When I met Josh Miles in 2003, we were both middlemen handling sums of money larger than either of us would ever know the thrill of spending, working for wealthy schemers whose faces we never saw, knowing them only through their well-guarded, secret system of coded transactions in a global enterprise we couldn’t begin to understand.

We were bank tellers in a busy little office just off the Blue Ridge Parkway in western North Carolina.

I’ve been thinking about the written bio – what its purpose is, and wondering whether it isn’t often abused. Artists, executives, inspirational speakers, your Grandmother on her Facebook page – everyone has a bio, but how often does it tell the truth? It’s so easy to make a bank teller sound like an underground thug, or a songwriter sound like the love child of all his favorite musicians. But you don’t need me to tell you about the music – you can hear it yourself on this very website. If you’ve clicked through to the bio, you’ve likely come for a deeper sense of the man behind the songs. What does he look like when he’s not holding a guitar, or closing his eyes in a moment of sincere worship? What compels him to write, and to write songs about his faith – or his doubt? This voice with its earnest – at times desperate – edge, sounding through your mp3 player or car stereo… what kind of guy has this voice?

All I aim to do is share with you my experience with Josh, and hope it satisfies the curious, perhaps answering some of the questions above. (And if it doesn’t, then all you need to know is that Josh is a former underground thug who discovered in his twenties that he was the secret love child of Shane & Shane and Brooke Fraser.)

I was suffering with a broken heart when Josh started working at the bank. Our manager tasked me with training him in the ways of teller-dom, and all I wanted to do was get through each day so I could retreat to my room where I wrote depressing songs about betrayal and loneliness and the death of all my dreams for a full 18 months. The talkative trainee with the subversive sense of humor and Carolina country accent was clearly a foil to my plans of remaining miserable forever.

When Josh learned I played guitar and even wrote some of my own stuff, I was really screwed.

I gave him a rough demo CD, hoping that would quell his interest and we could get back to being polite but disinterested coworkers. This was a mistake, as it only fueled the fire.

One night, despite my best efforts, I found myself sitting in Josh’s living room with him, his equally gregarious (and much prettier) wife April, and their wobbly wiener dog named Russ, demonstrating some of my favorite chord progressions on a warped old Fender. They fed me dinner and we played songs, and talked, and laughed well into the evening. It was the first modicum of community I had experienced for a year and a half.

Just a few weeks later, my car was loaded with the few earthly possessions I had and I drove out of North Carolina to find my future out west. (Yes, we easterners often still grow up with stories in our heads of that wild, wild land of canyons and cacti.) Josh expressed his mock-anger at me for leaving. He said, “I was just beginning to know you.”

This is a key element of what makes Josh the man he is. The desire to know. An insatiable desire by which he abandons the social fears that leash so many of us in self-doubt and unease. With some spiritual sixth sense that I still don’t quite understand, Josh grasped, in between the casual banter of tellers forced to stand next to one another for forty hours a week, not only that I was a soul struggling to stay afloat in a tide of loss, but that what I needed was a line back to the most basic of human relationships. I needed a friend. Josh gently but persistently chiseled away at the buffer I had established between myself and other human beings, finally drawing me out with a contagious belief in things like hope and promise and a God whose ardor is for his beloved to believe we are treasured beyond anything else of value in this world, or the next.

Any belief I may have initially had that Josh’s interest in me was merely for what I had to offer in the way of songwriting, recording, or performing experience has been dispelled, as he has long-since surpassed me in all music-related skills. Yet as the years passed, Josh’s phone calls never stopped coming, even when I was slow to return them. When April’s career brought her and Josh to Phoenix in June of 2006, I made several trips to visit them from San Diego, where I had settled. (It helped that their first home in Phoenix was within walking distance of the fields where the Padres conduct their spring training.)

So from the relatively short distance between us, I’ve watched Josh continue to develop as a songwriter, a leader, and a worshipper. He brings an empathy to his craft that is informed by his work with people whose loss of their own sense of value has driven them to places of desperate physical and spiritual need. He has wrestled with the pressure our churches and ministries put on those gifted with the call and ability to shepherd them. He has reacted with integrity and humility when that pressure strained its ministries to a point of fracture. He has grieved in the wake of personal upheaval and done battle with the doubt that visits all of us who choose to live by faith. In the whelming heat of the Arizona desert, Josh has amassed the resolve to write the words,

I know you’re struggling, I know you’re scared
I know you’re desperate for someone to care
I know you’re waiting for it to be alright
I know the voice that’s calling you to go outside.

I share these stories because I want you to know that Josh is both hungry and relentless. This might make him sound like some wild predator on an African prairie, which is only half true. He’s not a predator, but he is wild. You might not guess it from peering into his well-kept home in the furthest suburb of Phoenix, or by listening to him and April quibble over whether the dogs are too spoiled, but Josh’s heart is brought to life in the desert, in the in-between spaces of duty and desire, in the mix of relationships and the mysteries of faith, and in the cadence of a melody he hasn’t written yet, but hears calling his name. He has a hunger that isn’t satisfied with whatever processed fare our culture is marketing at the moment. And he is relentless in his pursuit of those things that help him feel whole – indeed, the things we all need to feel whole: the hope hiding in a broken heart, the calling that is death to ignore, the delight in a thing done well.

Back when Josh and I were filling change orders and praying every night that our drawers balanced at that little bank in the green and wet hills of Appalachia, someone stole $4,000 dollars from the master vault. We rummaged through every bin, looked in every unlit corner, counted every dollar four or five times hoping to locate the missing straps of bills. When we didn’t, it turned into a corporate investigation, complete with a bespectacled interrogator who called each of us into a private room, one after the other, removing his glasses and asking us questions about our social activities and what we had witnessed in the teller line and assuring us that if we confessed now, the consequences would be much less severe.

The investigation went on for a few days. There was constant chatter among the bank staff, fingers pointing, cases being built. But to this day, we don’t know who took the cash. The thief never came to light. Some things never do. They remain clouded in mystery, in a darkness too impenetrable for the human eye.

But try telling that to Josh. He has a hunger to know. He is relentless. Sometimes the mystery thief still comes up in conversation between us as we think back to our days on the teller line. But mostly, the hunger compels Josh to other conversations, the type you’ll find in his songs about the necessity of shining light in every obscured place until you prove that there is not one of us who has outrun the reach of hope.

September 2011