by Cole
The sun had just gone down, which made the scene, as I looked out at the water, extra beautiful. Standing there, with the waves crashing against the sand and the stars beginning to come alive, I felt extra close to God. I always do when I see the beauty He’s created. I found a spot where I could be alone and sat down on the sand, just trying to take it all in. Looking out at the waves rolling in, I felt incredibly blessed. I started praising God and telling Him how good He is. Then I asked Him if He had anything for me on this trip and, if so, to please reveal it to me. When we flew out to California for our month-long adventure, I had wondered if maybe acting was for me. I learned it wasn’t. Now that my trip was nearly over, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was maybe some bigger purpose in God’s plan to bring me here. “I’m listening, God,” I said. “Please show me.”
I sat back and looked at the waves and the sea, the stars and the sky. I hoped I might see a shooting star or an unusually large wave or maybe a dolphin jumping—anything that might be a sign from God telling me that He felt as close to me in this moment as I felt to Him. I also hoped He might show me what He wanted me to take away from my time in California. I sat there and waited.
And waited.
A half hour went by, or maybe it was forty-five minutes or maybe even an hour. I don’t know how long I sat there, but there was no giant wave or shooting star or dancing dolphin or any other sign from God. Finally I stood up and started walking up the beach to where John Stephen was working out. I had taken a couple of steps when my phone beeped. I looked down and saw a text: Hey, this is Michelle. I wanted you to have my number before we try to meet on Friday for VidCon.
Cool. Thanks. Guess I’ll see you again Friday, I texted back.
Then she replied, Here’s Savannah’s number. Text her and work out the details.
I looked at the time. It was already 11:00. I did not want to text a married woman with a child this late. I could imagine what her husband might think. I’ll text her tomorrow, I replied.
My phone beeped again. She’s up. Text her now! Michelle replied.
I didn’t know if I should. I found John Stephen and let him read the texts. “What do you think I should do? Do you think it’s okay if I text her?”
“If she’s telling you to do it, you should do it,” John Stephen replied.
“Yeah, I guess,” I said. So I did.
I’d been out on the beach looking for a sign from God. Was this Him sending it to me via text message?
Seeking a sign from God and drawing close to Him was nothing out of the ordinary for me. God has always been a part of my life. Both of my parents professed to be Christians for most of my growing-up years. From as far back as I can remember, they took me and my five siblings to church. However, if I’m being honest, I have to admit that I hated going to church. I don’t want to offend any of the pastors of the churches where we went, but most of those churches were just plain boring. We sang songs out of a hymnbook, and no one really got into them. It seemed like smiling and actually enjoying the experience were against the rules for worshipping God, which made no sense to me. I never had the sense that we were worshipping even though it was called a worship service. When I looked around, everyone seemed miserable. Still, everyone kept going. That’s what you did in a small town in south Alabama. You’d get up on Sundays and go to church, and you’d feel better about yourself because you’d made the effort. It’s not that you necessarily had your life changed by Jesus or that you’d made any kind of radical, life-altering decision. You went because that’s what you were supposed to do. Like I said, I hated it.
At home I saw a different kind of Christianity. Through most of my growing-up years, my mom and dad were serious about God. The two of them met at a church camp, fell in love, and got married. My mom stayed home with all of us kids while my dad was a Spanish professor at Troy University. When I was little, my mom taught my Sunday school and vacation Bible school classes. Dad coached my baseball and soccer teams. Both took us to church and lived what they believed.
However, my family didn’t experience the best kind of church life and that eventually took its toll. My mom never really fit in at any of the churches we attended. She isn’t your typical southern Alabama Christian mom. By that I mean, she loves to have a good time! I’m not saying other women where I grew up didn’t, but most would never in a million years touch an alcoholic beverage or be caught dancing to “Despacito” on the dance floor. My mom would. She even has a few tattoos, which made her anything but your typical church mom in Alabama. My mom just stood out, but not in a bad way—she was just different. On top of all this, she was, and is, a very beautiful woman. Most of the other women kept their distance. No one ever invited her over for parties or just to hang out or do anything other than attend a women’s Bible study once a week. Because of this, my mom never really experienced community, and that’s where Christians are called to thrive.
One of the things I love about my mom is she is never fake. What you see is what you get with her. She hates drama, and she had no use for fake Christianity, where people go to church on Sundays but don’t live it through the week. She had made up her mind that if she was going to do this Christian thing, she either wanted to be real about it or not do it at all. No faking it.
She’s also extremely intelligent. She knows almost every Bible story and knows more about religion, politics, and science than any person I know. The more she read Bible stories and saw how people who are supposed to love God are supposed to act, the more she saw a fakeness around her. Atheists and non-Christians were always more welcoming and kind to her than any church we attended. With time, she started to become distant from her faith. That led to her researching evolution, why God can’t exist, and everything else you can imagine. She started to become so immersed in questioning God that she began to doubt everything she’d always believed. All of that might not have been enough to push my mom over the edge into not believing. However, another horrible experience was the last straw.
In our small town there was a kid who was five years older than me named Tripp. He always hung out around me and my friends at the baseball and soccer fields. He also showed up for every youth event at our church and volunteered for vacation Bible school. But my dad always got a bad vibe from him. There was something about him that put my dad on edge. Other people got the same vibe, but since Tripp came from a broken home, most people felt sorry for him and didn’t say a thing about him hanging around kids who were five, even ten years younger than him.
Everybody in our small town knew Tripp. He went to sleepovers younger kids had but not at our house. My dad always kept him a safe distance from us even though my mom didn’t always see it. I believe my dad had discernment that came only from God because one day when I was thirteen, Tripp pulled me aside at the end of an American Cancer Society fund-raiser called Relay for Life. All my friends had left, so it was just him and me while I waited for my dad to come pick me up. Tripp asked me if I had hit puberty yet. That seemed like a very odd question. Then he asked me some other very uncomfortable questions a nineteen-year-old should never ask a thirteen-year-old. My dad arrived pretty quickly after that.
On the ride home I told him what Tripp had said to me. My dad immediately called Tripp’s dad and spoke to Tripp himself. Something was not right, and my dad knew it. He wondered what else this boy might have done. My father then called the police. A full investigation went down in our small town. After a few weeks many kids we knew came out about how Tripp had sexually molested them. Before my dad called the police, they had been too afraid to say anything. Tripp was convicted on multiple counts and was sentenced to prison for more than sixty years. This episode threw my mom, my family, even our entire town into a spin. How could this boy, whom our church trusted, do this?
We moved on to more churches over the next few years. In what should have been safe places, we encountered a few pastors who had acted out with some disgusting sexual behaviors, some toward young boys. Men wh
o claimed to follow Jesus but had behaved in ways that proved otherwise. This was the final straw for my mom. She was done. For her, there just seemed to be too much hurt and wrong in the world for a loving God to exist and allow it all to happen. Everyone struggles with this question. My mom decided the answer had to be that a loving God does not exist. My mom is the best mother on planet Earth, but finding out about her decision was definitely tough for my family and me.
My spiritual life changed early in my high school years. Before then, I went along with going to church, and I probably called myself a Christian, but God was always just kind of there. I believed He was real, and I could tell you a lot of stories that are in the Bible, but I cannot say I loved God. Not really. I did not have a passion for Him. I didn’t long to know Him more, and I didn’t want to live for Him. Like everyone else in the churches I attended, I went along with the whole God thing and did what was expected of me, and that was the end of it.
Thankfully, in my early high school years, I got plugged into a great church youth ministry that first got my attention with their really dynamic worship music. People around me weren’t just going through the motions and singing songs from a book. The songs made me feel like I was actually in the presence of God, which I later learned we were. Psalm 22:3 says that God is enthroned in the praises of His people. This was something I’d never experienced before, and it made me hungry for more of God. I wanted to worship Him. I wanted to get closer to Him.
Our youth pastor taught me that I can love Jesus while being myself. Through this youth group I discovered that I could smile and laugh and be goofy and still follow Jesus. In fact, following Jesus brought out more joy in me. And following Jesus is what I wanted to do. I’d seen the fake Christians and the abuse by those who claimed to follow God.
At some point in our lives, we all doubt God. Sometimes we doubt if He is really good or faithful or all He says He is, and sometimes we doubt His existence. I was out to see if this God was real, and if He was who the Bible says He was, my life would change and be better as a result of following Him. He’s the only Person to have ever conquered death, so, of course, His ways would be better than mine or anyone else’s. After surrendering my all to God, I quickly experienced His peace and joy. A peace and joy that nothing else can bring me. It didn’t make sense, but I felt content knowing He is in control and that He is who He says He is even if some who claim to know and follow Him aren’t.
Thankfully, by this point in my life, I hadn’t gotten involved in the kinds of bad choices that send kids my age down a long road. I didn’t drink or do drugs, and I wasn’t going out and sleeping around. Because I hadn’t done anything that was really bad, or had one of those really cool and deep come-to-Jesus moments, I always thought my story of coming to Jesus was pretty boring. I still had a lot of sin in my life, however, that I had to turn over to God. We all do. Some sin is just more visible than others. God still deals with me about stuff today. I want Him to. I want to get closer to Him. I don’t do it because one of my parents or pastors or even a church told me to but because I can feel God’s goodness and comfort in my life. When I’m closest to God, joy and peace overwhelm me. When I forget to spend time with God and let the world consume me, I become more easily agitated, angry, and less joyful.
After I committed my life to Jesus, I made some very big decisions. One of the biggest, at least in my mind, was to wait until after I got married to have sex. To me, this wasn’t a negative decision. It wasn’t so much that I was not going to have sex. Instead, I believed God had an amazing girl out there for me, and the two of us were going to share our lives together. And it wasn’t just that He had someone He’d chosen specifically for me, and me for her, and we were going to get married. This was someone I was going to make a lifetime of memories with. That’s what I looked forward to—finding the one with whom I was going to share amazing life adventures that we’d talk about for the rest of our lives. That’s why I didn’t really date anyone through high school or my first year of college. I didn’t want to have all these great experiences with a girl, only to break up and be left with memories that I could not share with my future wife—because no one wants to hear about what you did with your ex. The Bible says that sex is an awesome gift God gives to a husband and a wife to share together. Sex was the ultimate experience I wanted to share only with the one God had chosen for me.
Don’t get me wrong. I was no different than any other teenage guy. I wanted to have sex. I thought about it all the time. Remaining a virgin wasn’t some stroll through the meadows. I struggled, and when I say I struggled, I mean it was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Two small things helped me big in my walk for purity. First, I paid really close attention to the small decisions I made every day. By that I mean I did not put myself in situations where I knew the temptation was stronger than me. That’s why I didn’t date and didn’t drink. If I had put myself in a situation alone with a girl, with no accountability from my friends, and we started drinking, well, you get the picture. I’m not saying dating is wrong or even drinking if you are of legal age. I just knew myself and my struggles and had to be honest with myself if I truly wanted to wait until marriage.
Accountability was the second small thing that helped in a big way. I shared my life with some good friends who had the same morals. With my good friends, at my house or in a safe environment, we didn’t let each other slip up. I’m sure you hear this all the time, but surrounding yourself with good friends is one of the most important things you can do.
In the early years, after deciding I wanted to wait until marriage to have sex, I was pretty judgmental about it. I was also dead set on what I expected from my future wife. I figured that since I waited, so should she. Never did I think I’d date or be attracted to someone who hadn’t saved herself for our wedding night. Waiting to have sex was difficult and something I hoped my wife would appreciate greatly. I hoped that she was giving the same effort to waiting that I was.
However, as I got older and matured a bit, I realized how difficult and rare it was to wait. Some of my friends started caving. I also made new friends in college who had struggled in the past. I saw how strong and tempting the draw toward sexual things can be—not just the act of sex but also inappropriate images and thoughts. It’s so easy to give in a little here and a little there, and then, before you know it, you’ve gone farther than you would’ve ever expected. I had been in a few situations where if I had not cut the time short, I may not have waited.
As I matured in my faith, I realized that my heart wasn’t in line with God’s heart. He didn’t look at me and think I was any better for waiting than someone who hadn’t waited at all. He loved us both deeply and equally. He forgives us of all wrongs and redeems any and all situations. God showed me that He wasn’t this all-controlling ruler with this guidebook called the Bible and that we have to follow these rules in order to get into heaven and gain His love. Rather, God has been around forever. He knows sin exists and has seen humans, generation after generation, fall into this trap of believing our ways are higher and greater than His. That there are no consequences. But just because we want to think something is true, because it sounds nice, doesn’t mean that’s the case. God wants us to wait until marriage because He knows that not waiting can result in so much pain, sorrow, guilt, and shame, all of which could have been avoided. And God loves us so much that it hurts Him to see us choose any sin over Him.
I also started to realize that remaining a virgin until my wedding night wasn’t the real goal. The Bible doesn’t say, “Remain a virgin until marriage.” Instead, it calls us to purity. Biblical purity means trusting and obeying God. Purity is about trusting that God’s ways are higher than our ways even if we don’t like it or understand. When I stopped focusing on not having sex and instead pursued purity, I realized that I could technically be a virgin and not be sexually pure. Jesus said that if you look at a woman with lust in your heart, that’s the same as sleeping with her. By that stan
dard I was definitely not pure. I had to get my heart right with God and make the decision to pursue purity daily. It wasn’t easy. I failed daily, but God took my struggle and pursuit and turned it from something that made me feel ashamed into something beautiful.
I had to grow a lot in my walk with God before I came to this understanding. I wish it hadn’t taken so long. My biggest regret is that I wish I had focused less on being a virgin and instead focused more on Jesus every single day. He has greater plans for our lives than simply “don’t do bad things.” Rather, God wants us to live life and live it abundantly. He doesn’t want us to be bored losers; He just knows what’s best for us. With that being said, I’m extremely happy I did wait, and after Savannah and I met, we both waited together. I know God has blessed our marriage in a powerful way because of it.
I write all of this so that you will understand that never in my wildest dreams did I ever think the woman I met at The Grove with her child was the girl God had in store for me. For one thing, I assumed Savannah was already married—that’s how small-town Alabama I was. When I texted her that first night, I made sure my texts were all very proper and formal. I think I even called her ma’am, which is what a polite Southern boy calls a married woman. Even if I had known Savannah was single, I never would have thought about trying to date someone who lived more than two thousand miles from me. Sure, I went out shopping for a motor scooter without a plan on how to get it home, but that’s why there’s FedEx and UPS. Shipping a scooter across the country is a one-time thing. Trying to have a girlfriend who lives 2,200 miles away? That would have seemed impossible if I’d given it any thought whatsoever.