Jesus and the Gift of Music

Part One of a Three-Part Conversation with Eric Pennington

There’s a particular kind of loneliness in watching your own life happen to you. Eric Pennington knows it from the inside. As a boy, he remembers feeling almost outside himself — like he could watch young Eric move through his days, present in his own body but somehow also a few feet to the side of it, observing. Not constantly. Not dramatically. Just enough, and just often enough, that he noticed.

He doesn’t call it an out-of-body experience, exactly, though he understands why that’s the word people reach for. It’s closer to a kind of early vigilance — the watchfulness of a kid trying to make sense of a house that didn’t explain itself.

His parents, he suspects — though neither ever sat for a formal assessment — were both Nines on the Enneagram. The Peacemakers. Which meant, in practice, a house full of quiet. Not unkind quiet. Just unexplained quiet. “They’re just not talking,” he told me, “and you’re kind of left with — as a kid, I felt like I was left with question marks.” There was dysfunction underneath that silence, but a child doesn’t have the architecture yet to name it. He just keeps moving. Survives the day. Doesn’t ask why.

Then he turned twelve, then thirteen, and the questions he didn’t have language for started arriving anyway. Something cracked open in his family that year — the kind of rupture that becomes public in a way a kid never asked for, the kind that follows you into a new school year whether you’re ready or not. What matters for where we’re going today is what happened underneath it, at the same time, almost on top of it.

Eric gave his life to Christ in that window.

And within the same season — maybe eight months, maybe a year on either side — music became something more than background noise. “Jesus and the music was like a lifeline,” he told me. “The hope. The belief that I could navigate life in a way where I wouldn’t necessarily fall into the traps of a lot of my family — drugs, alcohol, prison. That’s kind of how I anchored myself. In those two things.”

Not one. Two. Faith and music, arriving together, doing something neither could have done alone.

I asked him about an archetype he’s mentioned to me more than once — Miles Davis. Not as a musician he simply admired, but as something closer to a mirror. His answer surprised me a little. “I really found Miles Davis’s music to be rather boring,” he said. It wasn’t the sound that hooked him. It was the shape of the career underneath it. Davis spent years doing it one way, then reinvented the whole thing and spent the next stretch doing it completely differently. A chameleon. Restless. Unwilling to stay put in a style just because it had worked.

“I think my attractiveness to that was just my hyper-creativity,” Eric said. “My desire to find things that were unique and different.” But there was something more functional happening too, something that only makes sense once you know what twelve-and-thirteen-year-old Eric was living through. “I think some of that connected to the trauma that was happening — like protection. If I could find something that set me apart, that would be sort of a protective barrier from just going along with the herd.” Because the herd, as he put it, was the thing pointing. Whispering. Making him the kid everyone already had a story about.

Difference, for Eric, wasn’t a personality trait he discovered later in a workshop. It was armor he built at thirteen, tuned to the rhythm of a man who refused to keep playing the same five years on repeat.

“Jesus and the Gift of Music”Reflection Sheet

I think about that often — how the things that save us early rarely look like salvation at the time. Music didn’t feel like a rescue plan to a thirteen-year-old. It felt like the only thing that made sense to do with his hands and his attention while everything else in his house was unreadable. Faith didn’t feel like doctrine. It felt like the only voice in the room that wasn’t asking him to pretend he understood something he didn’t.

What I find myself sitting with now, decades later, talking to the man that boy became, is how much of Eric’s whole posture toward emotional intelligence — the listening, the curiosity, the refusal to let people stay invisible to him — traces back to a kid who learned to watch closely because nobody was explaining anything out loud. He learned to read a room before he could read a textbook. He learned that silence isn’t the absence of information; it’s information you have to go looking for. And he learned, at thirteen, that you can be carried by two things showing up at once that have no business needing each other — a hope you can’t see and a sound you can hold in your hands.

He doesn’t watch himself from the outside anymore. Not the way he used to. But I’d guess some of that boy is still in there, still paying close attention, still listening for the note that doesn’t sound like everyone else’s.

Where this meets you: somewhere in your own story, two unlikely things probably arrived together and held you up when you couldn’t yet name what either one was doing.

Next time: how a bored afternoon in a corporate conference room turned into a company called Epic Living — and how emotional intelligence found Eric before he ever went looking for it.

Peace and every good.

About the Author

Jim Vaive is co-founder of spirit of EQ, where he and his wife Lynette help individuals, leaders, and teams grow through emotional intelligence, the Enneagram, and contemplative spiritual formation. He writes at The Mystical Seeker on the inward life that makes the outward work possible.