Episode 101: Jody Dean on personal faith

Dallas radio personality Jody Dean talks about his life as an adopted child, the faith he saw in his mother, and how those things have shaped his own life of faith for the better. You'll definitely connect with his stories and insights.

Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.

George Mason: Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith and public life. I'm George Mason, your host, and I'm thrilled to welcome to the program today a broadcast legend in Texas and especially in Dallas-Fort Worth, Jody Dean. Jody, thank you for coming and joining me for this conversation.

Jody Dean: Thank you, George. That makes me so uncomfortable.

George Mason: Well, it's a big setup, isn't it?

Jody Dean: Yeah. The worst thing in the world is trying to follow a long introduction or one like that because now I've got to live up to it.

George Mason: Well, I think you've been living up to it for a very long time and it's almost eerie having your voice coming through in this conversation because I'm used to not seeing you and hearing you on the radio, but we've also seen you on television doing the news and other things, and even a new show that you've just begun two weeks ago and we're looking forward to seeing more about that. But in any case, this program, Jody, is about the connection between faith and public life, Good God, and it's really both sides of that phrase, so it's about God and about good. And so we're going to explore that together in this and the next conversation.

George Mason: I'd like to get started though, because you've talked about your own faith journey in pretty significant ways across time and in various formats. Here we are in Dallas-Fort Worth, and it is really a ... Dallas is a place where you can be a public figure and be honest about your own spiritual life without embarrassment. And so in your radio life and TV life and writing you've done just that. Tell us about your early experiences of faith and the journey of your faith, the arc of it across time.

Jody Dean: Oh gosh. There's not enough bandwidth.

George Mason: Right.

Jody Dean: Yeah. I guess the most important thing I could say is that I had a great foundation. I grew up in a Church of Christ/Baptist home. My mom was Church of Christ. My dad was Baptist. There was a tussle when I got to be a senior in high school about whether I was going to go to Abilene Christian or Baylor, and my mom and my grandmother prevailed. My grandfather, William Harbuck, was a deacon at the Waldo Street Church of Christ in San Sabba, Texas. And I grew up with some amazing people. My pop wasn't particularly religious until he got older and became ill and suddenly he got very serious about his faith. But my mom and grandmother were amazing people. My grandfather, Dadaw, was the most wonderful man I think I've ever known. But all the Sunday school classes and Vacation Bible Schools, some of it took apparently.

Jody Dean: I got to see it firsthand. I've talked about this before. My sister was profoundly disabled and died when I was six years old. She was 12. And I got to see my mom and my pop's faith in action every day. And sometime it wasn't faith, it was just doing what they had to do. It was just forging on. But to see my mom feeding and caring for my sister, it wasn't just a matter of abstracts. It was right there in front of me. And like I said, the congregations, the churches I attended and the people that I knew growing up, the wealth of diversity, my friends who were of many different faith traditions, just I was very blessed. I had it very, very good.

George Mason: Well, you say the diversity, but I would say that when you talk about growing up Church of Christ in Fort Worth, diversity is not the first word that comes to mind for me.

Jody Dean: Well, I do tell people that I am a recovering Campbellite because, yeah, I can remember when we used to argue about whether you could wear pants on Wednesday night, whether women could wear slacks. And it was a very traditional background. But my mom and pop, my dad thought Archie Bunker was the hero on All in the Family and voted for George Wallace in 1968. But my first real girlfriend in junior high school was a lovely young Latina and I still see her every once in a while because Fort Worth is the smallest big town in America. Nobody leaves. Everybody loves it and everybody stays. And they never said a word. They never said a word.

Jody Dean: One of my best friends growing up in junior high school was a young man by the name of Edward Newton and he played one defensive tackle on our middle school team, I played the other and he was Jethro Pew and I was Bob Lilly. We even wore the same numbers, 75 and 74. And my pop would occasionally take Edward home after practice and Edward's dad would take me home after practice and never a word was said. They allowed me to be me. And sometimes that wasn't the best idea. But I'm forever grateful that they did that.

George Mason: You talk about the way they cared for your sister and I think that's a really beautiful story. When we talk about faith, for many people it's about believing the right things, but you're describing a kind of a beautiful synergy between believing and behaving, that you were the witness of that.

Jody Dean: Oh, boy. Yeah. It was very difficult. We had an oxygen machine and a suction machine in our home.

George Mason: Cerebral palsy, if I remember, is that right?

Jody Dean: Yes, pretty much. She was deprived of oxygen during birth and so she had a number of problems. I mean, this isn't that long ago and it was basically because my parents' blood types didn't match. But they lost five children in all, not just Susan, but they had stillbirths, miscarriages. And so they had dealt with a great deal of sorrow. And so the best example I can give you is that I have a book of my mom's poems that she wrote. She was a singer and she performed in the opera when she was younger. She became a school teacher. She sang in the USO during World War II. And so she would write down a lot of her thoughts while she would be up late at night, not only with Susan but with me. I was very sick as a kid. I spent most of my early life in the hospital because I had asthma very badly. I had to have a lung removed when I was six. So mom would write all this stuff down. And so I go back and read that and it's like reading the Book of Lamentations.

George Mason: Oh, wow.

Jody Dean: Yeah. And I get chills when I think about it. And I listen to the songs that she would sing. She wanted desperately to be a mom. And she felt, I think, throughout most of her life that she was deprived of that honor. And yet I don't know of anyone who served that role more dutifully or more beautifully than she did. I saw a story years ago and I wish I could find it. I haven't been able to track it down. But there's a village in Southeast Asia that has an enormous ratio of children who have birth defects. And I hate to use the word defect because I wonder sometimes if our perspective isn't a little warped on that. But because of that, their mothers had been forced to carry them around their entire lives and they grow up, literally, conformed to the shape of their mother's body.

George Mason: Oh my goodness. What a story?

Jody Dean: That strikes me as be ye conformed, therefore ... That sort of thing.

George Mason: Very nice, yes.

Jody Dean: And my mom was like that. I mean, she was conformed to us. She was conformed to love and she lived it. And that didn't mean she didn't doubt. I learned from my mom very early on that it's okay to yell at God.

George Mason: Really?

Jody Dean: And it's not like he hasn't heard it before. She didn't always get an answer, she surely didn't get the answer she wanted. So I grew up encouraged to question, encouraged to ask and I will show you things you've never imagined, that sort of thing. And he's followed through throughout my life. And sometimes in spite of me.

George Mason: So there's a beautiful story of how in your family you watched faith coexist with suffering and with loss and it made your mom cherish life and family even more. But when you talk about your mom and pop, we should clarify too that you are a gift to that family.

Jody Dean: Oh, boy. Yeah. I was the chosen child. Yeah.

George Mason: You really were. So you were adopted into this family.

Jody Dean: Yeah, I understood Moses very early on and I understood that he killed that Egyptian, not because of a sense of justice because he was mad. He had no idea or sense of who he was. And I grew up angry and I didn't admit it, I didn't even realize it, but I was like, "Well, why would anyone give a child away?" Late in life or later in life, I found my birth parents. And that's another miracle story.

Jody Dean: I'll tell you a quick vignette from it. My birth mother and father were not married. And when my birth mother found out my birth father was married to someone else, she decided not to open the can of worms and put me up for adoption. And so when I found my birth family, I found my aunt and uncle, Gloria and Ralph Carnes, first. And when I was talking to Gloria at one point she said, "You need to talk to Glisten." And I said, "Who is Glisten?" And she said, "Well that's the woman your father was married to when he cheated and conceived you." Oh my gosh. Okay.

Jody Dean: So I called that woman up out of the blue and we became very good friends. She loved my father till the day she died. She never remarried. She just couldn't trust him, which sounds a lot like the apple didn't fall far from the tree. It fell at the base. That was me. And there were so many parallels between my father's life and my life. But anyway, at one point, right before Thanksgiving one year, she said, "I have something I want to send to you." And I said, "Oh, what is it?" She said, "I bought it at a garage sale. I thought it looked good over the toilet. And it's a little decoupage plaque about the size of a pencil box, I guess. And it has a rose on it and below the rose has a name. Would you like to know what the name is?" And I said, "What's the name?" The name is Jody, J-O-D-Y. Now, my birth family did not know I had been born. They did not know I existed. And my father's wife had purchased this 13 years before I walked back into their lives.

George Mason: Oh my goodness.

Jody Dean: And all of a sudden I know the plans I have for you for good and not for evil just come roaring back. The idea that our life is a tapestry and when we're standing behind it, it really doesn't make sense. We have to step out in front before the picture becomes clear. We've all heard that sermon before. And all of a sudden I went, "Whoa." So I have that plaque hanging in our kitchen now.

George Mason: I think a lot of people wrestle with who they are and it seems to me as a pastor, in talking with people across time, there's a tendency to err on one side or the other. Either you have a fixed identity that's based upon your blood family or your family of origin, so to speak, or the human connection that you have in your family even your adopted family, or you try to run so far away from that, that you spiritualize it and you say, "I'm on my own here. I'm a child of God and I don't need to worry about that." But there is a sense in which blood and spirit have to come together somehow.

Jody Dean: Oh, yeah.

George Mason: Right?

Jody Dean: Yeah.

George Mason: I think you're an example of that in that you found, it seems to me, even though you are a person of faith and you had that foundation, the failure to get a grip on who you were in terms of your human identity and family was a big factor in your figuring out who Jody Dean really is.

Jody Dean: Well, I had a friend when I was in high school back in church youth group who compared me to the apostle Peter. And I didn't realize at the time that wasn't necessarily a compliment, because Peter was ... He was all over the road really. But the one thing he always was, was willing. And so I don't know that ... I even hesitate to use the word faith because my faith is very weak. I mean, but my trust is very strong.

George Mason: Okay.

Jody Dean: And I don't know why that is. As a child of adoption, trust is a hard thing to come by because we grow up really not knowing where we fit sometimes. And so for whatever reason, the only thing I can say is that based on the evidence in my life, I trust God. I don't always do what he wants me to do. Somebody asked me about my faith walk and I said it's been more like a run because most of the time I've just been running off doing what I wanted to do, grabbing the sword and swinging for Malchus' head. It wasn't like he was aiming for the ear. I was going for the throat and I was going to do what I wanted to do and thought I was smart enough to get away with it in many cases. There's God right there behind me reminding me one way or the other, sometimes gently, sometimes not, I'm here.

Jody Dean: Lately during the COVID-19 crisis, one of the verses that keeps coming back to me is that verse in Deuteronomy where God reminds the people of Israel that their clothes didn't fall off their backs and their shoes didn't wear off on their feet. And that's kind of the relationship I've had. And sometimes he just reminds me, I've never let you down. I'm never going to let you down. Some days I may send you a lesson. That's another verse that's come to me through this whole thing is that moment where the Israelites are complaining about the food. I mean, they've just been released from slavery and they're out in the wilderness and they're griping about this food sucks. And I mean, is that so us?

George Mason: Yes.

Jody Dean: To me, that's the humanity and the mischief of God. And that's one reason I tend to listen to him more now as I get older than not. Because who would put that in a book about themselves? Who would really ... That's not something you want. My people were griping about the food. Well, I've griped about the food and all I can hear sometimes is dad say, "Yeah, but it's good for you." It's good for you.

George Mason: I think that's one of the beautiful things about the Bible is how honest it is. I mean, I would probably whitewash a lot of things in my life, my story, if I were writing a scripture somehow and just give the highlights and the good things.

Jody Dean: Well, it's funny you say that because so many people would say, "Well you can't possibly think you're ..." I don't think I'm an example. Really, I don't know. I tell people I'm an expert in failure and I mean that and I don't think that I'm all that, as it were. But I do think God is and I think that I am one of the better examples around of using foolishness to confound the wise because you are looking at the biggest fool you'll talk to today.

George Mason: Well, there's an awful lot of scripture coming out of your mouth, Jody Dean. So I do hear that you have that good foundation. That's great.

Jody Dean: Yeah. I love to read it. I mean, I've got my Harper Study Bible from college. I had a good friend named JD Richmond, just one of those brilliant men, one of the sweetest men, one of the most eccentric human beings I've ever known in my life. If you ever go to the Forth Worth Zoo and you see the big cat diorama, he built that and he built a lot of other things. Forth Worth Botanic Garden, he built part of that. And I asked him one time, "How come you never put a sign out that says this is what you built?" And he goes, "Because I want it to look like God did it."

Jody Dean: I mean, he spent 45 years and used a roll of butcher paper to create his own Interlinear Bible. And he would cut out pages from different translations and paste them in corresponding places on his butcher paper. Used 45 years of his life to do that. And I remember I'd have breakfast with him every Saturday morning before he went home. And I said, "This is pretty remarkable that you're ..." He goes, "Well, I want to know more about my friend."

Jody Dean: One thing, for whatever reason in spite of myself, I've always tried to talk to people who are smarter than I am. Whenever I have a problem or a decision to make, I go get counsel. And he was one of those guys. I was at a church retreat one time and he was walking out the door and a friend of mine said, "Now there goes a giant right there." And I just knew I had to meet him. And he taught me. I could tell you stories about JD that would just make you stand up and cheer. I mean, he would park outside the jail every Sunday morning and wait. And then he'd see, wait for that right person, and then go, "You're coming with me to breakfast." Just that's the way he was.

George Mason: Well, we're here talking to Jody Dean. And Jody, I want to take you back just a little bit because the story of finding your birth parents is interesting, I think, because many people listening to this or watching our program will have experiences with adoption. And you mentioned that even though you had this wonderful family that adopted you, you had some trust issues that are probably rooted in this feeling that a lot of people who are adopted have this sort of lurking internal sense of abandonment. They have the fear of being left. They have these kinds of things that they aren't even necessarily conscious of. And now that we have open adoption laws that allow people to find their birth families, what did it mean for you spiritually and in terms of your personal sense of place in the world to learn your story?

Jody Dean: Wow. Well, it finished the picture. I had a lot of missing pieces. There were other things that had happened in my life. I'm a sexual abuse survivor. I was abused by a neighbor between the ages of three and five and my adoptive mom chose never to tell me that because they were from a generation where you just pretended it didn't exist and it will go away. And it didn't. It fractured me in many ways. And I had to ask later on, "What did you do?" And she said, "Well, we moved." And, of course, my birth nature kicked in and I said, "Well, why were we the ones who had to move?" So there was a lot of reconciling that had to go on there.

Jody Dean: But I think completing that picture and finding forgiveness. My pop was not the warmest person on the planet. He was like playing for Bear Bryant. He was a tough World War II, Great Depression guy, self-made, all of that sort of thing and had endured all kinds. I saw him cry twice in my life. I saw him tear up just twice. And I don't know that he ever told me he loved me. But I realized at some point that we can only build with the tools in our box. And for me to hold him accountable for tools he did not have was unfair. And considering the tools that he did have, he did the best job he possibly could.

Jody Dean: And so all of a sudden I stopped, and I'll tell you who taught me that lesson was my oldest son. I was chewing him out one day on the phone. He was off at college and he just stopped me and said, "Dad, I'm not you." And that logic was inescapable. I went, "Well, he was right about that." And it changed not only how I parent, but how I remember my parents. And I stopped trying to hold them to my standards and stopped trying to say ... I'll tell you this about being adopted.

Jody Dean: In one way or another, we are all adopted. I mean, particularly those of us who proclaim Christ as our savior. I've been adopted by so many people, so many coaches, so many congregations, so many bosses, so many coworkers, so many friends. I think I'm an honorary Jew. I think I'm an honorary Muslim. I've spoken in mosques and synagogues. You know what I mean? I'm welcomed. And I look at that and I go, "Who am I?" Literally this was on a plaque. I used to own a house in another part of town and I actually had a plaque made and put on the house and it says, "Who am I that you had brought me this far?" And I can't get over that. I just cannot get over that the life that I had been given and I cannot escape the idea that there's some reason for it outside of myself.

Jody Dean: It's not just for my glory. I mean, goodness, I hope not. I mean, if that's all there is, it's not worth it. If all this pain and all these bad choices and all these wrong roads and all these poor decisions, nobody's going to care about my successes, but we can all identify with our failures. And I think that I've been allowed to screw up as many times as I have so I can speak to people who were wondering if they've screwed up too badly. And I'm here to tell you that I don't know that you can. I think that there's always a door open and a way back. And if nothing else, there's someone on whose shoulder you can lean. And that to me is, if there's anything that I can derive from my foolishness, it's that maybe my foolishness will be of some comfort to someone else.

George Mason: Father Richard Rohr is a Franciscan monk in Albuquerque and he's written a book called Falling Upward.

Jody Dean: Yeah.

George Mason: It's sort of that second half kind of language about life in which he talks about how we don't really fully understand the Christian life, who we are until we come to that time in our life when we hit bottom, when we lose it all, when we accept our sense of failure and our full humanity, and then we really have a choice. Are we going to fall down or are we going to fall up? And your story is very much about coming to grips with that. Four marriages.

Jody Dean: Oh, boy. Yeah.

George Mason: And lots of jobs coming and going and those sorts of things. So tell us about how your spiritual awakening that happened in mid life was a kind of falling upward.

Jody Dean: Well, my spiritual awakening happens every day. I had a friend not long ago who said jokingly, "You have a lot of experience with forgiveness." And I said, "Only every other hour." It's amazing when I talk about ... Nobody wants to read my resume. I don't even want to read my resume. It reads like my mom wrote it. It's like, "He did this, did this, did this." But when I talk about he screwed this up, he's messed this up, he jacked this up, dah, dah, dah, dah. Then I get emails and I get phone calls from people who say, "I've done the same thing."

Jody Dean: And there's a guy in town who's a friend of mine. I've known him since I worked in the nightclubs. Imagine that a Church of Christ kid going to work as a DJ in the nightclubs. That was a good idea. But we've known each other since then and he's been through an awful lot. And I remember several years ago after I had one of my more recent epiphanies, he said, "What you had to say really encouraged me." And I thought that never would have happened if I'd have only talked about whatever successes I've had. It's the screw ups that people identify with. And I think that's why if you look at the characters, the figures in the Bible, they're not perfect. They're total jack wagons, most of them. I mean, you wouldn't hire them to do the most menial job. And yet these people are given authority. Well, the authority comes from the acknowledgement of their mistakes.

Jody Dean: And the day is young. I'll probably make plenty today too. And forgiveness is continual. It can't be earned. There's nothing I can do. When people tell me, "Oh, you deserve to be happy." I'm sorry, George, I just want to smack them. I really, really ... That's the Peter coming out. I just want to hit him because it's like, "No, I know what I deserve. This is not it. It's way better." And so, yeah. I think that it's our flaws, it's our foolishness, it's our mistakes that really ... I've heard people, I heard my mom wail prayer, not, "All mighty father, blah, blah," all that. And that's fine. In a certain context I do that too. But when there are no words and this groan comes from ...

Jody Dean: I've been there too. After the failure of one of my marriages, I was at a Budget Suites Inn near Six Flags and it got so bad that I had to sleep with a Bible under my pillow because I was terrified of sleep. All this stuff would come rushing back to me in the night that I could push away in the daylight. And I would find myself on the floor. And I still do sometimes. I mean, there are days when there's no words that can express, the groanings that we all feel. And there've been times when I cuss in a prayer. I'm sorry, I'm probably not supposed to do that. But again, I don't think it's like God has never heard it before. Like, why in-

George Mason: But the Psalms are that way, aren't they. I mean, Psalms are just-

Jody Dean: Yeah. Why in the hell are you letting this happen?

George Mason: Right.

Jody Dean: He lets us get that out and lets us vent and stands there and says, "Keep going, keep going." I mean who does that?

George Mason: It is really fascinating that ... As a pastor I experienced this too. I know that when you are expressing openly your weakness, your vulnerability, people really identify with you and they think somehow that you are being more authentic. And here I am preaching and thinking, "No, this is really not about me. It's about God. It's about Christ and I shouldn't be talking too much about myself and it's not something I really like doing." But it is fascinating how people really do hold onto that when you are willing to be honest about who you are and what you're dealing with.

Jody Dean: One of those epiphanies along the way, one of the people I sought out was one of my favorite preachers, one of my favorite ministers, a guy named Rick Ashley at the Hills Church in North Richland Hills. And you want a gut check, I mean, he is the book of James on two legs. There's nothing soft about what he'll say to you when you ask his opinion. He'll give it to you. And he did. And it helped me grow. But he has a saying that I'll never forget. One of his sayings is some days I wake up and I just don't feel all that Holy. I just don't. And believe me, when people say, "Well, you're just trying to be holier than thou." No, no, no, no, no, no. If anything, I want people to know it's that I am not on my own of myself holy. I'm wholly an idiot sometimes. There's no doubt about that.

Jody Dean: But, yeah. The idea that anything I have to offer is glorious. No, it doesn't come from me. If I stumbled into it, it's only because God has set the stage for me to walk out on it. And I hold myself in no regard. I really do not.

George Mason: Jody, over the course of time though, you've been a public personality, a celebrity locally at least, and people know who you are and it's probably ... I experience this a little bit as a pastor in the sense that you're sort of a public figure and the temptation for a pastor is to sometimes feel like, "Okay, so Jesus saves, but please remember that you heard it from me."

Jody Dean: I'm stealing that. That's great.

George Mason: But I wonder, there's a temptation probably in the spiritual life to get caught up in celebrity too.

Jody Dean: Well, yeah.

George Mason: To see your identity and to sort of protect that and that works against the spiritual life itself, doesn't it?

Jody Dean: I've seen that in ... Let me tell you from my part. My ambitions have never been along the lines of being a celebrity. I wanted to do the job because of the people who did the job before me. But I became fanatical about it because I believe so strongly. I became a professional legalist and I alienated a lot of people along the way because I so completely believed in the way that I'd been taught to do it, that that's how it was going to be and if you didn't do it that way, you weren't worth speaking to.

Jody Dean: As far as celebrity goes, being in the limelight, being in the spotlight really never had anything to do with it. I'm always more comfortable. I've always been more comfortable being behind the scenes as a producer. I love the moment where we produce something and somebody hears it and they like it and they say something but they don't know I had anything to do with it. Those are the moments that I really cherish the most.

Jody Dean: What I did do, and this is just as bad as pursuing famous celebrity or notoriety, is I did it for approval. I wanted to make sure because of my background as an adoptee, because of those sorts of things, that I was too good to be given away, that there was no way you could get rid of me again. That drove everything that I did it. It's driven just about everything I have done. And, of course, that warps reality over time and you go looking for things that can't give you away or won't give you a way or even worse that you can leave at a time of your own choosing, like four marriages.

Jody Dean: I told my youngest son recently that there's not a single relationship that I've had over the years that couldn't have been saved if I had just worked a little harder at it. But what I did do was I gave those relationships away before they could give me away. It was all about control. It wasn't about celebrity or the spotlight or any of that stuff. It was about I'm going to assert my control and get even for what I felt like had been done to me. Even though I had a great childhood and wonderful upbringing and wonderful parents and everything else. At heart, I felt worthless. And I think that was part of what drove the anger, the misogyny, the philandering, everything else.

Jody Dean: And still to this day I have to remind myself, "Dude, look how many people have taken you in. Stop worrying about whoever gave you away." And think about why they did it. They did it for your own ... It's like we don't like the food. Yeah, but it's good for you. This was the food that I needed. This was the manna that I needed and whether I want to complain about it or not, the creator, the cook knew the nutrition that I required.

George Mason: Well, this takes me back to your comment about the metaphor of adoption for spirituality, and that is to say that we all are in a sense ... The Bible says flesh and blood does not inherit the kingdom of God. So there's a sense in which spiritually we have to come to this place to realize that it's not rooted in us. It's rooted in the one who adopts us.

Jody Dean: Amen, yeah.

George Mason: The one who brings us together. Jody, this has been a fascinating conversation. I want to come back and have a second episode with you and talk a little bit more about what's happening now and the public connection to your work. But to summarize this, I want to say thank you for staying on the journey of faith and continuing to learn.

Jody Dean: Well, he won't let me off. I've tried. Dadgummit, people say we're so glad you found Jesus. I wasn't looking. He was right there. And I turned around and go, "Oh, hello." Yeah. As far as I run, somehow he chases.

George Mason: Right. So if you're wondering why you feel far from God, who moved, right? Very good. Well, thanks so much for joining us, Jody, and I look forward to our next conversation.

Jody Dean: Thank you, George. Appreciate it.

George Mason: All right. Bye-bye.

George Mason: Thank you for tuning into Good God. We're grateful to provide this for you during this time of COVID-19 isolation and we hope that it is a consolation to you during this time. There have to be lots of ways that we reach each other and even though we can't be in a studio as we normally are producing these, we're finding the technology using Zoom and communicating it to you through this programming. We hope that you'll find it to be encouraging to you as we make our way through these difficult days.

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