The Queen of Disco is committed to the King of Kings. In the 1980s, singer Gloria Gaynor was known for her parties. In fact, it was at one of those parties, a celebration thrown by the entertainer and her then-husband Linwood Simon, that the Lord literally got a hold of her.
“My mother had passed away some years before,” Gaynor says. “I sort of lost my moral compass for a minute. I was kind of in limbo morally and kind of going along with whoever I was with and all of that. One night, the Lord literally grabbed me on my collar and said, ‘That’s enough.’
“We had given a party in my hotel room and people were coming in with drugs and all that stuff and I was ready to get involved, to indulge, and the Lord just said, ‘No.’ I believe that he just said to the enemy, ‘Not to this one. This one’s mine.’”
Gaynor recalled coming across her baptismal certificate a year later, a discovery that flooded her mind with memories of when she was baptized at age 16. She was reminded in that moment of God’s faithfulness. “He doesn’t forget, even when we do,” she said. “He let me run amok for a minute. He just loves us so much.”
As she has matured in her faith, Gaynor has learned to apply the things God has revealed to her, especially in her career as a recording artist. Early on in her walk with the Lord, the singer admitted to attempting to “bargain” with God, vowing to put at least one Christian track on each of her albums.
Gaynor has steadily maintained her faith and convictions in an industry often condemned for its amorality and disdain for godliness.
“I’m not shoving anything down anybody’s throat, but if you want to know why, I can tell you why I follow the Lord,” she said. “I can help you understand this. I can take you to a better way because, as I’ve often said, he loves us with an undying, unchanging, unconditional love. Everything that he tells us to do, that he wants us to do is for our own good.”
For more info, visit her website.
–Dwight Widaman | Metro Voice