what I write here about Tears for Fears, because on September 14th I wrote something I had almost forgotten. As I wrote: