Centered

by Jason Brown

  What happened?

  No miracles came to fill our bank account with funds that year. As much as I might’ve hoped that this whole series of disasters was nothing more than a bad dream, I wasn’t waking up. I felt confused, lost, hurt, adrift. I felt like Job, who helplessly watched his family and fortune vanish until he was all alone, left to scrape his boils with a piece of broken pottery. I felt alone too. Abandoned. Honestly, I felt forsaken by God.

  All those emotions—the confusion, the hurt, the sadness—eventually coalesced into a new emotion: anger.

  I wasn’t angry with God. Not at first. I felt it was Satan’s doing. “The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy,” Jesus tells us in John 10:10 (KJV). “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.”

  Satan came and stole from me. As he did so, he tried to kill and destroy my dreams. But you know what? With every week that brought more bad news, with every day that sapped more of our resources, I grew angrier with God, too, because He allowed it all to happen. Where was the abundance that Jesus promised me in John 10:10? Why was God allowing the abundant resources that I already had—abundance that I was using for His purposes—to all be taken from me?

  One night, I poured out all my hurt and anger in prayer. I wanted God to reverse it all.

  “God, I’m working for You!” I told Him. “How can You allow these resources to be taken away from me? I need them—not for me, but for You! I need to have the money to do what You want me to do! You need to go to Satan and redeem and restore everything that was stolen from me!” I said. “Make me whole again!”

  Then God put me in my place.

  Jason, don’t be so quick to point the finger, He told me. You’re giving the devil too much credit. Remember all those years when you didn’t pray to Me? When you didn’t show your need for Me? When you didn’t place your faith in Me? When all your faith was in your bank account?

  You asked for this, Jason. You asked Me to write your testimony. You asked Me to take you to a place of humility. Didn’t you say to Me, “Take me to a place where I depend on You. Where I lean on You for everything. Where I cry out to You, God”?

  Cry out to Me now, Jason, God said. Cry out to Me now.

  So I did. I fell to my knees and cried—cried to heaven.

  The Corruption of Comfort

  “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither,” Job says. “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21, KJV).

  I think about that last sentence—how the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

  We know that God wants to shower us with blessings. We know from the Bible that nothing evil can come from Him. So, when we have reversals and suffer setbacks, when we go through life’s trials and tribulations, we ask why. It’s only human to ask why. We associate those trials with evil. And so naturally, if we’re Christian and we’re suffering through difficult times, we point to the Adversary—to Satan. It’s his fault, we say.

  But at the same time, Job learned that God allows these things to happen.

  When we pray for patience, God rarely just taps us on the shoulder and gives it to us. He takes us through a time when we’re forced to learn that patience. When we pray for humility, He leads us to a place where we are humbled. When we ask to have a deeper relationship with Him, sometimes He pushes us to a place where we have to talk with Him every day, every hour.

  And sometimes when we question God about our trials and moments of suffering, He roars into our lives and talks to us, like He did with Job.

  Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?

  Dress for action like a man;

  I will question you, and you make it known to me. (38:2–3)

  God eventually restored Job’s fortune. But He hasn’t restored mine. He didn’t magically return my wealth. For the next several years, and to this day, Tay and I have struggled financially. We budget as tightly as if we were still in college. My wife has worked part time here and there to pay the bills, and sometimes we’ve paid them late. Most people think I’m still a millionaire, but there’ve been times when I didn’t have a hundred dollars in the bank.

  It hasn’t been easy these past several years. If money was a temptation when I played football, the lack of money opened the doors to different temptations. This beautiful farm sometimes has felt like an anchor around my neck. Like the Hebrews who escaped from Egypt and retroactively thought of their captivity as the good old days, I’ve sometimes looked back at my life before First Fruits and remembered those times when I didn’t worry about the utility bill, or when I could just go out and buy a new vehicle if I needed one.

  When those financial reversals first hit, it was so tempting to walk away from farming. It would’ve been so easy.

  When all these money problems first happened, I could’ve called Harold, my agent, again. “I know I’ve been out for a year or two, but could you try to schedule workouts with a few teams?” I could’ve asked. A team would’ve taken a chance on me, and I would’ve made good on their faith. I had something left in the tank, another few good NFL years left in me. Another year or two of football, and we’d be back on solid ground.

  Or I could’ve turned to Tay and asked her to be the primary breadwinner in the home. As I said, she works a couple of days a week now, but what if she went to work full time? She has a doctorate. She could easily make well over six figures.

  Or we could sell the farm. And make no mistake, I have been tempted. First Fruits is a desirable property in a desirable location. We could put the place up for sale, and one of those millionaires or billionaires would snap it up for, easily, twice what we paid for it.

  When you’re drowning, you start thrashing and flailing around, hoping to find anything that floats. You panic. You look for something to save you. Sometimes, selling First Fruits Farm looks like a tempting life preserver. It’s so tempting, when your faith is wavering a little, to do what I had so often before becoming a farmer: forget my reliance on God and instead rely on my own resources to save me. We could sell the farm, take the money, and live comfortably for the rest of our lives.

  Comfort. There’s that word again.

  But following God isn’t comfortable.

  Ask Job. Ask Joseph. Ask almost anyone who sincerely decides to pursue God’s call. I didn’t call myself to do this; God called me. The evidence is all around me, and new proof pops up every year. He might not have restored my fortune, but He did restore my family—a gift far more valuable than a fat bank account. God has blessed us immensely—not always in ways that show up on a spreadsheet, but in ways that I can feel around the dinner table, when I lead family devotions, and when I wake up in the morning and watch the sun rise over my farm.

  So, for me to turn my back on God’s call, to sell the farm—that’d be like saying that God made a mistake. I know for a fact that He didn’t do so. God doesn’t make mistakes.

  I think about how we saw His hand in giving us the very farm we’d be selling—how he shoved a millionaire or billionaire out of the way. I think about all the miracles we’ve seen since. The fact that First Fruits exists at all is no accident. Its birth, just like my own and your own, was designed and planned and orchestrated by God. It’s not my farm; it’s His. I’m only His caretaker. His steward. I’ve seen His hand powerfully at work in this place. How could I hand it to someone else?

  And here’s the thing: as poor as we might’ve felt, we were in a position to see how much real poverty there was, even in North Carolina. Families are going without medicine and shelter, and far too many families are going hungry.

  When we bought First Fruits Farm, we gave it that name for a reason. The first fruits would go to charities and food banks around the region. But after our
first harvest—when we gave away every sweet potato we grew—the people who ran these charities came back and asked, “Do you have any more? Our food banks are depleted.” The cupboards, for so many of these organizations, were bare.

  So God placed in our hearts the desire to keep giving. In faith. Every year. Even in our relative poverty, even when it seemed as though we couldn’t afford it, we’ve given our harvest away.

  Two Lottery Tickets

  Our finances were in shambles for years after that. And because we were giving our harvests away, our bank accounts weren’t getting any fatter.

  A few years ago, one of the national lottery jackpots—I think it was for Mega Millions—was getting close to a billion dollars. A billion dollars! As I was pumping some gas, I saw the sign displaying how much the jackpot was worth.

  Wow, we could really use a few hundred million dollars, I thought, considering my own empty checking account. On impulse, I walked into the gas station and bought a couple of tickets.

  But as I drove home with those tickets in my pocket, I started crying. I was literally sobbing in the driver’s seat.

  “I’m so sorry, God!” I wailed as I drove. “God, what did I do?”

  See, when you walk by faith, it’s not a lottery mentality. We’re supposed to look to God for our daily bread. And for years, that’s what we’d been doing. No matter how tight our finances were, no matter that there were months we didn’t know how we were going to pay the utility bill, we walked in faith. We looked and prayed to God for our daily bread. We didn’t trust in some lottery ticket—that somehow a bunch of money would fall from the sky and we’d be wealthy all of a sudden. It doesn’t work that way.

  I drove into the farm and walked into the house. Tay immediately saw that my eyes were all red. Tears were still on my cheeks.

  “Jason, what’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Dear, I just bought a couple of lottery tickets.”

  She gasped in horror. “Oh no! Why did you do that?”

  The tears started again. “I don’t know why, dear!” I blubbered.

  We both felt terrible and turned to God in prayer. “God, please, please, don’t let us win.”

  Who does that? I know that many Christians buy lottery tickets all the time, maybe every week, and think nothing of it. To many people—even people who don’t buy lottery tickets—this whole story feels a little silly. Why all the remorse? Why all the repentance for just a couple of little lottery tickets?

  But it’s what happened. And it’s because we remembered. We remembered what it was like to have money. To have all the luxuries that money can buy. Yet with all that money, our hearts weren’t in the right place. We were focused on the material things of the world, not the eternal things of God.

  People often misquote the Scriptures, saying that money is the root of all evil. That’s not really what it says. It says the love of money is the problem (see 1 Timothy 6:10). It’s too easy to be focused on material things, to be just so overwhelmed when your life and so many of your priorities are dominated by money. It becomes more than a distraction; it becomes a burden.

  Buying those lottery tickets wasn’t evidence that we loved money, but it was a sign that we still wanted to rely on it. Remember when you didn’t place your faith in Me? God asked me. When all your faith was in your bank account? I did remember. I didn’t want to go back to that time. And so we cried. We repented. “God, please forgive us,” Tay and I said. “All we need is You. We don’t need all that other stuff anymore.”

  #blessed

  People talk about blessings all the time. Look at social media and you’ll see plenty of folks talk about how #blessed they are. They’ll post pictures of their new BMWs and write, “#blessed.” They’ll tweet from a beach in Maui and add, “#blessed.”

  As if God exists only to shower them with material goods.

  But the blessings extend far beyond big houses and fancy cars and comfort. I had all that stuff, but those weren’t blessings. The real blessings of God aren’t things we can wear or drive or put in a bank account; rather, we are truly blessed when we feel God’s presence in our lives. After all, God’s greatest blessing is Himself. He gave Himself to us for our sins. He blessed us with new life. And if we pay attention, we see that He blesses us with His presence all the time.

  I could’ve gone back to the NFL, but I would’ve missed so many blessings. My marriage is strong. I feel closer to God now than I ever did when I was living in an MTV-style crib. I have seen God at work in this farm. I have seen Him at work in me and my family, bringing us so far in our love for Him and each other in so short a time.

  Tay could’ve gone back to work full time, but then we wouldn’t be able to homeschool our children. We would’ve turned them over to strangers every weekday and allowed those strangers to teach them and raise them and instill them with their own values, not ours. Now we’re able to train them up in the ways of the Lord (see Proverbs 22:6)—to teach them what we value and who we worship in a way that we’d never be able to otherwise.

  We could’ve sold the farm. But how many blessings would we have missed then? How many miracles would we have never seen? How many chances to see God in action would we have lost?

  After retiring from the NFL, I thought I’d never be hurting for money again. I was wrong. But when my worldly blessings were gone, it opened the floodgates for miracles. And some were just around the corner.

  CHAPTER 8

  Sweet, Sweet Potatoes

  Broke. Exhausted. Abandoned. That’s where I found myself that hot summer day in 2014—the day you’ve already caught a glimpse of. My NFL career was gone. All the money I’d made playing football was gone. Maybe God did give us this farm, I thought. But we had nothing else. No labor. No equipment. No seed money.

  “God!” I shouted.

  I didn’t see any miracles on the horizon at the time. All I saw was the dust. The stubborn ground. The clouds of mosquitoes.

  The tractor, that 1968 Allis-Chalmers, groaned and sputtered.

  “God! I don’t mind praying to You, but every time I get on this thing, do I have to pray that it starts up?”

  It all felt like a cruel joke. We left a life of comfort to follow God to what we thought would be our own Promised Land. I had told my son that this was a land of milk and honey, filled with riches and gifts beyond measure. But now it felt like a wilderness, a thousand acres that I was cursed to wander across. People already thought I was insane. They’d be laughing at me now, mocking this crazy Christian and his dream of being a farmer for God. As for God Himself…well, I knew He was with us still. In my heart, deep down, I knew He wouldn’t desert us. But in that moment, in the heat and the mosquitoes, I sure didn’t see Him. I didn’t feel Him. I felt forsaken. It was as if God had driven us to a strange new life, kicked us out of the car, and taken off.

  We had a farm, but would we ever plant anything on it? Seemed unlikely. To grow a crop, you needed seeds. To grow a crop, you needed a real tractor. I’d suffered setbacks and trusted God. I felt the laughter and trusted Him. But now, as the Allis-Chalmers grumbled, I’d had enough.

  “God!” I shouted a third time into the blue sky, empty land surrounding me for at least a square mile. “I don’t even have to do this, all right? I’m out here for You! I’m doing this for You! I’m working faithfully for You!”

  I looked around the empty field and thought about the farmers nearby.

  “All these other farmers,” I said. “Look at them with their nice new John Deere tractors. They don’t work for You, but I do!”

  I grew bold.

  “You know what, God? I’m going to need me one of them daggone tractors! And You know what? You’re gonna get me one of them daggone tractors! I don’t know how You’re going to do it, but You’re going to do it!”

  Call it a prayer. Call it a tantrum. Call it
whatever you want. But I was hurting. I was tired. And I was calling out to my heavenly Father—telling my Daddy what I needed. And I wasn’t done.

  “God, by this time next year, You’re going to bless me with one of those tractors,” I said. “It’s going to need at least a”—I thought for a moment—“a hundred horsepower, because this is a big farm! And it’s going to need some sort of four-wheel drive because of all the hills around here! And—”

  I slapped at a horsefly on my neck.

  “And, God? I’m tired of swatting all these flies out here and getting all hot and sweaty in the summertime! That tractor needs to be enclosed and air-conditioned, all right?”

  It was just me and God out there. Me and God and all the mosquitoes and flies. God asked me to cry out to Him. Well, that’s what I did that afternoon: I cried out to Him, cried out like a baby. And finally, after my energy had been spent and my tears had dried, I stopped.

  “Amen,” I said. And I went back to work.

  Whatever God had in store for me, I knew it wasn’t going to come that afternoon. I still had work to do. I didn’t have any money, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me from being a farmer. I had a field to get ready for sweet potatoes.

  From YouTube to My Tubers

  Sweet potatoes and North Carolina have had a long, productive relationship. Native Americans grew the vegetable here well before it was called North Carolina, and now the state grows more sweet potatoes than anywhere else in the country. The potatoes love the rich soil and warm weather, and they can’t stand frost, which makes the state perfect for them. North Carolina farmers dedicate more than ninety-five-thousand acres of land to the crop annually, and they supply 60 percent of the country’s sweet-potato needs. The sweet potatoes are really healthful, filled with vitamins and minerals and antioxidants. Some scientists say that eating them can help ward off certain types of cancer. And because they’re grown from transplants, or “slips,” instead of seeds, they’re relatively easy to grow.