When becoming a parent, everyone hopes and prays that they will never have to lose a child. On October 23, 2019 Christian singer and songwriter TobyMac, Toby McKeehan, lost his son Truette McKeehan due to an accidental overdose. In the past two years, he has openly shared how hard it has been on him and his family to lose his firstborn son at only 21 years old. In an interview with 99 Joy FM, McKeehan talked about how he didn’t know grief, and when he lost his son everything had changed. “To me, grief comes in many ways. Some days it hits you really hard (…) I met grief in the fiercest way,” McKeehan stated on the show.

Before the passing of Truett, McKeehan had met a man in Austin Texas who had previously lost his son in a car accident, and during a conversation about it he told him, “When you go through something hard you have to grab onto something you can trust.” He later told him to grab onto a promise of God. “And that’s what I held onto, and I found him there.” According to the radio interview, McKeehan said that the most important thing to him is community. “To have loved ones surround you in your darkest moment, and just love you and be with you- the way I was prayed for, the way my family was prayed for, we felt surrounded by love through the deepest, darkest, hardest thing we’ve ever experienced and to me that’s what the body of Christ should look like.” 

TobyMac wrote a song dedicated to Truett called 21 years. In a Youtube comment, he stated, “Writing this song felt like an honest confession of the questions, pain, anger, doubt, mercy and promise that describes the journey I’m probably only beginning. The rest is yet to come. One thing I know is that I am not alone. God didn’t promise us a life of no pain or even tragic death, but He did promise he would never leave us or forsake us. And I’m holding dearly to that promise for my son as well as myself.”

After the death of Truett, McKeehan postponed all his concerts on his tour and took time to be with his family and focus on the promise of God. He has returned to performing and is currently on the Hits Deep tour. In his song “Help Is On The Way (Maybe Midnight)” he sings about how God is never early or never late. It is about his son Truett, but in September of 2020 TobyMac also lost his sister. The song talks about how God stands by what He claims. McKeehan says it might seem like a lifetime, but God is there and he is not going to lose his faith. Even if it seems like you can’t take anything else, just remember that God will never give you more than you can handle, and in times of darkness you are supposed to depend on Him.