Good Fortune

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James Fortune (far right), pictured with FIYA (Free in Yahweh’s Abundance)

By Lisa Collins, senior music editor, GospelMusicChannel.com
   
What does it feel like to have the most requested gospel song in the country?
   
“Awesome,” says 31-year-old James Fortune, whose single “I Trust You” has been the number-one most played song at gospel radio for more than seven months, bumping Marvin Sapp’s “Never Would Have Made It” from the top spot.
   
“It’s really humbling, you know, just to see so many millions of people who are being blessed by this song – a testament of how God is able to take what was a negative time in my life when He gave me that song and turn it around.”
   
Fortune’s good fortune is illustrative of how closely tied success in gospel is to one’s own testimony, particularly in these trying times.
   
In the case of the Houston-based artist – who got serious about pursuing gospel as a choir director 14 years ago at a John Kee “Worship In Arts” convention – what’s most surprising is just how much his own life mirrors the message of the song that has put him at the top. What makes success for James Fortune so sweet is the fact that he was homeless at the time he committed to trusting God and penned the words to “I Trust You” three years ago.
   
It is something he was not at first all that comfortable opening up about. So much so that members of his own family have only recently come to find out just how challenging the ride to the top was for him.
   
Today, he freely admits that not knowing how to ask for help was part pride and part shame.
   
“Being a father and a husband – realizing that I’m the provider and caretaker, I just felt responsible for getting my family in that type of situation,” Fortune reflects.

“We were leasing a home in Houston at the time, and the owner wasn’t sending our payments to the mortgage company, so my family and I were at home one day when a lady showed up and informed us that our home had been sold.”
   
The house had gone into foreclosure three months earlier and had been auctioned off. James and his family were given two weeks to move and told that all the money they would see was a check for $700 if they moved out on time and the house was clean.
   
So the family with two children – one and two years old at the time and their third on the way  – ended up living in a hotel room.
       
“When it first happened, I’d begun to really question God. ‘Have you forgotten about me? How could I have ended up in this type of situation when I’ve worked and ministered to your people every Sunday with them not knowing that I had to go back and live in a hotel with my family?’”
   
Then, he says, God began to minister to him.

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