Victory! (2012) by Gerry James

Thursday, January 19, 2012

The Voice of God

(Guest Post by Melanie Hemry)

Chuck Battaglia stepped onstage and into the spotlight before a cheering crowd.  Drink glasses jangled, waitresses wove through the smoky semidarkness, and dollars changed hands at a healthy pace.  The club bustled with business that the owners knew was due in no small part to Chuck's ability to draw crowds and hold them.

He did it with his voice.  When Chuck sang, he released a sound that left people hungry for more.  At times, his voice surged like a wave of adrenaline through the soul.  Other times it wrapped itself around weary hearts like a hug.  Smooth as a home run, Chuck's voice touched all the bases of human emotion with a skill that made it seem effortless.

It was no surprise that his crooning drew the predictable crowd -- party animals who came to escape their own emptiness.  But the curious thing was that Chuck also drew a faithful following of an unusual kind as well.  Like the pastor from the church down the street who would slip in to hear him sing.  For years, the pastor had urged Chuck, "Come sing in my church."

Chuck laughed at the idea, never giving it a second thought.  When it came to gospel music, he had been there, done that and left it behind.

When he was little more than a kid, and sang on The Gene Carroll Show in Cleveland, Ohio, his Catholic mother had sparked his interest in it for a short time.  She'd started watching tv preaching and bought a book about Faith.  Knowing that gospel music was an important part of a singer's repertoire, Chuck had read the book and written more than a dozen songs from its content.

Then life took an unexpected turn.  At 14, Chuck's family moved to Southern California where he soon forgot about gospel and found himself singing, playing piano and entertaining with elebrities like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, Little Richard and the Righteous Brothers.

At times his family's faith past still dogged him.  Nights like tonight, for example.  Stepping off the stage at the nightclub where he'd just finished singing, Chuck was confronted by several inebriated patrons.  "There's some strange women mumbling and acting weird in the hall," they warned.

"Not again!"  Chuck said, bolting for the hallway.  Grinding his teeth in frustration, he turned a corner and found himself face to face with his sister, Marh Ann, and her friend.

"You've got to stop doing this."

"We're just praying," Mary Ann said innocently.

Chuck lowered his voice to a whisper.  "The last nine clubs you prayed in closed!  I can't afford any more of your help.  People ask if any singing is so bad that the clubs where I work go out of business!"

Covenant Love

Even while Chuck struggled to ignore the spiritual fervor of his sister, there was another young woman he was paying plenty of attention to: a beautiful, blue-eyed, blonde cocktail waitress named Amy.

"She was working at the nightclub and we'd been dating for a while," Chuck recalls.  "When I asked her to marry me, she agreed, but with stipulations.  Each of us had a child from a previous marriage and she wanted to build a stable foundation for them, so she insisted that if we married we would take my daughter, Alyssa, and her son, Sam, to church.  I told her I knew a pastor who'd been coming to hear me sing for years and that we could attend his church."

But Chuck also had stipulations.

He agreed to go to church as long as they left right after.