When Tommy asked me to speak to the students, I immediately told him no. I was finally comfortable talking to people individually about my faith, but I still didn’t want anything to do with public speaking. But then I thought about the idea for three or four days and it was really nagging at me. I called Tommy back and told him to line it up.
When I arrived at the classroom a few days later, there were about fifty kids there. I stood in the front of the class and told them I was a hunter and fisherman, but I loved the Lord, and I told them why. I went through my entire testimony and shared the Gospel with them. I was so nervous talking to them that every time I tried to turn a page in my Bible, I ripped about three pages! My hand was shaking so badly that I couldn’t stop ripping pages! I kept looking up to see if anyone had noticed how nervous I was. I couldn’t wait for my talk to end.
But after I was finished talking, a young boy came up to me. He had tears in his eyes.
“Thanks, mister,” he said. “I really needed to hear that.”
I couldn’t believe God had used a simple guy like me to have this kind of impact on a kid. The youth director at White’s Ferry Road Church heard about my speech and asked me to talk to a group of students at Ouachita Christian School a couple of weeks later. I begrudgingly agreed, and it was a much bigger audience, but I got through it. The more often I spoke, the more comfortable I was talking in front of people.
The next summer, our youth group took a trip to Florida for a Christian conference. There were three speakers slated for the event, and I was one of them. The first guy who was supposed to talk stood up in a big classroom full of about two hundred kids. He apologized to the audience and said because of his selfishness, he wasn’t properly prepared to address them. He sat back down. Now, I was nervous because I was next and he’d just killed the mood in the room. I was about to die! Thankfully, the guy stood back up and gave an excellent talk about standing before God and not being prepared.
Thanks to my parents and people like Angel and Tommy, I know God is using me to help others be prepared to stand before Him, and by doing so I am prepared as well. 1 John 4:17 says: “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him.”
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ARRANGED DATE
FALLING IN LOVE WITH MISSY
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.
—EPHESIANS 5:25
My dad’s favorite motivational slogan when we were kids was “Who’s a man?” He used this admonition mostly when there was a tough job to do that required a great deal of physical exertion and pain, like when my brothers and I carried washtubs full of fish up the muddy riverbank. We would often fall, and he would laugh and keep quoting the same motivational line over and over: “Who’s a man?” Dad’s encouragement—at various decibel levels—always seemed to work.
I felt a sense of pride when my actions answered his challenge, and our work on the river often turned into “strongest man” competitions between my brothers and me. My dad has always viewed manhood as a big deal; he likes to say the most endangered species on the planet is manly men. As I began to become interested in girls, he would encourage me to work even harder, because what kind of woman doesn’t like a man with muscles? After one brutal day of hard work on the river, he told me, “One day you’ll be able to grow whiskers on your chin to go along with these muscles I’m giving you. These girls will recognize you as a man from a distance.”
Of course, there was a bit of a power struggle between my mom and dad over how my brothers and I looked as we became older. My mom would spend my dad’s hard-earned money on a few nice clothes for us when we started dating, and my dad would roll his eyes and shake his head. There is something to be said for first impressions, and my mom knew that if I was going to get a nice girl, something had to be done about my ragged appearance (not to mention my scent of sweat and fish). My dad, on the other hand, focused his efforts on dating advice. One of his favorite quotes was: “A situation becomes a crisis when cattle or women stampede.” I decided to try to find a balance between by parents’ ideas on dating. One of the things I really liked about White’s Ferry Road Church was that it was a big church with an active youth group. When we attended the smaller country church, I felt alone because there weren’t many kids my age in the congregation. I didn’t have many spiritual friends, other than Angel, and she attended a different church and high school. At White’s Ferry Road Church, my brother Willie and I found the greatest pool of potential girlfriends who were spiritual that any boy could have wanted. Willie and I started dating every one of the girls, simultaneously if possible! We even dated the same girl sometimes! It was a different date every other night.
I applied a lot of what I knew about fishing to the dating world. I thought that women were a lot like fish in that they travel around in packs. They even go to the bathroom together—even if some of them don’t need to go! The key to catching a lot of fish is to get the pack caught up in the frenzy of trying to be the one to capture the lure. When fish feed, they are motivated by one another. I have watched fish go crazy when my lure splashes across the top of the water. I have even caught two fish on one lure several times in large schools of feeding fish. However, I eventually learned the hard way that women are not like fish at all. For one, fish do not have the ability to slap your face because you’re trying to land two at once. Second, fishing is relaxing and relieves stress, while dating a lot of girls at the same time is maddening. Luckily for me, I always had the woods and water to escape to when things got crazy, which seemed to happen a lot. Nothing tells a girl that you’ve moved on quite like a dead deer in the back of your truck or ducks on the grill.
After a while, I started talking to one particular girl and we started hanging out, or at least that’s what we called it at the time. I might have kissed her two or three times, but it really wasn’t much of a relationship romantically. She initially came to me for spiritual advice, and I offered to help her. She was very attractive and seemed really nice. I was at her house one Sunday after church, and she came downstairs and told me I needed to leave. I didn’t know what the deal was, but I left and walked outside. All of a sudden, this guy came tearing into her driveway in a pickup truck. I’d never seen the guy before in my life, but he jumped out of his truck and charged at me. He started screaming at me, calling me every bad word in the book. I looked behind me to make sure he was talking to me, but there was nobody else there. I thought he had me confused with someone else.
But then I realized the guy was the reason the girl wanted me to leave. He was her boyfriend and wasn’t happy! When I figured out what was going on, I was like, “Well, come on over here, son. I’ll kick your tail! I don’t even know who you are.” Thankfully, he calmed down and backed off.
“Let’s just talk,” he told me.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s take a ride.”
When I got into the guy’s truck, he started screaming and threatening me again! He told me about how he was fixing to mangle my body, and it really kind of scared me a little bit. During our conversation, he explained to me that he was doing more than hanging out with the girl I’d just left. They had a long-term relationship and were a lot more involved than I realized.
“Hey, you can have her,” I told him. “I was only checking her out. She never told me she had a boyfriend.”
I told the guy I wasn’t interested in the girl and didn’t want to fight him.
“Let me tell you what I’m really in on,” I said.
Then I started telling him about the Gospel, but the more I shared God’s Word with him, the madder he became! Eventually, he pulled off at a dead-end road. When he stopped, I figured out that he wasn’t getting the gist of my message! Since I’d shared the Gospel with him and I’d already told him I wasn’t going to fight him, I decided I was going to turn the other cheek and swallow my pride.
“I on
ly have one thing to ask,” I told him. “Don’t hit me in the face.”
The guy punched me about three or four times, but luckily my adrenaline was really pumping, so it didn’t seem to hurt much, and he stayed away from my face. The guy climbed back in his truck, and for a few seconds I feared he was going to run me over. He left me in the middle of nowhere, about three miles from town. After I walked a couple of miles, the girl’s parents, of all people, saw me walking down the road and picked me up. I didn’t tell them anything. I asked them to take me to Johnny and Chrys Howard’s house, so I could attend teen church. Johnny and Chrys are Willie’s in-laws; we had teen church at his future wife Korie’s house nearly every Sunday when we were in high school.
When I arrived at Korie’s house, I was a little bit bruised up, but my pride hurt a lot more. I could hear my dad’s admonitions of “Who’s a man?” echoing in my mind. Even though I felt like I did a godly thing, it was very humiliating and humbling. The girl who kicked me out of her house was there, and she tried to apologize to me.
“Hey, I’m done with you,” I told her. “You’re out.”
The ironic part of the story is that Missy was pretty good friends with the girl who kicked me out of her house. On the night of the incident, details of my fight spread like wildfire through our youth group. Missy pulled me outside and talked to me about it. For some odd reason, I came up with a brilliant idea.
“Why don’t we go to the football game this Friday night as a couple?” I told Missy. “It will really make her jealous.”
Missy wasn’t too happy with the girl, so she happily agreed to do it. Five days later, Missy and I went out on our fake date. I picked her up and we headed to one of her school’s football games. Our primary goal that night was just to be seen together by the girl. However, we actually had a great time together, and I thought I sensed a mutual attraction. To be honest, what really piqued my interest in her was that when I took her home that night, she got out of my truck and walked inside. She didn’t say much and didn’t expect a good-night chat. I figured our orchestrated relationship was over. To me, the date was a good way to show everyone I had moved on by watching the game with a good-looking woman on my arm.
The next Sunday, I was at church and somebody tapped me on the shoulder.
“Look who’s here,” my buddy told me.
It was the guy who had beat me up and left me at the dead-end road! I thought he was following me around, because he was looking at me. It aroused my anger, and I was prepared to fight him in the parking lot after church was over! Whether I got whipped or not, I was going to let him know that I wasn’t going to put up with his stalking me. When he walked up to me in the parking lot after church, I was so close to hitting him between the eyes. But when I looked at him, I could tell he was broken.
“Whatcha got?” I asked him.
“I know this is going to sound weird,” he said. “But you know when you were talking to me about the resurrection? I’d never heard that before. Forget the girl. This ain’t about the girl. I want to study the Bible and learn about what you told me.”
It crossed my mind that he might have some devious ploy to attack my faith, so I decided to seek out someone for advice and wisdom. I found Mike Kellett, the youth director at our church, and we studied the Bible with him. The guy was converted, and we baptized him in the Howards’ swimming pool. He began meeting at our church and later became a pilot. Over the years, he has flown me free of charge to a couple of speaking engagements where I delivered the same Gospel message that I shared with him. We worked together as brothers in Christ and became good friends.
His conversion taught me a lot about spiritual warfare. Up until this point, I had judged the strength of a man solely on his toughness and fighting skills. I had been in many physical fights with my brothers and guys from school. I often remind Willie that the reason he is so business savvy is the constant butt-whippings I delivered to him. They molded his decision-making process. But the situation with the guy at church was different, because the threats came from someone I didn’t know, and he only insisted on fighting me after I shared the Gospel with him. It was a freak circumstance God used for a greater good, and it really inspired me. Second Corinthians 10:4 tells us, “The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.” By sharing the good news of Christ, I actually won the fight and I never threw a punch. The message of Christ’s death and resurrection transcends the physical makeup of a person and always triggers a spiritual response of anger, sadness, or happiness. It is the ultimate unleashing of power, God’s power.
Obviously, I didn’t pursue that girl any longer, and I didn’t think about Missy much after our so-called date, mainly because I didn’t think she was interested in me. But then a few days later, one of our mutual friends from church called me. She told me Missy couldn’t stop thinking about me. I didn’t find out until several months later that the friend also called Missy that night and told her I really liked her! Neither one of us thought much about our fake date, but our friend decided to play matchmaker.
The next time I saw Missy was at a youth meeting at the Kelletts’ house. Oddly enough, Missy’s family had lived in the same house for years until Mike and his family bought it. After the meeting I decided to check the credibility of our mutual friend who told me Missy was interested in me. We were outside and Missy was telling me stories of when she used to live there. I led her to the backyard and after she finished a story, I made my move. I turned and planted a juicy lip lock on her, to which she responded enthusiastically. I just wanted to see if she was interested in me and I got the answer. I have to admit I felt a spark or two during the encounter. It was nice!
Missy remembers a few more details of our early dating.
Missy: During our mock date, I also felt like we had a great time together. However, because we had mutually agreed to go out on this public-relations date, I would have never assumed anything more. I am not an aggressive person, and even though I felt something between us, I would have never made the first move! That’s why, when Jason dropped me off, I just got out of the truck and went inside. He obviously hadn’t asked me out because he thought I was pretty, funny, or interesting. In my mind, this was just business, whether I liked it or not. And I didn’t like it. I was definitely attracted to him, but where I came from and the way I was raised, it was the boy’s responsibility to make the first move. And he didn’t, at least not that night. When my friend called me a few days later and told me that he liked me, I was surprised and thrilled! Little did I know that she’d done the same thing to Jason. The night after our first kiss at our youth minister’s house, I remember trying not to get my hopes up. I knew about his reputation of dating as many girls as possible, and I thought there was a great chance that I would never hear from him again. However, I decided to go outside my comfort zone and give him a call. One of his mom’s friends answered the phone and when I asked to speak to Jason, she told me he was on his way to his girlfriend’s house. I hung up, feeling dejected. About fifteen minutes later, he showed up at my house. I was the girlfriend!
We took our relationship really slow after that, but mainly because I lived twenty miles away. We mutually decided to pray together, and we made a decision to stop each other if we ever became too physical. The main things we discussed together were our relationship with Christ and how we could encourage our friends. Of course, it wasn’t like it is today with cell phones, texting, and e-mails. I lived in the middle of nowhere and didn’t have a car of my own, so it wasn’t like I was talking to her every day or driving to town every night to see her. I really didn’t see her much outside of church.
To be honest, I wasn’t convinced our relationship would work. I had attended West Monroe High School, and Missy was a student at Ouachita Christian School. Her family was among the founders of OCS, which is a small private Christian school in Monroe. Her dad was a preacher, and her mother taught music at
OCS. I was a country kid who went to a public school, and she was more of a middle-class girl who attended a private school. I was into hunting and fishing, and she liked drama and singing in the choir at school and church. Our lives up until that point were totally different. But Missy and I had a very deep spiritual connection, and I thought our mutual love for the Lord might be our biggest strength in sustaining our relationship. Even though Missy was so different from me, I found her world to be very interesting.
Looking back, perhaps another reason I decided to give our relationship a chance was because of my aunt Jan’s bizarre premonition about Missy years earlier. My dad’s sister Jan had helped bring him to the Lord, and she taught the fourth grade at OCS. One of her students was Missy, and they went to church together at White’s Ferry Road Church. When I was a kid we attended a small church in the country, but occasionally we visited White’s Ferry with my aunt Jan and her husband. One Sunday, Missy walked by us as we were sitting in the pew.
“Let me tell you something,” Jan told me as she pointed at me and then Missy. “That’s the girl you’re going to marry.”
Missy was nine years old. To say that was one of the dumbest things I’d ever heard would be an understatement. I love my aunt Jan, but she has a lot in common with her brother Si. They talk a lot, are very animated, and even seem crazy at times. However, they love the Lord and have great hearts. I actually never thought about it again until she reminded me of that day once Missy and I started getting serious. Freaky? A bit. Bizarre? Definitely! Was she right? Absolutely, good call!
Good Call: Reflections on Faith, Family, and Fowl Page 7