This Life I Live: One Man's Extraordinary, Ordinary Life and the Woman Who Changed It Forever

This Life I Live: One Man's Extraordinary, Ordinary Life and the Woman Who Changed It Forever

by Rory Feek
This Life I Live: One Man's Extraordinary, Ordinary Life and the Woman Who Changed It Forever

This Life I Live: One Man's Extraordinary, Ordinary Life and the Woman Who Changed It Forever

by Rory Feek

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Overview

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER**

Her story. His story. The love story of Joey and Rory.

By inviting so many into the final months of Joey’s life as she battled cancer, Joey and Rory Feek captured hearts around the world with how they handled the diagnosis; the inspiring, simple way they chose to live; and how they loved each other every step of the way. But there is far more to the story.

“My life is very ordinary,” says Rory. “On the surface, it is not very special. If you looked at it, day to day, it wouldn’t seem like much. But when you look at it in a bigger context—as part of a larger story—you start to see the magic that is on the pages of the book that is my life. And the more you look, the more you see. Or, at least, I do.”

In this vulnerable book, he takes us for the first time into his own challenging life story and what it was like growing up in rural America with little money and even less family stability.

This is the story of a man searching for meaning and security in a world that offered neither. And it’s the story of a man who finally gives it all to a power higher than himself and soon meets a young woman who will change his heart forever.

In This Life I Live, Rory Feek helps us not only to connect more fully to his and Joey’s story but also to our own journeys. He shows what can happen when we are fully open in life’s key moments, whether when meeting our life companion or tackling an unexpected tragedy. He also gives never-before-revealed details on their life together and what he calls “the long goodbye,” the blessing of being able to know that life is going to end and taking advantage of it. Rory shows how we are all actually there already and how we can learn to live that way every day.

A gifted man from nowhere and everywhere in search of something to believe in. A young woman from the Midwest with an angelic voice and deep roots that just needed a place to be planted. This is their story. Two hearts that found each other and touched millions of other hearts along the way.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780718090128
Publisher: HarperCollins Christian Publishing
Publication date: 08/22/2023
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 254
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

Rory Feek is a true renaissance man, known as one of Nashville’s premiere songwriters, entrepreneurs, and out-of-the-box thinkers. He is a world-class storyteller, crossing all creative mediums, from music and film to books and digital media, and is the New York Times bestselling author of This Life I Live and author of Once Upon a Farm and The Cow Said Neigh. As a blogger, Rory shares his heart and story with the world through roryfeek.com and has more than 2 million Facebook followers. As a songwriter, Rory has written multiple number-one songs. As an artist, he is half of the Grammy-winning country music duo Joey+Rory. As a filmmaker, Rory wrote and filmed the touching documentary To Joey, with Love and directed the feature-length love story Finding Josephine. Rory has appeared on The Rachael Ray ShowCBS Sunday Morning, and The Today Show. As a storyteller, Rory has a new role as Chief Creative Officer of the television network RFD-TV, where he will continue to share not only his own story with the world but also the incredible stories of many others. RFD-TV originally aired the television variety show The Joey+Rory Show and will also air Rory’s most recent television series, This Life I Live. Rory and his youngest daughter, Indiana, live an hour south of Nashville in an 1870s farmhouse, where she goes to school in a one-room schoolhouse built for their community.

Read an Excerpt

This Life I Live

One Man's Extraordinary, Ordinary Life and the Woman Who Changed It Forever


By Rory Feek

Thomas Nelson

Copyright © 2017 Rory Feek
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7180-9019-7



CHAPTER 1

FAMOUS FOR LOVE


I am famous.

Not for what most people think I'm famous for, though, which is music. Yes, I've written some songs that you've probably heard on the radio, and my wife and I have had a very successful career in the music business. And we've made half a dozen albums, toured the country and halfway around the world, and performed on television. We even had our own TV show for a couple of years. But that's not what I'm really famous for. Not anymore anyway.

I am famous for loving my wife.


* * *

There is hardly a grocery aisle that I walk down or a gas station that I pull into where I don't find a hand reached out to shake mine, an iPhone pointed my way, or, even more often, arms reaching out to hug me and to tell me how much they love me. And my wife. And my baby daughter and family.

Do you know what a gift that is? To know that millions of people not only have followed our story online through my blog and videos but also have sung along to our songs, and they've bowed their heads and prayed and shed their tears over my wife and me. Strangers have done this.

All of my life, I've been anonymous. A nobody. Now I'm not just somebody. I'm somebody's. I am Joey's husband, Rory.

And I am honored. So very honored to have been her husband. To be her husband still. To have stood beside her at the altar and be standing beside her still when 'til-death-do-us-part became something much more than a phrase in our wedding vows. To have put a wedding ring on her left hand. Twice. Once, in front of our friends and families that day in June 2002, and again in late February 2016, when we were all alone and the cancer had made her fingers so thin and frail that she had been wearing it on a chain around her neck, and she asked me to wrap masking tape around the bottom of that platinum promise so it wouldn't fall off her finger in the wooden casket that would be the final resting place for the ring with BOUND BY GOD FOREVER engraved inside the band.

But to know why being famous for loving my wife means so much to me, you have to know something more of my story. More of the journey than just the last two and a half years, which I have had the chance to share in my blog. More lyrics of the song that is my life. More of the darkness that I lived through to understand the light that I found and have had the chance to become.

My life is very ordinary. On the surface, it is not very special. If you looked at it, day to day, it wouldn't seem like much. But when you look at it in a bigger context — as part of a larger story — you start to see the magic that is on the pages of the book that is my life. And the more you look, the more you see. Or, at least, I do.

CHAPTER 2

STRONGER


I don't cry like I used to or hurt like I did when I was a younger man. I'm more stable. Stronger. Finally. When others don't or can't hold it together, somehow I do. I'm not sure why or when that started. I wasn't always like that. Far, far from it. I was an emotional mess most of my life. Crying and falling apart for the smallest of things. Most of them, things of my doing. Or things that were just in my head. I'm not like that anymore. At least not as far as I can tell.


* * *

We had a perfect at-home birth that, a few hours later, turned into a horrific surgery for my wife and a diagnosis of Down syndrome for our baby daughter. A few months later my siblings and I watched our mother pass away right before our eyes. And the year after that, I held my wife's hand as cancer took her, and I had to pick up our two-year-old daughter, Indiana, and somehow go on. But I have been strong. I have cried very few tears, especially in the moments where the pain lives or is learned. I have found myself crying in other moments. When I'm by myself — thinking, remembering, wondering. But all in all, I have mostly felt peace. My wife was the same way. She was strong in her faith and trusted God when difficulties would come our way. Just as I do. I don't know why. Or where I learned that. Or became that. I know that she is a lot of why I am me. Joey. And God. God that was in Joey. I could see Him in her. In her eyes and her smile, even when it hurt to smile. In her tears and her laughter, He was there. Her love strengthened my faith. And brought hope. Always, always hope.

It's a wonderful difference compared to how I used to be, but it's also unusual for me. Most of the people around me break down easily and often. Hope comes and goes like the wind. My sister Marcy almost didn't make it through my mother's passing. Her grief was so great. I couldn't relate to her. I tried to. I listened and was there for her and did my best to comfort her. But I didn't cry like she did or feel her pain. My view of our mom dying was compassionate but in a realistic way. People pass away. It's a part of life. It's hard and terrible, but it's gonna happen to all of us. Mom smoked, right up until the end, so this happens a lot when that happens. Somehow I could keep in perspective that Mom was seventy-one, and that's a long life. Still, even with that, I wonder if I should be crying or hurting more. I don't feel like I'm carrying a huge amount of weight or that I'm bottling up my emotions or anything like that. I just feel like I now have a different perspective from what I had most of my life. I have peace. Because of my faith. And finally opening my hands and turning my life over to God. Believing in a higher power and trusting that He has a bigger plan. One that I don't understand. That I can't understand this side of heaven.

God is the author of this story. Yes, it is my pen that He's used to write the book. My laptop, actually. But it's the story He has told with my life and my wife's. A story He is still telling. I just wake up every day and turn the page. Sometimes I'm frightened by what I find, and sometimes I'm exhilarated. Many nights I don't want to go to sleep and wake up the next day to turn another page. Afraid that the beautiful moment we're experiencing might be met with hardship in the next paragraph, and our journey to the top of a mountain will come barreling down the other side. But we must turn the page and trust that the story He is telling is bigger than that one page or that one chapter.

Looking back at my life, it is easy for me to see. Even the chapter that I am in now, I know He is still writing. Taking my character and those around me, building a plot that is brilliantly woven into a beautiful tale that only the Master Storyteller could tell.

This is my story, up until now. Or at least a good chunk of it. Fifty-one years condensed into seventy thousand words. Mine is a sad story and a happy one. A human tragedy and a comedy of errors. It's Forrest Gump meets Jesus. The struggle of light against the power of darkness.

It is a story of faith. Of love. And a hope that never dies.

CHAPTER 3

THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE


My wife sees life like a garden. At least she did. I can't write about her in the past, so I won't. We will get to that, but for now ... though she's no longer here, she's still here. In my heart.


* * *

Joey sees life like a garden. It's not something that she's said to me, or consciously would know that she does ... but it's how she looks at life, how she sees the world and makes sense of it. Like all things, simply. Life is a cycle to her. A garden. God plants us somewhere. Then He gives us a spring filled with new life that is lush and green. Then a summer and an autumn and, ultimately, a winter ... when the world seems to slow down and the life that was new in the spring comes to an end. I like that way of looking at this journey we're all on. It helps me to put things in perspective.

I was planted in the middle of nowhere — not because Atchison, Kansas, is nowhere or because it's roughly in the middle of the US, but because I'm not really from there. That's where I was born, where my first breath was taken, and where my spring began, but it's not where I'm from. I'm from nowhere and everywhere. Growing up, we moved dozens of times to different houses in the same town, and to different cities, big and small, in different states all around the country. Always putting down roots, only to have them ripped up at the surface with a part of me left behind in each place.

You try to replant, insert yourself in the new place, in the new soil, but you never really do. You can't grow, not really, when you know you'll be there only a short amount of time and have to move on. You hunker down for a bit, 'til you get your bearings ... then peek your head up now and then to see what's around you, to see if it's safe to grow. But you always, always find yourself watching, waiting for that moment when you will again be uprooted and carried somewhere new in the backseat of a rusted Buick or Duster — to some new soil that may or may not accept you.

Part of me is in that river town in Kansas. That's true. But part of me is also just across the bridge in the dirty water of a lake in Missouri, beside an airport in Iowa, in a one-room schoolhouse in Nebraska, and various places in Texas, Michigan, and Kentucky. Broken pieces mostly. Scattered here and there. I get e-mails and Facebook requests from people who remember me from those places, who were there when I was there, from fans who say they "knew me when." I will be backstage at one of our concerts, and someone I don't recognize will tell me about the time when we did this or that. I politely smile and do my best not to let them see the lost look on my face.

I don't remember a lot about my childhood or early years as an adult. It's just not there. If our minds were computers with all information stored on hard drives, then my hard drive is corrupted, and no amount of "cleaning up my Mac" is able to retrieve those files. The details are there, I'm sure, somewhere ... but I can't get to them. I just keep living each day and adding more memories that I most likely won't remember. Trying to add a special code to this one or that one, or highlight a file, but knowing it won't work. My mind does fairly well at being here but not being there. I wish I was better at remembering all the details of my past, but I'm not. I know people who are good at remembering, who can replay a single hour of a single day in fourth grade with perfect clarity. I wish I had been in fourth grade with them so they could tell me more about who I was then and what life was like.

So this book is not factual. Not completely anyway. It's a re-creation of some scenes in the story of my life, remembered and described to the best of my abilities. And like most things, when you add time and perspective, they become different. Better and more honest, I hope. You can sometimes make sense of something when you're on the other side of it. See something that you couldn't see before. You can see it for what it was, instead of what you thought it was while you were going through it.

This is my life as it was and as it is now — through the eyes of a man who has had some time to chew on it and live with the choices he's made for a couple of decades. I apologize if at times I offend or disappoint anyone. If I do, just know that I am disappointed in me too. But that's the point, I think. It's okay to have made mistakes. I have learned that all great stories must have a beginning. Where the characters are deeply flawed and in need of redemption and love. But as they move through life, they find that the things they once thought mattered suddenly become meaningless, and the things that weren't important become the good stuff.

My life today is filled with the good stuff. I know it is. Mostly because I've spent years trudging through the bad stuff and have learned the difference. The funny thing is that now, after all these years, even the bad stuff — in a strange way — was actually the good stuff. It's what got me to where I am. It made me who I am. And it will be a part of leading me to where I need to be.

CHAPTER 4

TRAILER TRASH


I like to say that I am from the good side of the trailer park.

People think that's a funny statement — the people who never lived in a trailer park do anyway. But if you had the good/bad fortune to spend a little time in a single- or double-wide, you know why that statement is true. No matter how far down the ladder of success you are, there is always someone a rung or two lower than you who's gonna help you feel better about yourself and your lot in life. My mom was proud that we weren't like "those hoodlum kids with no manners" who lived a few trailers away from us. Kids who didn't take baths and whose parents were in and out of prison. Never mind that Mom was sending us to the grocery store to buy candy with our government food stamps so she could buy a pack of cigarettes with the ninety cents in change we brought home. Or that she had us drive her car to the bootlegger's to buy beer for her, even though I was only fourteen and didn't have a driver's license, and our car didn't have tags, insurance, or brakes most of the time.

There are many different levels of poor. The best kind, I think, is the version I experienced. The kind where you're poor but you don't really realize it at the time. It never occurred to me that we had it bad and that other people, other kids in particular, had it much better than us. I don't know why, it just didn't. I don't ever remember being jealous of the kids on the school bus who were picked up in front of the nice houses in the towns where we lived, or of the clothes they wore or the cars their parents drove. Those feelings didn't come until much later. After high school, actually. I was just happy to be. I had a drawer with a pair of pants and three shirts in it and a pair of old cowboy boots. What else did I need?

We didn't always live in trailers, my brothers, Joe and Blaine, and sisters, Marcy and Candy, and I. We lived in houses too. And apartments. With aunts and uncles and friends. We didn't just move from town to town; we fled from state to state. Mom would do the best she could with what she had, but sometimes that wasn't enough. We'd find ourselves packing up and leaving in the middle of the night so our landlord couldn't catch us and demand the three months of back rent that was due.

When I was in the tenth grade, I came home from school one day to find that my Aunt Mary had come to visit. She and Uncle Rod had recently moved to Kentucky and were doing pretty well there. So when I arrived home that afternoon, I found Mom and Aunt Mary walking through the house with a stranger. They were looking at our furniture and the stuff in our bedrooms. When I asked my mom what was going on, she said, "We're moving." I asked her, "When?" And she said, "Tonight."

Late that evening we loaded everything we could fit into Mom's '74 Plymouth Duster and climbed in the backseat, with Aunt Mary navigating, as Mom, smiling as she smoked her Winston red, with the wing-window cracked, steered the car east for the latest new-and-better life that awaited in Kentucky. The rest of our belongings were sold to the auctioneer for three hundred dollars. And in time, it was a better life. It was always a better life.

The government apartment complex in Atchison, Kansas, was better than my uncle's basement, where we lived in Brownsville, Nebraska. And the green trailer in someone's backyard in Greenville, Kentucky, was better than the little house at Sugar Lake, Missouri, that we packed up and moved from that night in tenth grade. Though they weren't always better places to live, they were part of a better life to live. I don't think I knew that at the time, but I do now. It isn't about the house; it's about the home. And we were always trying to make one. Find one. My mom just wasn't good at it, I think. She didn't come from a good home, so it made it kinda tough for her to figure out how to provide one for her children.

Most of the time we didn't mind moving. We were used to it. We got to meet new kids and see new parts of the country. Sometimes it was a family reunion, like when we moved back in with Uncle Rod and Aunt Mary and their kids from time to time. We were just glad to see each other.

There's only one place that I wish we hadn't left: a small town in Kansas called Highland. We got there when I was in the fourth grade and stayed until the middle of my seventh-grade year. It was like something out of a movie, at least in my memory it was. All of us kids feel the same way. We loved that time and wish we could've stayed and grown up there.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from This Life I Live by Rory Feek. Copyright © 2017 Rory Feek. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

1 Famous for Love 1

2 Stronger 3

3 The Middle of Nowhere 7

4 Trailer Trash 11

5 Mama Bare 17

6 A Hero's Story 27

7 Things That Go Away 35

8 Uncle Goombah 39

9 Froot Loots 45

10 Nashville 51

11 Joining Up to Sing 55

12 Your First Time Lasts 59

13 Forgiven Greatly 63

14 Marine Biology 69

15 From Texas to Tennessee 75

16 Song Righter 81

17 Baggage Claim 85

18 Father Figure 87

19 Duct-Tape Parenting 91

20 Self-Help Was No Help 93

21 Die Living 95

22 Never Gonna Happen 101

23 A New Family 103

24 Circa 1870 105

25 Something Good 109

26 Farmer Boy 113

27 Killing Myself 117

28 My Name Is Joey 123

29 A Girl, a Dog, and a Truck 129

30 Nothing to Remember 133

31 Sign Language 135

32 The Right Left Hand 139

33 A Clean Slate 143

34 Crossing Our Hearts 145

35 Alter Call 149

36 Sexual Healing 151

37 Honeymooners 153

38 Love Doesn't Exist 157

39 A Green Heart 161

40 Changing Lives One Sip at a Time 165

41 Nothing Matters 169

42 Money 173

43 Rhymes with Tex 177

44 The Name Game 181

45 Ten Percent 185

46 On the Same Page 189

47 Baby Crazy 193

48 Almond Eyes 197

49 Life Is Complicated 201

50 Fame to Farm 205

51 Turn, Turn, Turn 209

52 Ups and Downs 213

53 Hurt People Hurt People 215

54 Josephine 219

55 Something Worse 221

56 Surgery and More 225

57 No More 229

58 Crying and Driving 233

59 Indiana Home 237

60 Saying Good-Bye 239

61 Second Guesses 243

62 Life Imitating Art Imitating Life 245

Epilogue: After Happily Ever After 247

About the Author 251

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