At that point, I was no longer a student. I was a youth leader. Yet Joe articulated with clarity what I had been trying to communicate to my students for years. Christ is not merely someone we acknowledge on Sundays. He is not a means to a comfortable life or a ticket to heaven secured by a single prayer. He is the source and purpose of existence itself. To turn away from Him is not simply to break a rule; it is to cut oneself off from the very fountain of life.

What distinguished Joe even more was his refusal to preach the therapeutic, self-centered message so common in modern youth ministry. He did not tell us to find our identity, pursue our dreams, or rest content in who we already were. Instead, he preached self-denial, obedience to Christ, repentance, the corruption and complacency of the modern church, and the need to recover what has been lost. His message carried the weight of conviction and the ring of truth.

That same spirit permeated his music. His album The Lament became a companion to me during my journey into the Orthodox Church. I listened to it hundreds of times. It gave voice to questions I had carried for years and reassured me that I was not alone in seeing the fractures within contemporary Christianity or in longing for something deeper, older, and more faithful. Its songs expressed both grief and hope, lament and longing, in a way few artists ever have.

I would encourage anyone to listen to the album in its entirety. One song in particular, [I Feel Like] She’s Leaving Me, remains especially meaningful to me.

Joe, if you happen to read this, thank you. Your preaching and music did more than inspire me. They helped give language to a spiritual hunger that had been growing in my heart for years, and they pointed me more deeply toward Christ, the eternal Way. For that, I will always be grateful.

Through its simple yet powerful words, the hymn captures the spirit of the Lenten journey: self-examination, repentance, and the desire to draw nearer to Christ. Its solemn melody and deeply personal message have made it one of the most cherished hymns in Orthodox worship, serving as an invitation to begin the struggle of repentance with honesty, humility, and trust in God’s mercy.

I will never forget experiencing this hymn during Great Lent while prostrate on the floor for its entirety. It was one of the most profound moments of worship I had ever experienced. The combination of the chant, the prayers, the incense, and the physical posture of humility before God communicated a reverence that I had never encountered elsewhere. In my experience, no other Christian tradition places such visible emphasis on awe, repentance, and reverence before God within the actual corporate worship of the congregation. Rather than merely speaking about humility before God, the service invited me to embody it.