Before this week I had no idea who Jane Marczewski was. Did you? I typically don’t watch music shows, though my kids do, so I’m usually hopelessly behind on pop culture. But a few of my friends posted remembrances of Jane, nicknamed “Nightbirde,” who just passed away. And then Brian Mattson mentioned her briefly in his newsletter and I watched her performance last year on America’s Got Talent and I wept.
If you don’t know her story—like I didn’t know her story—Jane was a gifted young singer, diagnosed in 2017 with cancer. She was given a 2 percent chance to live. A graduate of Liberty, she wasn’t good enough to make the worship team at school, but worked hard and earned a spot competing on America’s Got Talent.
Her song was simple: “It’s ok.” You should just watch it:
Jane won the “golden buzzer” on the strength of her voice, but also on the strength of her authenticity and her uncommon joy. I don’t know how I would react if I were her, greeted by the sudden jolt of a cancer diagnosis. We like to think as American Christians, that our good life will just keep going on. If you are young, you imagine you will live a long and full life. But Jane had a supernatural joy, one that, as my friend Brian says, “That’s profound, and that is supernatural.” I found a great Gospel Coalition profile of Nightbirde, where the writer Angela Davis says about the singer’s moment of fame:
America is fascinated with Nightbirde not simply because her story is compelling, but because she seems to possess something elusive we all want. Or rather, someone: the God who knows our pain, meets us in our pain, and redeems our pain.
This is what struck the judges on America’s Got Talent, what brought the calloused and hard Simon Cowell to tears. Simple faith in Christ, in face of death, is a signpost to another world. There is something profound Jane said that night she earned the right to advance on AGT: “You can’t wait until life isn’t hard anymore until you decide to be happy.”
Nightbirde could decide to be happy because she knew that while her body was wasting away, she could cling to the promise that Christ has ultimately defeated the sin and death that so marbles its way through the human experience. She knew that one day our bodies will rise again, whole again. Paul says it like this:
Therefore we do not give up. Even though our outer person is being destroyed, our inner person is being renewed day by day (2 Corinthians 4:16).
This promise is one that resonates with me. In the last few years, we’ve lost some close friends to COVID. The promise of the resurrection allows us to both grieve the bitter taste of death and yet hope in Christ’s renewal of all things.
I also loved her view of creation. This is the opening line of her last blog on her website:
I don’t think it’s meaningless, the story that says God sculpted us from clay. Of all the things He made, humankind was the first that He touched. The first breath we tasted was His exhale. I don’t think it’s meaningless that the first time humanity looked up at the eyes of God, His hands were dirty and He was close.
I wish I had known of Nightbirde before this week. At a time where cynicism prevails, where it seems rancor is currency and unbelief is the rage, this story of simple faith is refreshingly uncommon.