Heaven is a Honky-Tonk

I grew up with a father in the beer business.

It’s interesting how that sentence has evolved for me over the years—how the meaning and perception have shifted as I’ve aged, reflected, and lived a little more life. But at the time, it was simply all I knew.

I spent a good chunk of my childhood riding shotgun with my father, moving in and out of honky-tonks across a small Texas town that CNN once named the most average city in America. Places like the Bar L, P2, and Frank’s Eight Ball Lounge. When you grow up inside something, you don’t label it right or wrong, good or bad. You just call it reality. And that was mine.

I loved it.

I learned how to shoot pool. I learned to appreciate a one-dollar grilled cheese. And with $1.50 in quarters, I could hold court at the jukebox for a solid two hours. George Strait. Willie Nelson. Merle Haggard. It was perfect.

It only dawned on me that this maybe wasn’t the norm when I suggested hosting our soccer team’s end-of-season party at the Bar L. Everyone else voted for Chuck E. Cheese.

At a young age, you start taking notes—whether you realize it or not. And one of the most important notes I ever took (or maybe the note took me), one I’ve kept in my pocket ever since, was this: once you step inside the doors of a honky-tonk, many of the labels that divide us outside those doors start to fade away.

There was camaraderie. Everyone knew each other by first name and more often, by their nickname. Stories were shared. Laughter came easily. Life, in all its messiness, was allowed to be exactly what it was. One’s net worth wasn’t interesting. But their God-given essence sure was.

Years later, I found myself spending more and more time inside church walls. By the time I was sixteen, I was in a church setting five days a week. In 1999, this was very oxymoronic, and the Baptists had some questions. The son of a beer man leading folks across all denominations in songs about unconditional love and a bearer of good news?

Yes.

And I was always drawn to the Jesus stories. He was more interested in the book someone was than in the cover the world might know them by. Whatever conditions the world claimed were necessary for love, he melted them. Kind of like my honky-tonk friends and my father.

I still remember the time I walked into church and heard someone whisper from the pew behind me, “There’s the beer people.” That’s my earliest memory of the world dividing, drawing lines, and labeling.

That moment stayed with me.

But what always struck me about Jesus was that he rarely talked about hanging out in the tabernacle. He seemed far more comfortable in ordinary places—around tables, among “outsiders”, in rooms full of stories, laughter, food, and drink. If he did draw a line, it was to point to an open door with a neon light hanging above it that read ‘come on in’.

Places that, if we’re honest, felt a lot like honky-tonks.

Because in those spaces, people could share their stories, raise a glass, laugh a little, and somehow—some way—arrive at the quiet understanding that even in the midst of suffering, when you stack the small joys of life together, they often outweigh the pain.

Which brings me to where we find ourselves today.

It feels like dualistic thinking has never been louder. Us versus them. Right versus wrong. Good versus bad. The lines are sharp. The labels heavy. The room is tense. We subscribe to one halftime show and unsubscribe to another.

And maybe—just maybe—what we all need is a stack of quarters, a room lit by neon, a song we all know by heart, and a place where the labels fall away long enough for us to remember each other.

To remember that we are one.

To remember that my story can open me to your story. And your story can open us to our story. And our story can collectively open us to The Story.

Maybe heaven looks less like correction and more like connection.

Maybe we just need a neon-lit room and to split a grilled cheese with someone not like us.

Maybe heaven is a honky-tonk.

Maybe that will crack the case.

The table is long enough for all of us,

Ashton