Most songs about faith are about the singer. Brooks & Dunn's "Believe" is about how faith gets from one person to another. Written by Ronnie Dunn and Craig Wiseman, it won the CMA's Single, Song and Music Video of the Year in 2006. It has been sung at funerals ever since.
The song has two characters. One is a boy. The other is a sweet old man down the street, Old Man Wrigley. Nothing dramatic happens between them. A mother sends her son on errands, and a friendship grows on a porch. Years later, the boy stands at the old man's funeral. But by the end, the old man's faith has become the boy's own. Scripture has been telling that story for three thousand years.
The Porch
The friendship begins with ordinary kindness. The boy's mother sends him down the street to the old man's house with things he needs. The boy keeps going back. Over a few summers, the two of them become friends.
Somewhere in those afternoons, the boy learns that Wrigley has lost his wife and his son. Then he asks the question only a child would ask out loud. How does the old man keep from going crazy? Wrigley's answer is simple. He will see them again soon. When the boy presses him, Wrigley smiles and describes how he prays. His faith is in what he cannot see, and he is certain of it anyway.
What matters is what Wrigley does not do. He does not lecture. He does not hand the boy a tract. The boy asks, and the old man tells the truth about his grief and his hope in the same breath. A sermon would have been forgotten. A grieving man who smiles is remembered for life.
Eli and the Boy Samuel
Scripture has its own story of a mother sending her son to an old man. Hannah prayed for a child for years. When Samuel was weaned, she brought him to the tabernacle at Shiloh and left him with the aged priest Eli (1 Samuel 1:24–28). "The child did minister unto the LORD before Eli the priest" (2:11).
It was a dry season. "The word of the LORD was precious in those days; there was no open vision" (1 Samuel 3:1). One night the boy heard a voice calling his name. He ran to Eli three times, thinking the old man had called him. The third time, Eli understood. He told the boy what to say: "Speak, LORD; for thy servant heareth" (3:9). It may be the most important thing Eli ever did. He did not give Samuel his own faith. He taught the boy how to meet God for himself.
The parallel is not exact, and it should not be forced. Eli's sons were wicked, and Eli failed to restrain them. Both died in a single day of battle, and the news killed the old man (1 Samuel 4:17–18). Wrigley's losses carry no such blame. But both stories turn on the same moment. An old man who has known grief points a boy toward the voice of God, and the boy grows up to answer it.
Simeon in the Temple
Wrigley's calm has another biblical likeness. Simeon was a just and devout man in Jerusalem, "waiting for the consolation of Israel." God had promised him he would not die before he saw the Messiah. When Joseph and Mary brought the infant Yeshua to the temple, Simeon took the child in his arms and said: "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: For mine eyes have seen thy salvation" (Luke 2:25–30).
Here is an old man holding a child and speaking of his own death without fear. He can let go because he has seen what he waited for. Wrigley has not seen it yet. His wife and son are gone, and heaven is still a promise. But he speaks about death the way Simeon did, as a departure in peace.
The letter to the Hebrews names this kind of faith. "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1). It then lists the patriarchs, who "all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off" (11:13). That is Wrigley on his porch. He sees his reunion afar off, and he is persuaded of it.
The Funeral
The boy grows up and moves away. His mother, the one who first sent him down the street, is the one who tells him that Wrigley has died. He goes back for the funeral. And there, in the song's bridge, the grown man makes his own confession of faith. What was Wrigley's on the porch is now his.
This is the turn the whole song was built for. On the porch, the faith belonged to Wrigley. At the funeral, it belongs to the boy. He has come to it by his own road, and the old man's example was the first marker on it.
Paul saw the same inheritance in his young friend Timothy. "I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice" (2 Timothy 1:5). Faith dwelt first in someone else. Then it came to live in him.
The Psalms make this the old person's calling. "Now also when I am old and greyheaded, O God, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation" (Psalm 71:18). And again: "One generation shall praise thy works to another" (Psalm 145:4). Wrigley had no son left to tell. So he told the boy down the street.
That is why the funeral is not a scene of despair. Paul wrote that believers "sorrow not, even as others which have no hope" (1 Thessalonians 4:13). The boy grieves his friend. But he grieves the way Wrigley grieved his wife and son, with his eyes on the reunion.
Faith Caught on a Porch Swing
The old saying is that faith is caught more than it is taught. "Believe" is that saying set to music. The boy never sits through a lesson. He runs errands and asks a hard question. The answer he gets is a man's life.
Notice who makes it possible. A mother sends her son to a lonely neighbor. Hannah did the same with Samuel. Neither could have known what would come of it. Small obedience opened a door, and God did the rest.
The song also says something about the old. Wrigley had lost the people he lived for. The world might have counted him finished. But his last years may have been his most fruitful, because a boy was watching. No one is too old or too broken to show God's strength to the next generation. Sometimes grief is the very thing that makes the witness believable.
Wrigley will see his wife and son again. That was his hope, and the song leaves it standing. He will also see the boy. And the boy, grown, will one day sit on some porch of his own, with some child asking how he keeps from going crazy. He will know what to say.