Psalm 55 + Crashing into a Yellow Pole | Jamey Ice

Been reading through Psalms the last couple months.

Hit Psalm 55 in my Bible a few mornings ago.

And there’s this little note I wrote on top: “4/7/08 Collective Soul tour broken.”

I don’t even remember writing that.

But… seeing those words is wild.

That’s 17 years ago now. Three months into marriage. We were on tour with Collective Soul — one of my favorite bands.

Melissa flew out to our California show. Big deal since we didn’t have hardly any money. She was finally going to see us as a married couple on the road (I was gone 300+ days that year).

We played San Diego, then drove to LA around 1 AM looking for hotels.

This was before iPhones, so we’d just drive until we saw vacancy signs.

First hotel — no vacancy.

Second hotel — no vacancy.

Third hotel… and I somehow drove our van straight into a three-foot yellow pole trying to turn around.

Totaled it. At 2 AM in Los Angeles.

We were stuck for a week. Van destroyed. The band was broke (we hadn’t signed our record deal yet). Couldn’t get back on tour.

Everyone was super mad at me.

Here’s what got me about finding that note…

These days when we tell that story at GRO shows, everyone laughs.

It’s become part of our canon of great stories. We look back on it fondly.

We were trapped in LA and had all these adventures. We wrote Goodbye L.A., one of our favorite songs about the experience. Geoff met his future wife Abbi at the Troubadour on that trip.

But I had completely forgotten how devastated I was at the time.

Psalm 55 is a song of lament. Anguish. Despair.

And apparently I was living it.

It’s wild how God does that.

Takes things that seem crazy hard at the time… and grows us through them.

How time heals. How He heals.

How His picture’s always bigger than what we can see in the moment.

That yellow pole felt like the end of the world. But 17 years later, it’s honestly one of my favorite stories.

Turns out it was just gas, fire, oxygen… and the making of a great tune.

It’s funny how God is always writing a better story than you can see.