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SALT LAKE CITY — For 25 years, Michael McLean has entertained millions of people throughout the country with his production of "Forgotten Carols."
As he looks back over his career, he shared the story of his "crisis of faith."
“When my friends woke me, what a tale they had to tell,” McLean said.
He remembers sitting at his piano in December 1990 in his Heber, Utah, home and being inspired to tell the stories and create the songs for the "other" people in the Christmas story — the innkeeper, the shepherd who fell asleep — because he says they are just like us, busy and distracted.
McLean and his “The Forgotten Carols” remain an important part of Christmas for tens of thousands of families throughout the Intermountain region.
“Homeless, homeless like the Christ child was,” says a lyric of one of McLean’s carols.
There is a song that strikes a chord with many today and answers the question of why so many love this show.
Years ago in Las Vegas, McLean met a man who had first seen it when he was homeless and addicted to drugs.
"He says, ‘I've been clean and sober for 13 years and three months, and I wanted to introduce you to my son because I wanted him to come see the show that changed his daddy's life,’" McLean said.
He was inspiring others but not himself. What no one knew about McLean is that for nine years he lived with a faith crisis. This happens to many people and they don't necessarily come out on the other side the way McLean has.
McLean had spent decades as an award-winning radio and TV commercial writer, creating Latter-day Saint inspirational messages, including "Mr. Krueger's Christmas" with Jimmy Stewart and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
"Isn't it ironic that the guy who writes the commercials and writes the songs about being the great dad, not so much," McLean said.
He said he began to pray, but answers did not come. And when nothing happened, he began to doubt his faith.
"I thought I may have gotten this all wrong and maybe I'm too arrogant to confess it,” McLean said. “Or maybe I'm too linked to the fact that 'You sold 2 million records to these people, how do you go tell them?'"
A couple of years later, the door opened slightly after he read Mother Teresa's book, “Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta” about her 49-year long faith crisis and she came to him in a dream. She sang to him, “I choose to pray to one who doesn’t hear me. I choose to wait for love that he conceals. And though God’s chosen now not to be near me, I’m keeping promises my heart no longer feels.”
It was then, McLean said, that he promised the Lord that he would hold on.
"Something miraculous will come, this will make a great song,” McLean said. “I'll write an article in the 'Ensign,' we'll live happily ever after, yes, wasn't he faithful? It was seven more years."
It was nine years in all, but when the answers came, it was a deluge download in his language.
"The songwriter got songs,” McLean said. “How thrilled I was that it came this way that let me know that I wasn't alone."
It turns out all that time, people came to him, messages came to him, but he wasn't listening.
"I thought that I was writing 'The Forgotten Carols' for fans,” McLean said, then he pointed to himself.
It was for himself as well.
"I have confidence that the answers we need the most desperately will come perfectly when we're willing to receive them," McLean said.
So, after 25 years and a million in those audiences, McLean takes his message about the gift of the Christ child forward, knowing now that it is for him as well as all of us.
McLean said remember the Christ child grew up to make the atoning sacrifice and die alone on a cross. McLean remembers what his father, who, at the time, was in the early stages of dementia, taught him.
"And could it be at the moment you feel forsaken, the greatest intelligence in the universe is saying ‘I have faith in you.'"
At the end of “ The Forgotten Carols,” McLean leads everyone in a song of peace.
No one, he says, is ever forgotten.
