by Jason Brown
Maybe I took my role of center too seriously. For the next several years, I listened to the world. I became the center of my own existence. I had my mansion. I had my eight-figure NFL contract. I had what the world says to value. And, ironically, I’d taken my eye off the ball.
“Do not love the world or the things in the world,” the Bible says in 1 John 2:15–17. “If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.”
It was time to get back to the basics. It was time to find the ball again. That scolding in the mirror, Ducie glaring back at me in my own reflection, planted the first seed of what would be a whole new direction in my life.
But as every farmer knows, it takes a while before you see that seed start to grow.
CHAPTER 5
A Different Sort of Field Goal
I’d been humbled in my reflection. Ducie, almost seven years after he died, had challenged me like he always had. Be better than me, he’d tell me when I was in high school. Well, I didn’t think I could ever be better than Ducie, but I could be better than me. Better than the me I’d been the past few years.
But how? You don’t walk away from an NFL career. No one does that. Even if I did, what was I going to do that was better?
Naomi, our second child, was born in May 2011, but by that time our family was crumbling fast. Tay and I did a great job of sticking on smiles for the outside world, and everyone thought we were a model couple—loving, successful, faithful. We were playing the tune the world wanted to hear. But we knew that we were playing it while the ship was going down, like the violinists on the Titanic. Tay knew what kind of man I really was. She knew how selfish I was. She knew what a hypocrite I was. She’d had enough. By late 2011, Tay was researching divorce lawyers and drafting separation papers. I just hadn’t been served yet.
Day by day, week by week, our relationship had grown weaker and weaker. Our slights turned into fights and became more and more frequent until Tay and I were barely speaking to each other. There wasn’t necessarily a single moment, but just the wear and tear of a partnership when the partners aren’t in sync. Marriage is supposed to be about we, but somehow for both Tay and me, it became all about me.
The NFL is hard on relationships. Every professional sport is, if you look at the statistics. According to the New York Times and Sports Illustrated, the divorce rate for pro athletes ranges between 60 and 80 percent—much higher than the national average. Everyone thought that Tay and I would be the exception, but we weren’t.
My marriage wasn’t the only thing falling apart. The career that I had sacrificed so much for took a bad turn too. The Rams were in the middle of a miserable season in 2011 (we’d go on to finish 2–14 that year), and when you’re losing that often, those in charge are willing to try anything to turn the season around. Everyone’s job is on the line, especially for the coaches. Late that year, Coach Spagnuolo, the same man who made me the centerpiece of his free-agency pickups just a couple of years before, called me into his office and demoted me. I was no longer the Rams’ starting center.
I’d been a backup before, but never in my football career—not in high school, not in college, not in the pros—had I cracked the starting lineup and then been benched. I was devastated.
I went into football as a business decision. I didn’t grow up loving the sport, and I don’t even watch much of it now. But football had been so good to me, and I had been so good at it, that I’d put the sport on a pedestal. I’d turned it into an idol—the source for not just my wealth but my happiness too. My identity and self-esteem were wrapped up in football.
Again, “do not love the world or the things in the world.” My first love was supposed to be God, but somewhere along the way, I’d fallen in love with football. And football wasn’t loving me back anymore.
I was failing as a father too. I’d come home from work exhausted, both physically and mentally. Many times, I didn’t give my family the best because I’d already given my all to the Rams. I knew I wasn’t the father I could’ve or should’ve been, but I saw that particularly clearly around Christmas of that year.
Now, we Browns aren’t big on Santa Claus. We hadn’t stuffed JW’s head with visions of sugarplums that Christmas. But Tay and I barely saw him enough to stuff his head with anything. I was away most of the day. Tay was working full time as a dentist. We’d drop JW and Naomi off at a day-care center around six-thirty or seven in the morning, and sometimes we wouldn’t pick them up until six at night. In an average day, we could count on one hand the hours we spent with our children. We were handing our kids off to strangers, and those strangers were the ones teaching them.
One night near Christmas, I came home completely exhausted. I’d been working with the backups and the practice squad. I was angry because I knew I should be starting. I was frustrated to be working so hard and still be sidelined during the game. The last thing I wanted to do that evening was turn around and be a good, attentive father.
But four-year-old JW wasn’t having it. He had a job to do.
“Dad! Dad!” he said. “We gotta go outside!”
“Son, I don’t want to go outside,” I said. “I’m really tired, and it’s really cold.”
“But we have to,” JW whined. “We’ve got to feed the reindeer! They’ll never make it around the world if we don’t!”
I noticed that JW was holding a little Ziploc bag filled with Chex Mix and pretzels and sprinkles. Reindeer food, according to his day-care center.
I didn’t want JW thinking about reindeer on Christmas Eve. I didn’t want him thinking about a bearded old elf handing out gifts. I wanted him to think about the real gift of the season—to remember that, as the book of James says, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above” (1:17). Feeding these mythical reindeer and leaving cookies out for Santa Claus felt like idolatry. I wanted him to know that the only jolly fat man eating cookies in our house on Christmas Eve was going to be me.
I sat him down, and we started talking about the difference between what was real and what was pretend.
“Son, is Spider-Man real or is he make-believe?” I asked. Spider-Man was pretty popular then, and JW had seen some cartoons starring the superhero.
JW thought for a second. “Make-believe,” he said. He’d seen drawings before. He knew the difference between a drawing and a real-life person.
“Is Iron Man real?” I asked. This was trickier because, unlike the cartoon Spider-Man, Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man sure looked real on screen. JW said, “Iron Man’s real.”
“I’m sorry, son,” I said gently. “Iron Man’s not real.”
We went through all his favorite superheroes, some he thought were real and some he knew weren’t. We finally got to Santa Claus, and I broke the news to him: Santa isn’t real either.
But then I asked one final question, the million-dollar one: “JW, is Jesus real?”
JW thought about it, and thought about it hard.
“No, Dad,” he said. “Jesus isn’t real. Jesus is make-believe.”
That’s when I knew I was failing my son. I was failing my family. Tay and I were so engulfed in the things of this world, we weren’t teaching our children about the things that mattered most. We were chasing success and fame and money—things that, compared to God’s greatness and His gifts, might as well be make-believe too. It wasn’t just JW who couldn’t tell the difference between what was real and what was imaginary. I was guilty of that too.
Faith and family, I’d always said. Above all else, faith and family. But I hadn’t taught my family about my faith. Not enough.
Down the Drain
Not long after, I had wh
at I can only describe as a vision. I was in our home’s great room when Jesus painted me a picture of my future so clear, so vivid, that it felt like it was in high definition. He showed me in that house all alone. That huge mansion was empty, except for me. He showed me the brokenness of myself. He showed me the crushing loneliness I felt. Not only were Tay and I divorced, but I also wasn’t even able to see my children or hold them or tell them that I loved them. In my vision, they were nowhere around—not even in the same state.
In that vision, I saw my brokenness. It literally brought me to my knees.
All my life, I’ve wanted to be in control. And for the most part I had been. I took control of my life in high school and never looked back. I worked hard to drive my own destiny. I sacrificed so much to build the opportunities I’d built. I’d been able to control everything—to fix everything—in my life.
Until now.
My marriage was broken. My family was broken. My life was broken.
I was the strongest player ever to come through North Carolina; I could squat more than eight hundred pounds. But I wasn’t strong enough to fix this. I graduated from one of the best universities in the country, but I wasn’t smart enough to fix this.
This was the last position I ever wanted to be in. But you know what? It was exactly the position Jesus wanted me to be in: a position of complete surrender, complete humility, complete obedience.
“Jesus,” I said, tears running down my face, “whatever You want me to do right now, I will do it. I know that You can restore and redeem my family. I know that You can restore and redeem my marriage. Jesus, that’s what You’re best at. That’s what You do. I know that I can’t do it, but I know that You can. Whatever You want me to do, I will do it.”
Jesus responded to me in a clear audible voice: “Pour it all down the drain.”
I wrinkled my brow. That’s kind of cryptic, I thought. What does that mean? I said I will do whatever You want me to do.
“Pour it all down the drain,” He said again.
I was still on my knees, but I turned my head around and looked at the liquor bar behind me. I saw all those bottles of top-notch alcohol lining the shelves, liquor I didn’t even drink. Then I thought about the symbolism of all those bottles—how instead of lifting the name of Jesus up in our home, we’d been enshrining the names of Captain Morgan and Jack Daniel.
“Pour it all down the drain,” the voice had said. This was a start.
I started uncorking and unscrewing every bottle at the bar: gin, whiskey, brandy, vodka. I poured it straight down into the sink and watched it drain away. After I was done with that bar’s stash of alcohol, I went into the basement and dumped the top-shelf liquor out of that one, too, including that $1,500 bottle of Louis XIII cognac. The walnut-colored liquid melted away in the sink, temporarily increasing the value of the St. Louis sewer system.
Tay, who could barely stand to look at me at the time, heard the clanging of all those bottles and clomped down the stairs from the bedroom.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
I looked at her, my eyes red from crying, snot coming down my face. “I’m pouring it all down the drain,” I said.
“Why are you doing that?”
“Because Jesus told me to.”
I watched as her face changed. The anger and exasperation fell away, replaced by a look of utter, complete confusion. She had never seen me like this. I was a big, strong football player. I could control my emotions. I didn’t show fear to anyone. But now, for the first time, she saw a different me: someone trying to obey a higher power. It caught her completely off guard.
I’d like to say that our relationship changed right then, that all the wounds we’d given each other had been miraculously healed. It wasn’t like that. She just turned around and walked away. But I’d surprised her. I showed her something she hadn’t seen from me in a long time. Humility. Submission. In that moment, a moment that might’ve looked crazy to most anyone else, I was once again putting faith and family first.
In the days and weeks that followed, Tay could see that my change of heart wasn’t a momentary thing—that pouring the liquor down the drain wasn’t just an expensive and temporary moment of conviction after which I’d slide right back into the same patterns. She could see a change in me. She could see that I’d been humbled, that I was serious about following God’s call, and that I wanted to lead our family to a better place. As she saw that transformation take hold in me, her heart began to change a little bit too. She was willing to show me a bit more grace, be a bit more tolerant of my faults.
It wasn’t an easy transition. And it sure wasn’t easy to ignore the world around us—the world that told us that everything we had and everything we’d done for ourselves was great and that for anyone to say otherwise—even if that anyone was us—was wrong. But Tay and I began to have some difficult conversations about what we really did value and what we really should. As time went on, I started unpacking what I thought we needed to do.
“We’ve got to get back to our real priorities,” I told her. “Faith and family. Whatever comes after that, it comes after. Never again are we going to make decisions for our family based on money. Never again are we going to make decisions for our family based on the almighty dollar. We can’t do that.”
“So what does that mean?” Tay asked.
“I don’t know exactly. It might mean a lot of things,” I said. “It might mean that one of us will stop working.”
“So who’s going to stop working?” she challenged. “I spent four years in dental school. Are you going to quit football and be a househusband? Do the grocery shopping? Take the kids to school?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe. We’re going to pray about it.”
But I didn’t know how.
Solid Foods
I’d been calling myself a Christian my whole life. I’d gone to church since the time I was a baby, and I’d rarely missed a service. I praised the Lord. I read the Bible. But now, at the age of twenty-eight, I knew that even though I claimed to be a follower of Christ, I’d never stopped being a baby in the faith. I was still, as Paul told the Corinthians, drinking spiritual milk. I wasn’t eating solid food (see 1 Corinthians 3:2).
I was a really good football player. I was really, really good at being successful in the world. But I was not a good Christian.
So, how do you become one? If you’ve done church all your life and it’s still not enough, what do you do?
I thought back to my time in high school—how I transformed from an overweight kid into a football player. I’d trained and sweated and lifted and studied until I became one. I’d worked my tail off to get to that point. Every goal I’ve had, every dream I’ve achieved, didn’t come from dreaming or hoping. It came about through effort. Desire translated into time and energy.
So, when I wanted to deepen my relationship with God, I knew what it would take: time and energy. I needed to work at it.
I called it my spiritual training camp. The training wasn’t as physically grueling as what your typical NFL training camp puts you through. But mentally? Spiritually? It was a workout. It consisted of three things: fasting, praying, and reading the Bible. Over and over. Fasting, praying, reading the Word. I didn’t even know how to pray, so I bought a book of prayers and read those prayers over and over again. After a while, I’d ad-lib a bit—deviate just a little and try to say some more organic prayers—but those written ones were my staples for a long time. I’d read them aloud. I’d even record me reciting some of the longer ones on my iPod. When we’d all leave the house for an hour or two, I’d play those prayers over a loudspeaker while we were gone. And when we came home, you could sense the difference, as if our St. Louis mansion had been cleaned and detoxed of some of its worldliness. It was as if our home, through those long iPod prayers of mine,
had been anointed.
Reading the Bible was a different challenge.
I had been reading Scripture all my life, but now I was reading with a purpose, with a desire to move closer to its Author. And you know what? That Author was moving closer to me too. As I read, I felt as if God was pushing my attention to a particular story in Genesis. I’d try to move on. I’d read the Psalms or the Gospels for a while. But God seemed determined to point my attention to that very first book and the story of Joseph (see Genesis 37–50).
You’re probably familiar with the story, but just in case: Jacob, a wealthy farmer and shepherd who lived in the land of Canaan, had twelve sons, but his favorite was Joseph. Joseph’s brothers were jealous of him, so they sold him into slavery and he was carted off to Egypt. There, through what the Bible calls the “favor of God” and a series of wild circumstances, he became the Pharaoh’s right-hand man. Joseph helped prepare Egypt for an upcoming famine, and when his brothers came to Egypt begging for food, he revealed himself to them. “Do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life,” he told his brothers in Genesis 45:5.
Every time I read that passage, I thought, All right, God, thanks. And then I’d read something else. But God would pull my attention right back to that story. And finally it hit me that God was trying to tell me something very specific: Jason, there’s going to be a famine, He seemed to be telling me. You need to prepare.
So I, in all my worldly wisdom, thought I knew exactly what to do: I ran to Sam’s Club and bought canned goods and nonperishable food items and stuffed them in my pantry.