It wasn’t the way the story was supposed to go, and TaRanda was angry.
After her husband, Tony, began battling renal failure, she gave him one of her kidneys, and he came through the surgery with flying colors.
“I was a perfect match,” she said.
Then a year later, he died.
“I thought we had our miracle. I thought everything was going to be fine,” TaRanda said. “I got pretty angry.”
And she lost herself and lost touch with God for a while, she said.
“I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror. I couldn’t get out of bed in the mornings,” TaRanda said. “My mom was raising my two little girls, and I felt guilt, shame and felt pretty useless.”
Finding healing
It was a long time before she found healing, but over time and through counseling, “God completely turned me around,” she said, and she also remarried in March. “I always promised God that I would share with anyone I could that there’s no place He can’t reach.”
That’s the message she shares now that she’s a part of southern gospel trio Cana’s Voice, a new group whose album debuted at the end of May.
“I think the places that Doug and Jody and I come from, even though it’s not the same, it’s a similar place emotionally and spiritually,” TaRanda said. “The three of us have been through things and questioned God. We’ve asked questions like, ‘Why me? How can God’s Word be true when this is happening to me?’”
Cana’s Voice wants to be the voice for the broken, said group member Jody McBrayer, who spent 13 years in the contemporary Christian group Avalon.
“That’s our heart as Cana’s Voice,” he said. “If you are at your wit’s end, you need to know that there is hope and that God is doing something, so don’t give up.”
McBrayer himself has been in that spot before.
“In 2011, I was so deep in depression because I had heart disease,” he said, explaining that the two often go together. “We were at the beach, and I went down to the water one morning and stood at the base of the ocean with the idea that I was going to walk into it and not come out.”
But somehow the Holy Spirit got him back to the house from the edge of the water, he said, “and the next day I realized what I had been thinking, and I was shocked.”
He called a friend who connected him with a counselor.
“I told the counselor my whole story, and he said, ‘I can help you as long as you’re still breathing, but I can’t if you stop breathing,’” McBrayer said.
So he focused on breathing.
“God is faithful, and I’m grateful that He’s sustained me and sustained us,” he said. “My family is thriving and we are in a great place now.”
But McBrayer said that as a group, Cana’s Voice knew they wanted to wear the scars of where they’d been.
“We [made] a conscious decision that we wanted to be real, even though some of that reality might make people uncomfortable,” he said. “You help more people by showing them your scars than showing them your trophies. There’s healing in knowing you’re not the only one.”
It’s a message that began from their very first time singing together, said Doug Anderson.
‘A God thing’
“When we first got together, we sat down at a piano and started singing, and within the first 30 seconds I knew it was a God thing,” said Anderson, formerly of the group Signature Sound. “We spent three hours around the piano crying our eyes out and telling each other testimonies of what God had done in our lives.”
Out of that place, the group’s songs are worship focused and ministry minded, Anderson said.
“The basic underlying theme is that God loves you and He’s not done with you yet,” he said. “Our songs are powerful stories of what we’ve come through. We’re all comfortable with where we are — we aren’t trying to be somebody else. And we want our songs to resonate with others.”
For more information, visit canasvoice.com.
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