Музыкант Джейсон Грей выступит на фестивале Fun with Family Day в Манитобе

Ever since childhood, Jason Gray has been surrounded by music, and now he is gearing up to come to Manitoba for Fun with Family Day. "I grew up on the road with my mom's rock and roll bar band," Gray says. "We would get all the gear into an old converted school bus and drive around Minnesota, the Dakotas, Wisconsin, and Iowa." While it was a tough environment for Gray, it developed his love for music. "There I was, a five-year-old hanging out at the bar. I remember I hated the smoke, but I had a bottomless glass of root beer and the waitresses adored me. It was a good life. So I grew up around a lot of music, and music was always in the background." LISTEN TO THE FULL CONVERSATION WITH JASON HERE: His parents would eventually get a divorce, something Gray says has left a lasting impact on him. "My parents divorced when I was five, and it was a very dramatic divorce; it actually left me with a speech handicap." Hearing from God While living with his grandparents, Gray says there was chaos at home. "I didn't have my own room. I'm sleeping on the couch every night. My grandpa was a good man, but he was also an alcoholic. So there was a lot of volatility, a lot of chaos. And the Lord knew how to cut through all of that, to speak the thing that He wanted me to hear in a language He knew that I could understand. "I was out doing errands with my grandpa one day in January; he left the car on when he went into the liquor store. Over the radio came "Bridge Over Troubled Water". One lyric goes, 'When you're weary, when you're feeling small, when tears are in your eyes, I will drive them all. Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down for you.' "As I heard those words, I had this sense of a loving presence in the car with me, as though I was held in its presence. It was as though it was whispering to my heart like, hey, this song that you love so much. This is my heart towards you and I had that experience and I believed it. "I didn't have the language to say, I think God spoke to me or anything like that. That wasn't part of the conversation in the household I was growing up in, it came much later. The first time that I heard God speak to me, it was through music. And ever since then, I've just wanted to be a part of that." RELATED STORIES: Relying on faith Since giving his life to Jesus, Gray says he has had to rely on his faith through true disappointment. "I went through a brutal divorce, and I never prayed harder for anything in my life. To have those prayers go unanswered was a wound to my faith that continued to grow and expand until eventually I lost my faith." Gray says that was one of the most important spiritual experiences he ever had. "The cornerstone of Christian belief is the idea of death and resurrection. I'd always conceived of my belief as something that I chose what to believe. I'm in the captain's seat of my belief, and I think what I experienced in all of that is that my belief went away when I didn't want it to. I desperately did not want it to go away. I did all of the things I knew to do to hold on to it, but it went away from me. And then it was gone. Belief was not in me." Through the unbelief, Gray was able to come out of it, seeing God's grace. "It put me more in touch with the grace of it all. It decentralized me as the person driving the car of my faith. It's really all up to God and He's in the driver's seat." Update on son Jacob's cancer In 2019, Gray's son, Jacob, was first diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. At the end of 2025, Gray took to social media, asking for prayers when it returned. "My sweet boy, Jacob, he's round two battling leukemia. We thought we'd beat it the first time, but then it came back. There are great advances in treatments, even in the few years." Gray says Jacob was so sick last year, they didn't know if he would make it. "He was so sick that he couldn't even withstand the treatment. So they had to bring him up to a level of health so they could actually treat him. That was a very scary period. But they were able to bring him up to that place. And then in February, he began his treatment." Jacob has had to live near the hospital to complete treatments, and being at home has been very hard on him, Gray says. "He can't go out and do anything. So he's been apartment-bound; it's been very hard on him. It's really helped me to understand why there are people who didn't want the treatment anymore and were willing to die instead. I was always perplexed by that. But I've seen it up close to now I understand. It's just been very, very hard on him. He's really beat up through the process, but he's winning. It's working. And in fact, in two weeks, he finally gets to go home." To help Jacob pay his bills, a GoFundMe has been launched. "So many people were so generous. I can't thank people enough. So we may have to do a little bit more of that because he's been unable to work." Fun With Family Day Gray will soon be in Manitoba to play in Fun With Family Day in Portage la Prairie. "I never take it for granted that people are interested in hearing what I have to sing and share. So that is a real gift. So I'm excited to be with you guys. I love Canada too. I grew up in Minnesota, which is kind of like America's Canada, right? And so I'm excited to be back up there." Gray is excited to be sharing the stage with a good friend. "I'm excited to be up there with my friend, Josh Wilson. He's another artist who's going to be there. We are actually going to travel with each other. We recorded a song with each other about our friendship about a year and a half ago. I love getting to do life with him." He says that he is excited to have a good time on Saturday. "A lot of people tell me, if the music thing doesn't work out, you should go into comedy. I love making people laugh. I'm strategic about that because if you can make people laugh, I find you can also go into the deeper places with them. You earn their trust with the laughter, and then you can go into the deeper waters with them. Hopefully we'll go high, we'll go deep, we'll have a good time with each other." More than music Gray wants Fun With Family Day to be more than listening to music. "We can hear music at home. We don't have to leave our homes to go hear music. And so what are we really doing when we're going to hear music? We're going to things like this because some part of us is hoping that God will speak to us in some way. I think that's why I go to concerts. I'm hoping for an encounter with the Spirit in some way. "One of the things that I think is easy to take for granted but is important to remember is that we worship a God who speaks. He is the God who speaks to us, who is eager to speak to us. I hope people come away with a sense that they are deeply loved and that they will be able to hear that word from the Lord that they are hoping to hear, whatever it is specific to them." Fun with Family Day is at Our Farm Greenhouses, 31083 Mile 62 Road North, Hoop and Holler Bend, on Saturday, September 5 beginning at 10 a.m. Admission is free.