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Spark in the Dark, Billy Falcon

Posted by Steven Budlong on April 13, 2010 at 8:30am
Dear Way Corps,

I often get questions about Billy Falcon. He was active, along with his wife Myla, in the mid-eighties in Manhattan when Terry and I were Territory Coordinators.

He was at a hard place in his life and career when I first got to know him. We were walking once from a fellowship we had conducted in Harlem. I asked him then, "what do you need to do right now with your career?" He said, "I miss the studio, I need to record." About ten of us put together an investment plan to produce a tape on his behalf. The arrangement honored "artist rights" and paid the musicians. It further stated that once all investors were paid in full the ownership and copyrights would be relinquished to the artist, Billy Falcon. We did that. In 1987, following the Rock of Ages, we broke even and dissolved the partnership.

Last summer I spent some time with Billy in Nashville. He has flourished as a song writer, working primarily on his own material and with Jon Bon Jovi, both as a credited and uncredited song writer. I would encourage you (just for fun) to go back through the last decade of Bon Jovi's material and see if you can find Billy. I did that several years ago and was right and wrong half the time... interesting though.

Our ministry taught us to dream big when it came to "Word and Culture." Billy did that and his testament is his music, recorded in part in "Spark in the Dark" and more recently in the material you will hear on his web site, billyfalcon.com. I encourage you to go there and listen. Great stuff. You will be inspired and refreshed. I also have to put in a plug for his daughter Rose. She has done amazing work as a songwriter, artist and performer. She had her own album about six years ago which did incredibly well. I also think Billy is on to something, something he calls "The Sowing Circle." You have to go to his website to get a glimpse of that.

Finally, Billy and I agreed to produce a limited number of "Spark in the Dark" CDs last year. We redid the cover art (thanks to Kellie O'Malley), and with Gerry Comito (the original sound engineer) remixed the tracks and added two songs that were not a part of the first release. I am pretty thrilled with it. If you want a copy hit this link:

http://cgi.ebay.com/BILLY-FALCON-Spark-in-the-Dark-NEW-RE-RELEASE-Bonus_W0QQitemZ390074757785QQcmdZViewItemQQptZMusic_CDs?hash=item5ad2447299

On top of that, I have often asked myself "what if" The Way had not demanded the publishing and performance copyrights of their musicians and artists? Look around you at the musicians and artists you loved and respected, and ask yourself this question, "are they not entitled to the fruits of their labor?" Well, according to The Way International, they are not. That attitude is horribly, grossly and pathetically sad. It is evil and ugly. There is no greater violation in life than being lied to, stolen from or raped. That is what The Way did to its artists.

So the next time you hear someone from Pressed Down, Joyful Noise, Branded, Selah or any of the other bands you remember singing a song that changed your life. Go thank them, knowing that in their youth they gave away a most precious piece of their life.

Truly Yours,


Steven Budlong
12th Way Corps (and proud of it)


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Decisions, Decisions.....

Posted by Joe Kriston on April 12, 2010 at 8:52pm
I remember reading an old poster somewhere that said "Not to decide is to decide"...Which reminded me a little of Yogi Berra's famous "When you come to a fork in the road, take it" line...I think the older you get, the more you realize that making the right or wrong decision is not as important as living with the decisions you make...

Obviously, there's no magic formula for making right decisions, since none of us can predict the future...When we choose one thing over another, we never get to know how the 'other' would have turned out...Even if we could know, what would be the point?...Most decisions you can't take back----not very easily, anyway...We put off decisions, hoping that the right choice will somehow be made clearer than it is right now...We all hate to admit that we made a bad decision...

When faced with a big decision, I don't know that I really have a tried and true formula that works...However, I do find that after exhausting whatever common sense I can muster up in choosing among certain options, it's often a little insignificant thing---maybe something that tugs me emotionally just a little bit---that ends up being the deciding factor...When we bought our house 23 years ago, it fit all the criteria we were looking for in a house, yard size, square footage, price range etc.---along with about a dozen other houses...Why did we choose this one over the others?...When I walked over to the storage shed in the back yard, I noticed on the concrete slab it was sitting on five various sized hand prints of the kids that lived in the house previously....I looked at the hand prints and then the back yard and said " we could raise a family in this house"...And we bought it....

I have a local friend, a long-haired Polish Jew with a French accent, who recently has literally been faced with making a life or death decision...A proud man of 55, he suffered a heart attack last fall...He was immediately taken to a heart hospital and there he had a couple of stints put in his arteries to clear up some blockage he had...He was released from the hospital a couple of days later, and that's when the fun started...Throw away the cigarettes...Lose the six cups of coffee a day...No more making gravy out of the grease...And he felt weak...Then the depression sets in...Time goes by and he isn't feeling much better...He returns to the doctor...Now the doctor wants to do open-heart bypass surgery...How much more depressing can it get?...

As I said, he is a proud man...He doesn't trust doctors....He doesn't want to leave his life totally in their hands....He's never depended upon anybody before...He certainly doesn't want to be indebted to them---not for the money but for saving his life...A person's whole philosophy of life can change when they're staring the devil in the face and they're relying on another human being to rescue them...

He asked about his options....How bad is his blockage?...Sure, he can change his ways, eat better and take better care of himself, but will he be able to live with himself?...Will he worry himself sick every time his heart starts racing or he has heartburn, wondering if this is "the big one"?...He read about alternatives...There is a strict, fat-free vegetarian diet out there that can slow down, if not stop the blockage in his arteries...We talked...We knew he was at the fork in the road...He hadn't "taken it" yet...He had the bypass surgery scheduled, then canceled it..He hadn't made a decision, he delayed it, and he knew it...

Seems like the easier decision to live with is to get the surgery...Of course, there's a one percent chance he'd die on the operating table...Then he has to live out his life knowing he owes it to another man...The only advice I could give him is that if he opts not to do the surgery, that it's a decision and not a postponement...He believes in the power of will and of the mind...Procrastination can be fatal...

It's been four months since he canceled the surgery...He actually enjoys his vegetable diet, his tea, an occasional snort of booze and sneaks a smoke every now and then...He feels much better and his doc says he's improving, and even has a high opinion of the doctor who wrote the book that he got his diet from...He's certainly not out of the woods, but he's alive,....and he seems to be living with his decision...What more can a person do?....
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Share your miracle stories

Posted by Phyllis Heinz Tryon on April 7, 2010 at 3:33am
I'm looking for miracle stories for an upcoming website that Steve Sann is going to post. Currently gathering stories, interviewing people, editing some....If you would like to drop me a story via email, or prefer me to call and interview you, just email me at phyllis@emericamedia.com.

I'd love to hear from you! Looking for stories that distinctly show healings, deliverance, heavenly intervention, etc.
God bless.
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"A Little Bit Goes a Long Way"

Posted by John and Janet Ruiz on April 2, 2010 at 11:17am
I've been thinking about that phrase recently. It's a thought with a meaning I've found to be very true over the years.

So often I think in terms of Big - big answers, big problems, big deliverance, big change, big actions, big results. Yet, looking back it seems it's the little things that so often have had the largest, long term effects in my life. In that way they've been magnified far beyond the perception I had of them at the time.

Not to say that AAA Grade sized stuff hasn't had it's place. Only that if I compared life to say the ocean, I've had many, many more small waves come into shore day after day than big ones. I remember the big ones. Right now I'm pondering the others.

My wife and I celebrated 39 years of marriage March 27th - that's a biggie. Everything past the first one's been a milestone, for that matter. Now I look back and think - 10 years - shoot, 10 years? I can do that standing up without breaking a sweat. That's nothin', y'know? I don't start the meter till 20. (tha's a joke).

But it's been the accumulation of each that's amounted to the grand total - all the steps, one after the other that have made this year what it is. Can't do 10 without doing 9. Each follows the one before it and each has at times been very, very different from the year before. Here we are though, and counting.

I met my wife the first time on the steps of a local high school auditorium in Oakland, CA, after a high school "dance", with other friends. We only brushed paths that time, quickly, didn't even know her name. Then a year or so later, a guy showed up at a gig my band was playing and talked to me afterwards about coming over to Alameda and jamming. So I went and we jammed. His girlfriend at that time (who he also married and to whom he's still married) came by to listen and brought her best friend - Janet. Janet and I met and afterwards I got her phone number from my new best buddy - think she'd mind if I called? I did, we got together and the rest is, now, history. It didn't take me long to realize "this was it", albeit at the tender age of 17. Everyone I met that day has figured into my life in huge ways.

Now it seems it couldn't have happened any other way. It's all I know and all I want to know, really. A little tiny moment in time that has rippled out, growing in quality if not in speed. If anything I'd slow it down, y'know? Time can seem to go so fast looking at the events that fill it but life really seems to exist in a timeless place of it's own.

On average God's been good to me in the little things, events, people, actions. At the time I seem to go through them not even realizing what's really happening until later. As I age I've also found some degree of wisdom to recognize the golden moments when I'm in them. Like now. I'm only a thought, a blink, an action away from...something good... : )





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