Big Daddy Weave Frontman Recalls Miraculous Memories of Late Brother
Movieguide® Contributor
Mike Weaver is sharing how God worked through his brother and former band member, Jay, who passed away from COVID-19 complications in 2022.
“He was really funny and he was just light-hearted. Always kind of like making some kind of quip that, you know, makes the room lighten up,” Weaver recalled on “The Gather” podcast. “At one point, man, the Lord just began waking him up at like 4 in the morning and he would have these times, man, where he would just get downloads from Jesus, and I knew it had to be that way because Jay couldn’t have come up with this by himself.”
“It transformed who he was, and all the joking would stop for a second, and it would be very somber, clear statements, and I’m like, ‘Jay you have to have received this from the Lord because it’s not in you naturally, you know?’ and then Jay just began to walk that out, and man, I’m telling you, we began to see God just move in miraculous, powerful ways,” he continued. “Every night we would just hear about miracles.”
What God did through Jay confirmed to Weaver that God is the same God of the Bible.
“Jesus still does miracles every single day,” he said. “My family has been on like a CHOSEN kick, you know, and so we kind of watch that show together and stuff, and whenever the music gets like real serious and then Jonathan Roumie’s playing Jesus and he’s about to like do the miracle or whatever, sometimes I find myself holding my breath, right? Because dude, I know Jesus still does that today. I’ve watched him do it for years in rooms all over America.”
“I’m telling you, it’s been it’s incredible. I share some stories of that because…there was a time in Big Daddy Weave when the shows began to take, like, a turn, and we would just stop towards the end and almost kind of crash land the show and just pray for people, and man, the Lord just began to move in those rooms, and man my brother was leading the charge in that,” Weaver shared. “He would be getting these like special words, you know, for people.”
Weaver remembered one night when the band had been playing their song, “Redeemed.” He looked around, and Jay had disappeared from the stage mid-song.
“I watch my brother walk by in the audience, and I turn to see that our monitor engineer guy running ‘What’s going on?’ in our ears. [He’s] playing the bass and like looking at his phone looking at chord charts trying to fill in on base because Jay is on assignment from the Lord and has gone out,” Weaver said. “He handed off his bass to the monitor guy.”
“Thank God he played bass right and goes and just stands back at this kind of near like a light some sort of lighting structure outside at this event that we’re playing somewhere in like mid-Florida or whatever, and I watched this young lady walk up to Jay and just burst into tears, and so after the show I asked him, I’m like, ‘Jay Dog…what was going on back there, man? And he said ‘Well…Jesus told me to go wait for Vanessa’ is what he said…and so he just goes and waits, and this girl comes up to him, and he goes, ‘Vanessa?’ and her eyes just look shocked you know?…And he goes, ‘Jesus just wants you to know he never thought any of the things that you thought about you. He loves you so much and he always has loved you and he always will love you.’”
The young woman cried after Jay told her that.
“I was like, ‘Praise God’ and that was like every day, man. It was incredible, what the Lord was doing you know?” the singer said.
“It was wild because even in those times when we would stop, when we just pray for people, for the longest times like the rest of the audience would just stay and they would just see what was going on, and I feel like they were being encouraged in their heart that they could step out and they could believe God for something more and they could know him in a way more than they had previously known him, you know? And it’s in a way that’s not just knowing a book but it’s in a way of knowing the person you know of this book, right?”
Movieguide® previously reported on Weaver after Jay’s death:
After the death of Big Daddy Weave’s Jay Weaver, his brother and lead singer for the band, Mike Weaver, shared an update.
Mike thanked fans and friends for their prayers and messages and confessed that he, the band, and the family are “hurting more than you can put into words.”
“I was just crushed by his passing,” Weaver said. “As the stories and other testimonies … and the love kind of came pouring in about how the Lord had just used my brother … it kind of changed everything on the trip down there.”
Weaver says there’s “thanksgiving” in Jay’s death because he knows without a doubt that Jay’s in heaven.
He said, “There is that broken part in being in this broken place until the day that we are going to step through and see what Jay is seeing.”
Jay’s death inspired the band’s song, “Heaven Changes Everything.”
“The song’s bridge has a telling lyric, ‘The peace in this pain, the hope in this grief, the beauty beyond this I have to believe.’ There lies the seed of a heavenly perspective,” the worship leader said. “Coming to that place where you can find hope in grief and peace in pain is where the journey takes us. Coupled with the knowledge that, ‘This world’s where I am, but this world’s not my home,’ makes us strong, by the grace of God.”
