🌤️ Vero Beach, FL 74℉/68℉ | Cloudy with a 10% chance of rain | It's 5 o'clock somewhere, and it feels like paradise somewhere too.

I recently dragged Minesweeper out of its 90s grave and rebuilt it as a Wordle-style daily board at oopsboom.com, where everybody gets the same board on the same day. It's free and a little addictive. If you need something to poke at on your lunch break, it's all yours.

Anyway, did you know Johnny Cash's comeback album was recorded in a prison cafeteria? One of the biggest records in country music got made at 9:40 on a Saturday morning, in the drab dining room of Folsom State Prison, in front of the kind of crowd that had been writing him letters for years.

For the next few weeks I'm taking one dangerously creative Christian at a time and pulling out the trait that made them dangerous. Last time was about saying the big thing in plain words.

Trait 4: A dangerously creative Christian goes to the room nobody is booking.

I call it the Folsom nose.

It's a sense for the people who have been writing to you for years while you were busy trying to get booked somewhere bigger.

It's easy to chase the room everyone else is chasing, the one with the bright lights and the line out the door. Meanwhile, down the hall, there's a room full of people who have been waiting years for you to walk in and act like they were worth the trip, and when you finally do, you won't have to fight for their attention.

Johnny Cash never did a day of prison time, which is funny, because he sang like a man who had lost count of the days.

It started in 1953, when Cash was in the Air Force in West Germany and his unit sat down to watch a 1951 movie called Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison. It stuck with him, and he wrote "Folsom Prison Blues." When the song came out on Sun Records a couple of years later, inmates started writing him letters asking him to come play their prisons, and he did, starting at Huntsville in Texas in 1957 and going back to prisons for the next ten years.

Then the wheels came off.

By the mid-60s the hits had dried up, and his drug problem had a lot to do with it. In 1967 he finally got help, and by the end of that year he was turning his career around.

Put yourself in his boots for a second.

You're a fading star with one real shot at a comeback. The safe play is a Vegas lounge or a TV special, somewhere with nice lighting and a crowd that already likes you. Cash pitched his new producer, Bob Johnston, on recording a live album inside a prison instead, and Johnston loved it. He called San Quentin and Folsom. Folsom called back first. (San Quentin got its turn in 1969.)

Now think about the downside. A washed-up star plays a prison, the record flops, and even Vegas won't return his calls. Cash saw the upside, because he was picking the one audience that had never stopped writing him.

The night before the show, Cash and the band were rehearsing at a motel in Sacramento, and California's governor, Ronald Reagan, who was there for a dinner speech, stopped by to cheer them on. That's a fun detail, but the one that changed everything came the same night, when a preacher friend of Cash's who counseled inmates at Folsom handed him a tape. On it was a song called "Greystone Chapel," written by an inmate named Glen Sherley, who was doing time for armed robbery.

Cash said later, "I listened to it one time and I said, 'I've got to do this in the show tomorrow.' So I stayed up and learned it."

The next morning he walked into the prison cafeteria and played the first of two shows. The second one, at 12:40, was a backup in case the first one stunk. Glen was sitting in the front row with no idea what was coming. Then, right before the last song, Cash said, "This song was written by our friend Glen Sherley. I hope we do your song justice, Glen."

He closed both shows with it.

Columbia barely promoted the record. At Folsom Prison went to No. 1 on the country chart anyway, and "Folsom Prison Blues" became his first top-40 hit since 1964. After Folsom, ABC gave him a whole show of his own, which is a lot more than the TV special he could have chased.

Cash put it simply: "That's where things really got started for me again."

Cash didn't forget Glen, either. He lobbied to get him paroled, and when Glen walked out of prison in 1971, Cash met him at the gates and gave him a job with his band.

I wish the story ended there.

Life on the outside was hard for Glen, his behavior got threatening enough that Cash eventually let him go, and Glen died in 1978 at 42. Walking into that room didn't fix Glen's life. Cash's daughter Tara later said the news was "a wakeup call that he realized he couldn't save everybody."

If that sounds familiar, it's because Jesus had the same nose. He kept showing up in rooms the religious crowd wouldn't be caught dead in, to the point where they grumbled, "This man welcomes sinners and eats with them" (Luke 15:2).

In John 4 he sits down at a well around noon, tired from the walk, and asks a Samaritan woman for a drink. That was a big deal, because Jews didn't associate with Samaritans, and even his own disciples were surprised when they came back and found him talking with her. The woman left her water jar right there by the well and went back to tell the whole town.

My own vacant room turned out to be at our dinner table.

My boys, Arlo and Hollis, are both under 5, and they already get talked to all day long by videos, Alexa, apps and AI. Every screen in our house has something to say to them, and less and less of what they hear comes from me. So I built an app to tip the scale back toward Darian and me. It's called Powwow, and every night's question also comes in a version little kids can actually answer. The littlest person at the table gets a turn too.

So let me ask you. Who keeps writing you that you never write back?

In September 2017, Rihanna launched Fenty Beauty with 40 shades of foundation. Right before the launch, a fan slid into her Instagram DMs and asked if she was really that committed to diversity. Rihanna wrote back, "You knoooowwww it!!!!!" and said her brown sisters had "been left out too many times in the makeup world."

Less than a week after launch, the darker shades were selling out at Sephoras around the country. A sales associate in Times Square told The Cut, "Everything after 390 is pretty much gone." Over in D.C., another one said her store had gone from weekly shipments to new boxes coming in every day, and added, "I've never seen this before while working at Sephora."

Here's a dangerously creative idea.

Find your Folsom in 15 minutes.

Search the last three months of your email, DMs and comments for the people who keep reaching out and hear little back from you, and write their names down. Those are your letters, the same kind Cash kept getting. Pick one name, make one small thing this week just for that person, and when you send it, tell them you made it for them.

Until next time,

Payton ✌️

P.S. If the first name on your list makes you wince a little, start there.

P.P.S. A thank-you worth saying out loud

Since July 2025, 222 people have found Christian Story Lab through Andrew Heddle's recommendation in Bible Copy Club, and I want to thank him out loud. Bible Copy Club is a free email that sends you a short passage of 5 to 7 verses to copy out by hand, along with a brief meditation on it. If you want to spend more time in Scripture, join Bible Copy Club for free.