Nate had wonderful manners. He was a gentleman — respectful of authority, respectful toward me. He was a leader and an influencer. People were naturally drawn to him, and this quality was very attractive to me. I imagined what a powerful influence he could be if only he finally yielded his life to Christ.
Nate made me feel safe, and this was no small thing. For the first time in my life, I felt like I had a protector. I didn’t feel like it was up to me to handle everything. I knew he would never let anyone harm me. Even on days when I felt ugly, Nate would look me in the eyes and tell me I was beautiful, inside and out. He put me on a pedestal, and it was fun being there.
Family was important to Nate. He treated my family well and was especially kind to my mother. This touched me deeply. I could imagine raising a family with him — a modest house somewhere near Dallas with a few children running around on the lawn, going to Cowboys games together, and having people over for the holidays. It was a beautiful picture in my mind, far from the dysfunction I had grown up with. It was a dream I wanted very much to make a reality.
Nate listened attentively when I talked about my relationship with God. He somehow knew my connection to God was what made me special. He was interested in Christianity and asked questions about it too, but he didn’t feel he was good enough to become a Christian. He knew that if he gave his life to Christ, he’d have to give up a lot of things he enjoyed doing, and he just wasn’t ready for that. I appreciated his honesty. In fact, I took it as a good sign that he was willing to listen to me and not pretend. I never stopped communicating or spending time with him because of his reluctance. I didn’t want to seem judgmental, and I knew that if I pulled away, it would hurt Nate. He was so open and accepting of me, my beliefs, and everything that was important in my life, and I wanted to return this level of openness and respect to him.
I had hoped I was being a positive influence on Nate, but I was finding that the more time we spent together, the more his behavior slipped. His language went from being always respectful to an occasional slip of the tongue to regular use of profanity. He drank beer too much and too often. He sometimes said mean things. I had never experienced him that way before, and I didn’t like it. Warning signs were flashing red in my mind and spirit, but somehow I always managed to shrug away his troublesome behavior: No one changes overnight, after all; it takes time. Again, I decided to be patient with him in the hope that if I could continue being a good influence, it would make a difference. I encouraged him to be better, to be his best. When he behaved badly, I told myself he was wrestling with his old nature, that it had a firm grip on him but would release him when he committed his life to Christ.
Over time, my patience with his behavior slipped into compromising my own standards. Little by little, Nate was changing, but not in the ways I’d hoped. Still, I continued to excuse his behavior by telling myself that a change for the better was coming soon.
As time went on, however, the open, free-flowing communication we’d once had began to dwindle. I could tell that something was bothering Nate, but since he wouldn’t open up to me about what it was, I couldn’t seem to help him through it. His behavior grew more reckless, and he was agitated and angry more often. Instead of sharing his most personal thoughts with me and taking me into his confidence, he now seemed guarded. I tried to write it off to the stress of so much publicity and the growing pressure to perform well at every game. But there was no denying that Nate was changing — and not for the better. The change was apparent to everyone, and it troubled me. But every time a black cloud hovered over our relationship, Nate found a way to make the sun come out again. I was determined to be as supportive as I knew how to be, and Nate seemed calmer when I was around, so 1 took this as a good sign. Things would be okay.
CHAPTER 13
Love Is a Wonderful Thing
When a heart finds another, what’s a cloud more or less in the sky.
Peter Wolf, Ina Wolf, and Martin Page
Nate and I were better than ever. We were meeting each other’s friends and getting to know each other’s families. I believed he was the one I would spend the rest of my life with. More and more, I could look at the future and imagine growing old with Nate Newton at my side.
Still, I was plagued by a nagging unrest about where he was in his relationship with God. I knew he believed in God, but when the conversation turned to salvation, Nate would always say he wasn’t good enough yet. He hated hypocrites and vowed never to be one. He didn’t want to pretend he was a Christian, and since he was straddling the fence with one foot securely in the world and the other uncomfortably entertaining the possibility of being a Christian, he wasn’t ready to accept Christ.
I loved God deeply and wanted to please him in everything I did, but there was a tug-of-war in my heart. When I was alone with God, I was totally filled with peace and secure in his love for me. When I was alone with Nate, God receded to the background. My connection to Nate increased my physical attraction, and all I could think about was sexual intimacy with him.
When I was a young girl, I made a conscious decision to wait for sex until I fell in love and married. My mom had warned me about the dangers of being unequally yoked, and I knew better than to marry a man who was not a Christian. Nate clearly felt differently than I did, but he respected my position. He thought it was okay, even good, for dating couples to engage in sex. I believed it was wrong. I had remained pure. Now here I was, still a virgin and deeply in love, but beginning to feel guilty for making my future husband wait when I was the one who wasn’t ready yet to be married. My resolve wavered and then gave way.
I made a decision to go on birth control pills. I decided that if I was going to betray my morals, the last thing I wanted was to bring a baby into the equation. My doctor was a wise, kind, Christian man. He counseled me to wait, even as he reluctantly wrote out a prescription. Even there in the doctor’s office, I had second thoughts about it. Going on the pill was deciding to have sex outside of marriage. I knew I was making a conscious decision to sin.
Nate and I planned it. It was anything but a spontaneous burst of passion. It wasn’t a magical night in which we lost control and were swept up in the heat of the moment. In truth, “the moment” had been building for months. Looking back, it’s hard for me to reconcile these two things: I wasn’t ready to commit to Nate in marriage because he had not yet made a commitment to Christ; yet somehow I did feel ready to commit to the acts of marriage with Nate. It no longer seemed important to wait until the wedding bells had rung. I was an adult after all. I was in love. We were in love. Wasn’t that what really mattered?
Nate and I were playing house. It was like a trial run to see if marriage would work out. I never wanted to be in a situation like my mother, financially dependent on a man and unable to escape if things went wrong. As much as I loved Nate, I wasn’t ready to walk down the aisle and commit my life to him forever. I needed some measure of control. I didn’t want to be married. Things were good just like they were for now. Nate seemed content to be with me on these terms, and in my mind, this left me free to walk away if I needed to.
I often traveled to be with Nate for away games, and sometimes his family would join us. One weekend, they came to Dallas for a home game, arriving on a chartered bus from Florida. I went to the hotel with Nate to greet his family. I had met several people from his family at previous games, so I was excited to see them again and interested to see who else came along that I had not yet met.
To my great surprise, a long-lost girlfriend had come to town to see Nate. I was shocked. Nate’s family was clearly embarrassed by the situation. They apologized profusely. They knew Nate and I were close. They knew how important I was to Nate. Why this woman had chosen to come along, knowing I would be there, is a mystery I have never understood. Of course, this all happened the day before the game — after the Cowboys had sequestered all their players in a hotel to keep them focused on the task at hand. They didn’t want their star athletes distracted
by anything that might hinder their performance in the game. So Nate was not around to see me in my misery or to answer my questions. He wasn’t there to face the music, own up to his deceit, and explain his lies.
I felt so betrayed. I thought I was special to him. I had been totally faithful to him. He was the only man I had ever given myself to, and the thought of him being with someone else felt like a kick in the stomach. I felt ill.
Nate’s family was sensitive to my struggle. I could tell they were sincere in their concern, so I dug down deep, found every ounce of kindness I could muster, and pressed through the game rituals with a pasted smile on my face to support Nate. I don’t remember much about the game because I was too busy working through all the things I wanted to ask Nate on the way home. The more I thought about it, the more I realized this was an opportunity to make a clean break and get out. I recognized how much I had lost my focus — on God, my career, and even family goals. I had become totally absorbed in Nate’s world, Nate’s future, and Nate’s needs, and I had lost myself in the process.
After the game, Nate’s family said good-bye and got back on the bus headed for Florida. It was time for Nate and me to have a heart-to-heart talk. I decided I didn’t want to have anything to do with him anymore. I had been with him for almost two years, and he never mentioned he had a girlfriend during the same time he was dating me. I was hurt and angry. I didn’t want to talk about it — no explanations; I just wanted to make a break from Nate and move on. I should have done it long before, and this was the jolt I needed to wake up from my fairy tale and enter the land of reality.
Instead of confronting Nate and asking him to explain his deception, I chose to distance myself from him. I refused to accept his phone calls. I wouldn’t answer my door. I was devastated by his betrayal.
I decided that this might be a good time to move back home to Louisiana. Because I still had three months on my lease, I gave three months’ notice at my job, packed all my things and placed them in storage. I would use only the bare essentials in my apartment until my lease expired and I was free to move home. I hadn’t made any plans about where I would go in Louisiana, where I would live, or where I would work, but I was focused on this new course of action and determined that everything would work out just as it should.
I stopped taking the pill. I regretted I had ever started taking it. I regretted surrendering my virginity. I made the determination that I was through with Nate Newton — for good!
Nate kept dropping by my office and coming to my apartment trying to talk to me. He was doing everything he possibly could to stop me from leaving. I felt like he was stalking me; every time I turned around, there he was! After four solid weeks of this, I relented and let him in one night. I wanted him to see I was serious. I thought if he saw my apartment bare and knew I was resolute in my decision to move away from him and move on with my life, it might make him realize our relationship was truly over.
Nate asked me to just listen to what he had to say. He was so earnest that I didn’t have the power to refuse. He told me he had not been spending time with the young woman and had not seen her for a very long time. They had bought a house together and he was helping her out financially. He told me they were no longer in a relationship and that he was as surprised as anyone that she showed up at the game. He was sorry I was hurt — that he had hurt me. He was desperate for me to believe him and forgive him.
For days, he kept coming to my apartment and stopping by my office, and each time he always seemed to have just the right things to say. To put me at even greater ease, he communicated with the woman on the telephone in my presence, so I could hear what he said and be assured there was no relationship between them. My resolve wavered.
Nate produced receipts to show me he had given this woman a lump sum of money to help her out. He assured me over and over again that it was me he wanted to spend his life with. He was so sincere and took such extreme measures to prove himself that I couldn’t help but believe him. Maybe I wasn’t being fair to Nate, I thought.
I took my things out of storage and weighed my options. What should I do? Before this incident with the woman, our relationship had its ups and downs, but there had been nothing like this — nothing that made me lose trust in him or feel betrayed. I still loved Nate, and part of me wanted to forgive him and move on. Was my love strong enough to overcome the pain? Could I trust Nate? Should I stay in Dallas and give our relationship another chance, or should I move home to Louisiana and forget all about Nate Newton?
I decided to stay. I withdrew my resignation from my job, and they were thrilled I was staying. Nate and I started seeing each other, and things were good again. I forgave Nate, and he went out of his way to make sure he didn’t hide things from me. He knew I was serious enough to leave my job and move away from him, and this had a profound impact on Nate. He didn’t want to jeopardize what we had and grew more determined for us to be a lifelong partnership.
Nate even agreed with me that God was the only way our relationship would work. Though he wasn’t ready to go to church, he consented to do a Bible study with me and another couple from my church. I was still shaken from the incident with the girl from Florida, but I saw it as an opportunity for us to strengthen our bond and establish trust, and for Nate to finally commit his life to the Lord. I knew that total forgiveness was required from me, and I gave it.
Still, at times I caught myself looking in the mirror and wondered who it was that was staring back at me. Once confident and bold, I had become unsure of myself. I missed my close relationship with God. I still knew him and trusted him, but I was no longer deeply intimate with him. The sense of loss was overwhelming. I felt God calling me to return to him.
Nate invited me to take a trip with him to Atlanta. Road trips with Nate were the best. And maybe that was just what we needed right then. It was a lovely drive, and we were never in a hurry. We took our time to stop and see anything that captured our interest. We talked comfortably about everything and were totally at ease with one another. We met up with friends of his and shared the most beautiful four-day weekend together.
Our first night together on the road, I reminded Nate that I had only been back on the pill for one week. He brushed it off, reassuring me that nothing would happen, that I should trust him. We were both aware of the risks, but neither one of us thought for one moment that I would conceive. The pill was our magic shield against responsibility.
From then on, we were sexually intimate on a regular basis, so I don’t know exactly when it happened. But early in February, my family came into town, and I was feeling a little sick. When I complained of nausea, my mother looked me right in the eyes and said, “Dorothy, you’re not pregnant, are you?”
“Mama! No!” I exclaimed. “How can you say that?” Being pregnant never entered my mind. I felt safe on the pill.
It wasn’t until a full two months later that I realized the truth. I was stunned. How could this have happened? We never used any extra protection because I was taking birth control pills, and the “98 percent effective” promise sounded like pretty good odds. I felt protected from the risk, so I was willing to take it.
In those moments of passion and intimacy, God was the last thing on my mind. And my fears of being unequally yoked to Nate in marriage somehow didn’t translate into a fear of creating a soul tie with this man through our sexual relationship or the possibility of creating a baby in the process. But I had made my choice, and I knew what I was doing. It was a decision that changed my life forever.
CHAPTER 14
Shattered Dreams
“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”
Jeremiah 29:11 NIV
God’s best for my life was all I had ever wanted. No longer did that seem possible. I stared down at the pregnancy test in disbelief. I read the instructions once more, hoping that maybe I had done something wrong to make the test i
naccurate. But there was no denying it: I was pregnant.
I looked in the mirror and felt sick. The woman who stared back at me was a stranger. She looked lost and confused and totally without hope. The sadness in her eyes was unbearable. I turned away and crumpled in a heap on the floor. I had never felt so alone. What a mess! What was I going to do? What would my family say? Oh, Mama!
I grabbed a towel and hugged it to my chest, squeezing it until my knuckles hurt and my hands were shaking. My mind went to all the people I had studied the Bible with in college. I thought about everyone I had witnessed to and how many of them had come to know the Lord. I could see their faces. I felt as if I had let every one of them down. I was a fraud. How could I have been so stupid? Those thoughts overwhelmed me with grief and sorrow. Then I tried to imagine what God must think of me and how I had turned my back on him. Sobs shook my body. I don’t know how long I lay there crying, but I cried until there were no tears left. I was disgusted with myself. Oh, what had I done?
I grew cold lying there on the floor. Shame and fear gave way to pity, and depression settled over me like a dark, ominous cloud. Then my thoughts wandered to Nate. What would he think? How would he react? I didn’t really blame him; I was too filled with blaming myself. How would I tell him? What would he say?
I avoided him for days, not sure how to break the news. I was miserable. Doubt, fear, frustration, anger — my emotions were boiling just beneath the surface, and I found it hard to concentrate on anything.
I went to see my doctor, and he confirmed that I was, in fact, pregnant. He seemed sad for me and asked about the father. I told him who it was. In a very kind gesture, he invited me to have dinner with him and his wife in their home. I was so desperate and alone that I accepted. They prayed for me and were supportive and encouraging without one hint of judgment. I was overwhelmed by their kindness.
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