I Am Pooped

It says in Scripture those who believe should be merciful to those who doubt; snatch others from the fire and save them; to others show mercy, mixed with fear — hating even the clothing stained by corrupted flesh. There is no one size fits all approach to ministry.

Contemplating the fire reference, there is much truth in the dictum ‘only those who have been through the fire can speak with authority to the ones still engulfed in flames.’ While it is possible to obtain an understanding based on research of any given life scenario, the most one having such information can offer is advice based solely on the findings of others. To genuinely know what something is about requires firsthand knowledge of the matter. Which, to put it mildly, isn’t always a whole lot of fun.

This is never truer than for those reaching out to others viewed with something less than favor by society due to past and/or present actions. The believer who does so faces instant double jeopardy. Not only will they encounter the open hostility of many who prefer dying in their sin, even while acknowledging its destructive hold on their life, to admitting their need for divine intervention. They will also be confronted with the naked disgust of other believers who can’t handle the brutal side of reality, preferring adherence to the polite self-delusion of how surrounding oneself with nice people who’ve been that way since day one is the better way to holiness.

Little wonder why, in the face of such a reality, the lioness needs to roar.

“We’d get these letters: ‘Dear brothers and sister in Christ, we all know that any sister who would wear red sequins is obviously still a whore, and I think you need to repent from this.’ I’d write back: ‘My dear brother, I think you need to renew your mind.’ You know? Hello…”

Nancyjo Mann grimly chuckles at the memory. It’s a rainy evening outside her Oklahoma home, and Barnabas’ lead singer is taking some time to look back at it all. Including the parts giving cause for many to squirm upon hearing.

She continues, “It took its toll. We had control over our albums to a greater extent than a lot of other artists. But at the same time, they didn’t know what to do with us. Oh, they wanted us. But they didn’t know what to do with us even though when Gary (Mann; bass & keyboards), Kris (Klingensmith; drums & lyrics) and Brian (Belew; guitar) wrote together our music was good. Real good.”

So was it just the music, firebrand prog metal that remains relevant twenty plus years later, that caused befuddlement? No. There were also cultural differences leading to the gap. As Mann puts it, “We can all safely say that we were rockers before we became Christians. We weren’t Christians who then became rockers. We were what we were when we came to Christ.”

Who Mann was and how she got there is a story not for the faint of heart. She was born in Mason City, Iowa. By her description Mann was raised in a household where traditional morals were practiced, although as the only girl among her three siblings she gravitated toward the tomboy side of behavior. She notes there were other influencing factors at play. “In addition to my brothers I had almost all boy cousins. Plus, most musicians are guys, so I was very accustomed to being around a lot of guys as far as friends and things.”

Although music was a large part of Mann’s formative years, it wasn’t her goal in life. She wanted to be a doctor when she grew up. This dream was derailed when at a time far before today’s world of daycare centers in high school she became pregnant during her junior year. “Back in the early ‘70s we didn’t have the protection rights we do today. If you were pregnant and they found out, you were expelled. My family had a good reputation, and there I was, pregnant. I had to quit school during the second semester because I was showing after only a month. I married my children’s father, then went back and finished high school with my own classmates. My daughter was nine months old sitting in the audience with my parents when I walked across the stage to get my diploma. After graduation I started working in the field of medicine. I then became pregnant with my son.”

Any illusions of this all working out were quickly shattered. “It was my daughter’s third birthday. My husband’s whole family was over. He never showed up. For four days we had no idea where he was or if he was alive. He then came home long enough to leave for good. I was devastated and then divorced. I honestly didn’t realize guys did that.” She laughs before half-acknowledging and half-bemoaning, “I had a sheltered childhood.”

The laughter fades as Mann continues her story. “I then became pregnant with Shauna, my third child. I was nearly six months along. I had married her father. That’s what we did back then: you got pregnant, you got married. And then he walked out at the end of October 1974. The morning he walked out, I took my children over to my Mom’s house. One of my brothers was there. I said, ‘Well, what am I going to do? Bill’s left.’ We talked for a little bit, and my mother said, ‘Nancy, you’re never going to amount to a hill of beans. No man’s going to love you with two, let alone three children. You’ll probably be on welfare the rest of your life. You’ve got to have an abortion.’ Within a matter of four hours they had me set up for a saline abortion at Iowa Lutheran Hospital in Des Moines. I went in by myself and went through the whole saline abortion alone. Hospitals didn’t have protection rights back then, so if the nurses didn’t make it to the room in time, oh well. They would be forced to help you, so they wouldn’t come. So I delivered my girl myself and got to hold her. When I could feel my daughter kicking and dying as she got weaker…”

(excerpt from a WEBA pamphlet)

… she sat in Dr. Fong’s office, terrified, not wanting to abort her child but seeing no alternative. The doctor didn’t bother to examine her. When she asked him what he was going to do, he answered, “I’m going to take a little fluid out and put a little fluid in. You’ll have severe cramps and you’ll expel the fetus.” She was told to go to the hospital, get admitted and he would be over in an hour.

As she sat waiting for him, she thought about what he said, picturing a regular sized shot. When he pulled out a 4” needle with a 6-8 inch cylinder, everything within Nancyjo wanted to scream, but she was paralyzed with terror. She lay there frozen as the doctor prepped her and using the syringe took out 60cc’s of amniotic fluid. Immediately after he injected 210cc’s of 20% saline solution. He left and her baby began to thrash around violently.

Nancyjo talked to her daughter the hour and a half it took her to die, begging for forgiveness. She still remembers the last weak kick against her lower left side. The nightmare of what was happening seemed unbearable. Nancyjo was never told what would happen to her. She was never told she’d feel her baby die. The severe cramps were in reality hard labor.

After the baby died, nurses came in, started an I-V of pitosin to induce labor, then left. Nancyjo tried to summon help, pleading for someone to be with her, but no one came. It took twelve pain-filled hours, but she finally delivered her daughter. Alone.

She was fourteen inches long, weighing a pound and a half. She had a head full of hair and her eyes were opening. Nancyjo held her for a minute before the nurses rushed in, grabbed her out of Nancyjo’s arms and threw her into a bed pan. Nancyjo heard her tiny head hit the cold metal. The nurses then yanked on the umbilical cord, jerked out the placenta and left. Nancyjo lay there, tormented by guilt and grief.

The next four months were filled with bleeding and infections. Too ashamed of her abortion to go to her regular OB/GYN, she re-turned to Dr. Fong for a D&C (dilatation and curettage, in which the lining of the uterus is scraped and the tissue is sent to a lab for tests). Unbeknownst to her, that wasn’t all done that day.

Three weeks later she was running a 105 degree temperature and was doubled over in pain. She went to the bathroom and expelled over twenty yards of black packing the doctor had neglected to remove after the procedure. She was rushed to the hospital. The doctor who examined her exclaimed, “My God. Who has done this to you?” Filled with shame, Nancyjo refused to say anything. The doctor continued, “He’s cut off your cervix. You have an open uterus. You’ll never stop bleeding.” Again he demanded to know who had done this. She replied only that he had to make her well. Thus at age twenty-two Nancyjo underwent a complete hysterectomy due to her “safe,” legal abortion.

Mann pauses before continuing. “I had no idea what they were going to do to me would end up doing to my life what it did. I believe the majority of Nancyjo died on that table along with my daughter. After going through that, for the next four years I lived a spiraling downhill life. I wanted to die, but I didn’t want to die because I didn’t know where I’d go.”

Given how trying to get into medicine by herself with two kids was more than a bit problematic, Mann pursued music by singing with assorted local country rock ensembles. This lasted until May of 1978. May 26th to be precise, on which day the front wheel of the motorcycle Mann was riding dropped out. She was going seventy-five miles an hour at the time. The results were what could be expected: severe burns, a mangled knee, internal bleeding. The primary question centered not on recovery, but survival.

Mann picks up the story from there. “When I wrecked in Illinois, they took me across the Mississippi to a hospital in Burlington, Iowa. On my fourth night there I got an aide to bring in a TV, and the only thing on at two in the morning in Burlington, Iowa was The 700 Club.”

She laughs before continuing. “I couldn’t get up and move because I was so swollen, and from the bruises and burns along with some internal bleeding, so I couldn’t turn the channel. All I could do was say to myself, ‘I don’t need this religious stuff right now. I’m already dying.’”

Actually, she did. “I don’t remember much of what Pat (Robertson) said except at the end: ‘If you’re at the bottom of the barrel, why don’t you get on your knees and ask Christ into your life?’ To which I said, ‘God, if I could move I would get on my knees to You.’ I had one of those ‘wow!’ experiences because my God was so gracious. He wanted to show me who He really was as a Father, the giver of life.”

Mann’s salvation came at a most opportune time. “They told me it’d take probably five years using pigskin mesh and then five more years of plastic surgery for the scars and burn wounds to heal. But after I asked Christ to come into my life, they came on a Tuesday morning to surgically remove the debris from me. They didn’t put you out back then, so you had to lay there and take it. But I got through it. Remember, they’d been saying, ‘We don’t know if we can get you through this.’ Well, when you’ve been told by Someone much bigger than them you’re not going to die… you know, in four weeks I had brand new skin and no scars. None. I was really purple, but that faded after a few weeks.” She laughs as she adds, “I do have two scars on my right knee, but its had five surgeries. So that’s more of a rat bite!”

A few months later, Mann packed up her children and moved to Hermosa Beach, California. Shortly thereafter, while reading a local trader/want ads paper she spotted an ad from an all original Christian rock bank looking for a female lead vocalist; experience preferred. She called. The band, which at the time included Gary Mann (who would later marry Nancyjo) and original guitarist Monte Cooley, came over to her house. Mann’s audition consisted of her singing along to a Linda Ronstadt record. She was invited to join the band on the spot. Thus began her journey upon what Klingensmith and Mick Donner, who played guitar with for a time after Cooley left, eventually dubbed the pirate ship Barnabas.

During Mann’s tenure with Barnabas, in 1982 she founded and put much effort into WEBA (Women Exploited By Abortion) International, a still active ministry for women who have gone through an abortion. Its beginning included a 1983 concept album by Mann which led to one of those moments some might dream of taking place yet believe could only happen in the Twilight Zone: she told off Pat Boone.

To this day she can’t tell the story without bursting into laughter several times. “At the same time I was doing the album, or right afterwards, Pat came up with his song ‘Let Me Live.’ This was in 1983. Anyway, shortly after that we were both in Washing-ton D.C. We’d testified before a Congressional committee about abortion. The next day I spent sitting in my senator’s office listening to him doing interview after interview. The following evening, after dinner — it was for the Year of the Bible — we started talking.”

The laughter fades as Mann notes her father has passed away a short time before the meeting, so she was understandably not in the best state of mind. From there she picks up on her moment with Boone. “I told him how I had been raised on him and how I remembered his white shoes, watching him every week on television with my family. Later on I knew a couple of his daughters; they worked with me at a crisis pregnancy center in Kansas City. I said to him, ‘Look, just because you’re Pat Boone doesn’t mean you’re the only person with a pro life song. Have you ever had an abortion, by the way?’ He gave me a look that said most people don’t talk to me like this, to which I replied, ‘I’m not anybody, okay? I want to know: can you tell me what this is about?’”

Three years later at a national right to life conference in Denver… “I was rehearsing a ‘We Are The World’ kind of song Annie Herring had written. She and I had run into each other several times over the years, and we had clicked. He walked into the room — he was emceeing — spotted me and said, ‘Well, my gosh. Nancyjo Mann.’ Obviously he remembered me!”

Getting back to Barnabas, after its 1980 debut album Hear The Light found the band decidedly on the punk side of things it shifted gears into the metal approach for which it is best known. Did this require Mann to change her vocal style? “No. When we were starting out people were calling us punk or new wave, but I believe it was more because of the look we had at the time than the music. Also, on the first two records we didn’t have a clue what we were about. We hadn’t yet discovered who we were as a group. So the vocals didn’t change. As time went on I became more comfortable with it all, learning what it was like being in a studio. That might be what people were hearing.”

Mann’s view of Barnabas’ catalog? “I have a hard time listening to the first two albums. Approaching Light Speed and Feel The Fire I was very happy with. I have a very difficult time listening to Little Foxes.”

Because of the memories of what was going on at the time of recording the album when the band was falling apart? “Yes. They never should have made us record in the situation we were in at the time. There was so much stress. We were being talked about, and the things they were saying… people would write things as though we had said it when they’d never interviewed us. They were saying a lot of things that weren’t true. Also, we had a couple of tours fall through at the last minute. That hurt us a lot because we felt like we were starting to be accepted, but we still weren’t. I wish we could have done more touring.”

She expands on the thought. “Back in our day my heart’s desire, and everything we intended to do with the band on the road, was to always call ahead to the city where the show would be and make sure we would have as many ministries available as possible. If someone was cold or hungry, if someone needed medical help, or if someone needed a place to stay because they either didn’t have one, or where they were living had something wrong — we wanted people to be there from different ministries in that town that could meet the needs we couldn’t have. That was my heart. It was important to me not to just get kids at a concert and maybe lead them to the Lord. To say, ‘Here’s the good news and good luck,’ didn’t cut it. If you could help meet some of their needs, then I felt like we did what we were supposed to do.”

Yet with all the adversity Barnabas faced, the break-up was a shock to Mann. “I was absolutely devastated. I remember stand-ing in the apartment in Edmond (Oklahoma) when the guys decided they wanted to break up. I literally collapsed on the floor sobbing. I couldn’t believe they were doing this. After all we’d been through I couldn’t believe they were now letting it go. If we would have taken a break for a year it would have been one thing. But it didn’t happen. I couldn’t believe they were disbanding.”

This was in 1986. In 1989 Nancyjo and Gary divorced. She moved to Kansas City, working at a crisis pregnancy center until burnout set in during the ‘90s. She then started working in the food service business, paralleling her family’s work in the restaurant and club industry. In 1995 she started doing private hospice work. She shares an observation from this: “In doing that, I learned that people of faith do die differently than those who don’t know Christ. They are at peace. This work is pressed on my heart, and while doing it I had the privilege of leading a couple of people I was caring for to the Lord.”

And then she fell.

Not from grace. Literally fell. “February seventh, 1999. It was at night. It was sleeting. I was trying to jump a water and ice puddle, and the knee that had been injured in the motorcycle accident couldn’t hold me up. I had both hands in my coat pockets, so I had nothing to stop my fall. Went straight down on the street onto my right eye and temple. I felt something crack.”

Mann understates the situation. She had suffered a traumatic brain injury. “I started going downhill. I had brain injury teachers everyday, six days a week for almost three years trying to get the brain to respond. I isolated myself from most everyone. All the tests, all the doctors said I wouldn’t make it back from this.”

She did. “In December of 2006 I underwent a test that required general anesthesia. It reacted to the medication I was taking at the time and put the right side of my brain into a sleep state. I lay in bed for a month with my name on the wall so I’d know who I was and where I was living. I was safe. I could call a number if I needed help. So I laid there for a month, begging God every day to please wake me up. I’d been asleep so long.

“Kris (Klingensmith) called me one night to talk about different things. I said, ‘Kris, I’m so tired. Let me call you in the morning and you can tell me about it.’ I wasn’t taking it in. So I crawled back in bed — it was 2:30 in the morning — and I prayed, ‘Please wake me up so I can carry on a conversation again. I’ve gone backwards.’ When I woke up the next day at 2:30 in the afternoon — it was January 26th, 2007 — not only did I wake up from the anesthesia but eight years of my life woke up. Now, every day is exciting because each day is bringing something brand new. Everything is new to me, because when you lose the majority of your life, and you know you knew it and you have to relearn it, you don’t take it for granted. Nobody should. Each day is new be-cause I don’t know what I’m going to see that might trigger a new thought that will make me go, ‘Wow, I got a memory back!’” She also got her passion for ministry back; Mann is busy with multiple projects including re-energizing WEBA along with a documentary and retrospective release of her favorite moments from Barnabas. The lioness in autumn has lost none of her roar.

Final thoughts on the band whose music lives more than twenty years after it played its final note together? “Life with Barnabas was so rare and unique. To have been a part of it… I’m a decent singer. I’m not a great singer by any means. To have been with those three musicians, with Brian, Kris, and Gary was an honor. It was an honor to have been allowed to front these guys. But the best part was having the honor to do something for my Father in Heaven that was so out there. Yet it was us.”

That was part of the chapter on Nancyjo Mann from the book God’s Not Dead (And Neither Are We)

I got permission from Jerry Wilson with Nancyjo Mann’s blessing to share this with you all of you. I’m probably going to share it on a few more places on the internet. It’s an important story because it just reinforces the fact that you can’t out-sin the Lord’s Grace.

I’m the type of person that believes as a Christian we are not too good to spend time with people that have a story to tell. Maybe you know somebody going through something that could use a real friend… one that isn’t going to judge.

Anyhow… I will not spend too much time sharing what’s really going on inside of me because that would take away from this chapter that I wanted you to read so that you will truly think about what it is you’re suppose to get out of this.

What are your thoughts on Abortion? Do you know someone that has had an abortion that is struggling and hurting deep down inside? Do you have an abortion story that you would like to share? I promise you will not get any judgment from me. I believe God allows certain things to happen for a reason and He knows what’s going to happen even before we do. So yes, sometimes bad things happen to good people but it’s what those people do with what has happened that matters in the end. God doesn’t give us anything that we can’t handle and when we seek Him we can handle ANYTHING.

If you have a story you’d like to share but would like to share it anonymously, put “Anonymous Story” in the subject line of your e-mail and send it to me via my brand new contact form.

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