How Granger Smith Healed from Heartache: ‘I Am Washed Clean of Guilt’
By Movieguide® Contributor
When former country signer Granger Smith “ultimately surrendered to God” after his 3-year-old son’s drowning accident, his relationship with the Lord changed radically.
“That’s when, when faith turned from a noun to a verb for me, it became active. It became something I was participating in, not in a way to earn more of it or to earn grace or to earn any kind of salvation or anything like that,” Smith told Fox News reporter Shannon Bream on her podcast. “It was active in terms of surrendering and following.”
Movieguide® previously reported on Smith’s attempt to take his own life:
“That night on Wildflower in that back bedroom—that was just as rock bottom as it got to be honest,” he said.
Countrynow.com reported, “Luckily, he found a wave of strength from imagining his two other kids, Lincoln and London, and how, at only seven and five years old at the time, they were waiting for him to return and be there for them.”
“I said, ‘Jesus, help me.’ Suddenly I felt life sort of stop for the first time. The slideshow stopped. I slid the gun out of my hand and it hit the bank and I fell down on the floor,” Smith shared with ET.
After his encounter with Jesus, Smith decided to pursue ministry. He currently attends Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and is on track to earn a master’s degree.
Before Smith truly surrendered to God, he looked at his life in a worldly way. He evaluated his success according to the world’s definition of it.
“Even though I called myself a Christian my whole life, I never really knew what it meant to deny myself and take up my cross and follow Jesus,” he explained. “And so that kind of act of faith is what really changed things for me. And that act of surrender.”
“Sometimes we hear, especially as Americans, we hear that word surrender, and we think that means weakness or defeat or giving up,” he said. “But if there is, there isn’t; there is an active activity of surrender that I believe is really the essence of faith.”
Smith was in his backyard when his son drowned in the pool, so he felt hugely responsible for the accident.
Bream encouraged him to explain how he overcame the guilt: “Guilt is real,” he said. “And I think we all deal with that as humans on some level or another, but it can be totally crippling…I related a lot to soldiers with PTSD because I have just in the nature of the music business, I’ve done a lot of traveling, and I’ve done a lot of tours, entertainment tours in Iraq and Kuwait, the Middle East and Europe and developed relationships with these soldiers.”
“And so I found commonality with them as I was discussing grief and shame and guilt. And that’s a big one—guilt—because there’s a lot of soldiers that could feel guilty from something they’ve done, and the world and their therapists that everyone else tells them—‘It’s not your fault, you did nothing wrong, you should not feel guilty,’” he explained.
While being told that you shouldn’t feel guilty may sound nice, Smith believes it does nothing to change one’s perspective about one’s own self-guilt.
“And I think it’s a problem for a lot of people that want to feel not guilty, they want to listen to the world, they want to listen to their therapist to say, ‘It’s not my fault, it’s not my fault.’ But when they saw something, or they did something they know that it is,” he shared.
“So that’s a long way for me to say that, through my guilt as being a father and being responsible for my three kids, in that moment, when we lost my son to drowning and being in the backyard with them, I could not get over the fact that I was I guilty as a father, who dropped the one task that you’re supposed to do,” Smith explained. “It’s almost a joke when people say, your one job as a parent is to keep them alive till 18. Well, I failed at that.”
The only thing that helped Smith change his perspective about his self-guilt was surrendering.
“Through this act of faith of surrendering, [I realized] what the gospel does, and the Bible, what the gospel of Jesus does, is it says, unlike the world, the Gospel says,, ‘We’re all guilty,” he said. “We all have become rebels, we’ve all turned away from God in some way or another.”
“But Jesus through His sacrifice, as he became then for us on the cross, as he took our place and, and put on the debt of our sin and our shame and our guilt, he then is able to cover us and cover our, our guilt and our shame and take it away,” he continued. “And make us clean and wash away all of this. And that’s the only solution. The only answer that I have found that, unlike the world says, I am guilty, but I am washed clean of that guilt. I feel it no more it has now gone from me. And that is an amazing piece of, of understanding.”
Smith believes that surrendering to God comes with an abundance of peace. He believes there is freedom in not knowing what tomorrow holds.
“I don’t know what my future is. I don’t know what my 10-year plan is, I could responsibly plan for it. But I don’t know what it might be,” he shared. “And I’m okay with that.”
“But, right now, immediately, it’s writing books, it’s taking speaking engagements, Lord-willing, when the right ones come around, it’s attending seminary, and it’s going to church on Sunday mornings with my family, and sitting under teachings of my pastor,” he told CBN Digital.
Smith previously wrote a memoir about his son and his family’s experience titled “Like a River” and a story for families about grief called “Up Toward the Light.” Per Fox News, he will soon release another book about grief, designed for kids aged 4 to 8.
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