This is an opinion column.

I’m gone win

You gone win

Everybody ‘round me winnin’

Rod Turner didn’t know better. He was a sophomore at Miles College. “Just a kid,” he’s telling me now. A kid from a musically gifted family in the Birmingham neighborhoods of Inglenook and Prattville. Grandma was an organist and album producer. Dad played the bass. Uncles and aunties sang.

“I just had to pick up an instrument,” Turner says, starting to laugh, “and not sing. I didn’t want to hurt anybody.”

He picked up a few: piano and organ, drums, alto sax, harmonica, “and a little bit of guitar.”

Turner tickled the keys on that day at Miles, having sneaked downstairs at Prentice Hall to get in a little practice before the start of youth services led by a young minister he’d recently met.

The two young men reconnected and vibed that day. The minister listened. The keyboardist shared a few tracks he’d created. The minister was “really cool,” Turner recalls. He returned downstairs time and time again, sneaking for time on the keys before service. “I didn’t know any better,” he says. “I was in there just being a musician.”

The minister kept listening. “One day he told, me, ‘Man, you’re going to be special; stick with me.’”

Believers don’t believe in happenstance. In coincidence or fate. Our steps are guided. Ordered.

Turner indeed stuck with the young minister: Mike McClure, Jr., who—fast forward—is now Senior Pastor of Rock City Church in Birmingham (full disclosure: RC is my home church), where Turner, 34, is Music Director. Most every Sunday, Turner’s on the keys during praise and worship just as he once sneaked to do in the basement at Miles.

Because he didn’t know any better.

McClure, (popularly known as Pastor Mike or PMJ), is now one of the most decorated artists in gospel music. He’s won 19 Stellar Awards, the genre’s highest accolade, and is the reigning three-time Artist of the Year.

Last year, Turner became a Stellar artist, acknowledged as a producer on tracks for “Winning,” which won Album of the Year and Contemporary Album of the Year.

Stick with me.

Turner was on stage at Boutwell Auditorium that Sunday in 2019 when Pastor Mike, during a sermon, began to riff on the magnitude of God’s future blessings. “And it’s gonna be… big,” he declared. Turner hit it with a resounding chord.

After service, Pastor Mike called Turner: “Man, we need to do something with that.”

Turner couldn’t sleep that night, so he started building a track. “I didn’t want anything depressing,” he says. “PMJ always said: How you say something really matters; it has to coincide with how the music sounds.” Turner thought guitars. He thought rockish.

“High energy and of lifting,” he is saying. “In gospel music, a lot of encouraging songs are slow and draggy. Some of them are really good, but God, in that moment while I was making the track, just gave me a vision of something energetic, yet still anointed. Something simple, but anybody and everybody could sing it.”

And it was big.

Turner was accompanying Pastor Mike on an out-of-town preaching gig. By then “Big”, blessed by producer/distributor Kerry Douglas of Blacksmoke Music Worldwide, and was receiving a bit of radio love. “We were just excited about it being out,” Turner recalls. “Excited about people hearing it.”

Pastor Mike called Turner’s hotel room. “Hey, hey, hey, hey, I gotta tell you something,” he said excitedly. “The song’s No. 1, doc! ‘Big’ is No. 1. I told you. I told you I was going to take you to the top.”

Stick with me.

“He sounded like Muhammad Ali: ‘I told you. I told you,’ Turner remembers. “I’m like, ‘Man, this is crazy.’ That moment was crazy. All of us were so proud because we did it. We said we would, we prayed on it, and God fulfilled it.”

“Big” spent 48 weeks on the gospel airplay chart—10 weeks at number one.

Woke up to a bill on the dresser

Tired, and I’m tryna keep my head up

Everything’s looking like I’m gonna lose

Believers also know there will be triumphs and trials. Conquest and challenges. Seasons of strain. Sometimes severe.

Turner first learned of his high blood pressure as a high-school senior, during a routine physical before Ramsey High School’s football season. He played the entire year without any issues, still.

During a subsequent exam for college, he was asked: “Do you take high blood pressure medicine?”

After saying he was not, Turner was told his blood pressure was high—”Like 171 over 80,” he remembers. “I think nothing of it, just going on with my life. I’m young, eating good, not feeling bad in any way.”

Fast forward again: Years later, Turner’s mother said he looked pale and asked him to take his blood pressure. It was 208 over 110. Mom started praying.

“She very, very, very old school religious, grew up and grew up in the Holiness church,” Turner said. “She grabbed my hand and started calling Jesus.”

Medication brought the pressure down, but the season reared again.

“I’m on the road with PMJ, everything’s good when all of a sudden I get that tired feeling again,” he said. “This time, dramatically—like I ran miles but I hadn’t done anything all day.”

A week later, about an hour after a routine physical, the doctor’s office called and told Turner to get to an emergency room. “Why?” he asked. “’Man, we just got your blood work back, it looks like your kidneys are functioning at two percent. You need to get back here. Your body could fill up with waste, and we just don’t know, man. Whatever you’re doing drop it and come back up here.’

“I was like, ‘Wow.’”

Turner was immediately placed on dialysis. “They put a tube down my neck to get all that dirty blood and waste out of my system,” he recalls. “I literally could have died.”

He needed a new kidney, and soon. “It was scary man.”

Almost 90 percent of the 106,000 people on the national transplant list are waiting on a kidney, according to the American Kidney Fund. Most wait at least three and up to five years for a kidney, the organization says.

Turner is going on this third year of waiting. In the midst of it came the Stellar accolade. “That was incredible,” he says. “That’s all Pastor Mike wanted was for something to be credited to me, I love that about him; [winning] wasn’t a selfish moment for him. [Rock City Music Minister] James Fortune was a writer as well, so we all got to share in it and be winners.”

And still, Turner undergoes dialysis every day—peritoneal dialysis, which cleans his body of waste through a tube in his stomach. The process takes about nine hours, so he does it a night, sleeping through much. Of a sort.

“My life, it’s kind of weird,” he says. “I sleep through the day sometimes because my nights on the machine are kind of up and down. The machine is draining me so it’s not comfortable.”

The dialysis machine is about the size of a “small printer”. He takes it on the road, still sticking with Pastor Mike. “I just put it and all the solution that goes with it in a big case,” he says.

Nine hours.

Being around Turner, you’d never know of his dire need. His smile is broad and free. Each Sunday he’s on stage left during praise and worship and almost all of the sermon, following Pastor Mike’s lead, as he’s done since they crossed paths in the basement at Miles.

A husband and father, he credits all of them for keeping him boosted. “Nobody’s down and dreary,” he says. “We all speak in faith. I’m not alone. if I ever get down, my wife is going to lift me, and that’s the best blessing,

His faith has been “challenged,” Turner confesses, but its roots are deep, seeded with the upbringing in the Holiness church. “We did the Lord’s Prayer every night,” he says. “Mom would make us read our Bible, ask us Bible verses and all kinds of stuff.”

Turner is on the transplant list at two facilities: Piedmont in Atlanta, and Vanderbilt in Nashville. A donor’s blood type must be O-positive. They may reside anywhere; if the three tests required prove them compatible the donor must travel to either Atlanta or Nashville for the surgery.

Turner’s two younger brothers tried to donate. One didn’t have the right blood type, the other’s DNA was so close to Turner’s that doctors were concerned his remaining kidney might fail, too.

Woke up this morning, I’m blessed

Food on my table, I’m blessed

Clothes on my back, yeah I’m blessed

I’m blessed

I’m blessed

Devil already know I’m winnin’

“I’ve definitely gotten closer to God,” Turner says. “I’ve seen God do it before for other people. That’s my stance on this. I’m not the first person to ever go through this, and not the last but I’m now the new testimony.’

Everybody ‘round me winnin’

“That’s how I see it. My dad’s gone through cancer. My mom is now going through breast cancer. I had an uncle that needed a new kidney; God allowed him to get one and he had it for 20 years. I’m just seeing God work all around me.”

I’m a member of the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary. My column appears on AL.com, as well as the Lede. Tell me what you think at [email protected], and follow me at twitter.com/roysj, or on Instagram @roysj