Sometimes there are people in your life that make it easier to imagine heaven. People who bring you in and are totally excited to see you even when you don’t have much to offer them. People who engage life with honor and wide-eyed wonder. People who are pure in heart, honest to the core, who give without thinking twice. Who love in truth. Who overflow with effortless joy. People whose simplicity makes you a little embarrassed for the times that you’ve tried too hard to be something that you’re not, but able to accept that with kindness and move into a more authentic experience of who God made you to be.
There are a few moments in the course of my friendship with Cody I remember most clearly, and through those moments I remember all these things that were so true about him.
I met Cody Winton at a bluegrass house concert in late 2010 (I believe) played by the family band that consisted of him, his brother, and his Dad. I wasn’t even really into bluegrass music at the time. My focus, personally and as a budding musician, was on the British-American folk music that to me was more poetic and grand. But I enjoyed the show, and Cody and I in particular experienced the beginnings of a friendship that night.
At that time in my life, I was living in a very broken family situation. As a result of some of the dynamics of that situation, it was very hard to make close in-person friends. There was a deep relational divide between my parents with fear and resentment on both sides, and because I was homeschooled and not involved in too many extra-curricular activities, I really only had the opportunity to make friends with young people from families who were to either part of my Mom’s circle of influence or my Dad’s. It was hard to be honest with people in those circles with what I was feeling. There was a risk of opening wounds and aggravating tensions. So any opportunity to connect and form friendships with people outside that network was something I seized on. Especially like-minded young guys who seemed to share the same enthusiasm, vigorous hope for life, masculine values and (tragically) code of dogmatic cultural externals as an attempt at following Christ that were so important to who I was and who I wanted to be.
Cody was one of those guys—kind of. We were a part of and connected in terms of the same Christian subculture, but it was less of an identity for him, which is why I think we didn’t hit it off as dramatically as was the case for some of the other friendships I had at the time. Cody had a personal grip on the gospel that I didn’t, and it led to him eventually having something of a subversive impact for good in my life. It was eight summers ago when I was roused by the sinking realization (which I believe was the work of the Holy Spirit) that my whole spiritual life up to that point had been a self-serving con intended to promote myself in the eyes of others. We all struggle with insincerity and impurity of motives at times. I’m not talking about that. I was a complete through-and-through hypocrite who was manipulating people with the false appearance of spirituality. I realized that if I was going to get to a place of freedom and life, I had to completely tear off the mask. I had to detonate the carefully constructed image of who I was if there was any hope of real connection and redemption in my life. So I chose to confess to my closest friends what was really going on. On August 1st, 2011, I sent out an email to the handful of guys that I considered my closest friends. There were eight of them. Most didn’t respond. I can’t even remember some of their names at this point. There were only a couple that clearly offered the Gospel, and Cody Winton was the one who really understood what was going on. He told me, in short, that it was quite possible I was right about myself, and that I had to wrestle with that concern. He also told me that having a relationship with God was not about what I did to try to reach God, but about what God had done to rescue me. That it wasn’t about my effort, but about receiving and being transformed by the love of Jesus. Instead of backing away, minimizing my crisis, or rejecting me for the way that I had been using him, he cared well for my soul in a way that made me feel my own worth. Of the people that were speaking into my life at that particular moment, he did more to set me on a track towards authentic engagement with the person and work of Jesus than any others.
A couple of months later, his family band came through to do another show, but this time I couldn’t go. I was still very much working through all of the doubts and questions about my standing with God and what it meant to really know Jesus. And as part of that process, I was emotionally processing the damage done by my broken family situation in a way that I hadn’t been able to up to that point. I had counselors, but I needed to know that I had friends who cared. And for some reason, because of the email he had written a couple of months before, I felt that Cody was someone I could really trust and open up to. I remember scrambling out a letter for one of my brothers to give to him at the concert, in which I poured out a (hopefully) brief history of what was happening in my family and asked for prayer. I got an email a couple of days later, saying that he had read the letter and was praying for me. He didn’t make any attempts to fix what was going on. He included a link to a song he’d been listening to. While that song didn’t speak to the exact details of my situation (and he knew that it didn’t), it created space in my heart for me to feel the feelings of grief and loss over my broken family that I was struggling to believe in as valid.
In the days and months to come I began to open up to other friends about the brokenness in my heart over the brokenness in my situation. Many people offered sympathy. But what astonishes me now, looking back, is the way that Cody offered something more—genuine empathy for and presence with someone that, at that point, he really didn’t know that well. He made himself fully available even though he knew he was unable to fix anything, which I now realize was a brave and unselfish thing to do.
I saw Cody in person only a few times over the course of our friendship, and it was through those meetings that our friendship grew in earnest. There was a conference here in the Chicago area the spring of 2012 hosted by a national Christian teaching & discipleship organization that we both followed. I think he was serving at the conference as an intern or something. And then he and his family band came through again in the fall of that year to play another concert at the same house I met him. There was peace in my heart in my walk with God at that point, and we had a connection that we didn’t have before. There was something totally unpretentious down-to-earth and deeply real in the way that he shared in the joy of my coming to know Jesus.
What amazes me looking back is just the gift of friendship that I had from Cody. Even within the subculture that we were a apart of, Cody had some very different passions than I did. He was three years older, and in terms of his personal and emotional maturity, he was more like seven or eight years older. He was in a very different stage of life: starting out in business, exploring relationships, moving out into life on his own. I was far away from those things. I guess I always felt that Cody was more my friend than I was his. What I mean is that he had a lot more to offer me than I had to offer him. There was no way that I was going to be able to relate to and share in the excitement that he had for life as it was coming together for him at that point, or help him process the burdens and anxieties he was working through. In some ways, I was emotionally crippled and preoccupied with my own mess, and it’s only now that I’m really beginning to enter the stage of life that he was in at that point. From this place I can see how easy it would have been for him to think of someone like me as mostly dead weight. But every time I saw Cody, he was brimming with excitement to see me. He understood that his role my life was that of an older brother, and he assumed that role with genuine enthusiasm and without the slightest hint of condescension. Never, not even once, did Cody make me feel like he looked down on me.
He had (in many ways) much healthier priorities than I did, and it was in part because of that better footing in life that we began to grow apart. I became very invested in long-distance friendships in a a way that sapped my own energy to engage my in-person life in the way I needed to. Cody was one of a couple of friends in my life who kindly and consistently challenged that tendency. I remember him quoting Jim Elliot to me: “wherever you are, be all there.” I was for the most part determined to learn the hard way, and I made myself available to people who enabled the same unhealthy escapist approach to life. Cody didn’t enable it, and we began to drift apart. He was there for me, always ready to be leaned on, but he was focused on his life and work and future, and I was unable to connect with his world and walk alongside him because I was spinning my wheels in distracted relationships and pursuits that didn’t hold real promise for my immediate growth and my future.
The last time I saw Cody in person was in January of 2015, at the wedding of mutual friends in Alabama. He was there with his wife Sarah, whom he had just married the previous fall. He was, as always, glad to see me in way that made so many of my nagging insecurities just vanish in the time I was with him. We talked briefly and sang a couple of songs. It was like picking up where we had left off in the very best way. I remember thinking that I was a different person around Cody, absent of any effort or pretense, and I liked that person.
In the spring of 2015, I moved to a new church, and that move triggered a whole series of huge changes in my life and perspective. I was being personally equipped and cared for by that church, and as a result I began to become fully focused on my own spiritual and personal growth, pursuing opportunities for in-person work and ministry. I began to drift from the subculture and the points of theology in which I had found so much of my identity. What was odd is that even though I was drifting from the context in which Cody and I had become friends, I never had the fear of losing him as a friend that I did with so many other people. And perhaps that’s because Cody had a much healthier identity in Christ than I did, and I felt that I was moving towards that identity. We had very sparse contact after that beyond now-and-then connection through social media. My energy was becoming fully focused on building my life, as it had been a long time coming. Meanwhile, his energy was being poured into his young family, his work with technology startups, and so forth. And although I was content with these realities I had always supposed that our paths would come together again, and that we would enjoy more fully the friendship that had in one sense only just begun.
I really don’t know very much of the shape that Cody’s life has taken over the past few years. I don’t know what we would argue about, what we would share on a personal level, what songs we would sing. I’ve wondered.
Twenty-four hours ago I received the news that Cody was killed in a car accident early on Wednesday morning.
At first, it felt strange and foreign. And then, a steady wave of memories came back to me, the ones that I’ve described here. And many moments that I couldn’t do justice to in describing for anyone that didn’t know him personally. His self-effacing corny wit, his blunt and welcoming presence, his effortless class, his way of engaging everyone and everything with perfect stubbornness and generosity. I can’t begin to think about it without breaking down into ugly crying as I write. He was my friend, and the moments I had with him felt like something stolen from a better world. Maybe that’s why it’s so much easier for me to think about and dream about and live for heaven as I mourn the fact that he’s gone. But I think it’s even more because he was a person who, as I knew him, lived for heaven.
I’ve always been a music guy. These last 24 hours I’ve been listening to a lot of Ben Rector and Josh Turner, two guys that he turned me on to. I’ve also been listening to a lot of Rascal Flatts and Maroon 5, bands that I openly hated but secretly grew to love because of the way that he loved them. But more than that, I’ve just been lost in worship. I’ve had “God and God Alone” by Chris Tomlin and “Jesus, Only Jesus” by Matt Redman on a constant loop as I’ve been driving from Geneva to Carol Stream to Sugar Grove and back home. These songs weren’t ever part of our friendship. But they are the songs that, right now, connect my heart to the future reality of surrounding the throne of God at the healing of all things.
The best thing that I can say about Cody is that even though I often find it terribly hard to imagine heaven, it’s easy right now because how easy it is to imagine him enjoying the assembling of God’s people to give Him praise. Perhaps it’s so easy to turn in the midst of a sense of grief and almost crushing loss to worship because it’s so easy to imagine Cody enjoying the presence of God, and as I imagine him in God’s presence, what I see in his face and hear in his voice reflects something to me of what it will mean to see God when my own time comes.
I love you, Cody. Thanks for everything.
Andrew Micah 