The Light Within Me

by Ainsley Earhardt

  When I boarded the bus for New York all the students made me feel very welcome, and by the time we arrived I’d become acquainted with most everyone. However, as soon as I stepped off the bus, I was pushed out of my comfort zone. One leader handed me a stack of “tracts” explaining that these would be used to minister to those who were not Christians.

  “What the heck is a tract?” I asked. I had never seen tracts before. I didn’t know what they were.

  “This is how you tell people about Jesus,” I was told. They were little, rectangular pamphlets, just a few pages, written in clear, simple language about how to know Jesus. They were designed to help seekers understand who Jesus is, what he had done (died on the cross), and how to have a committed life with Jesus. It was basically a step-by-step guide to becoming a Christian. After you read the little tract to the person you were sharing Christ with, you’d ask them to pray with you. It’s called the salvation prayer. Christians believe when you ask Jesus into your life, you get “saved.” That means you are saved from hell and are assured you will spend eternity in heaven. The whole idea of going up to random people and telling them about Jesus seemed bizarre to me. Even though my family went to church and we considered ourselves Christians, we were taught that your faith was extremely private. We didn’t really talk about it around the dining room table, much less strike up a conversation with a stranger on the subject. But that’s what I was supposed to do on this trip. The whole experience made me very uncomfortable and made me wish I’d backed out with my friend. I thought about my friends staying in luxury hotels, visiting tropical islands, and having a blast while I slept on a church floor in Queens visiting homeless shelters with complete strangers. At the same time I enjoyed the sermons, prayers, and music, as well as feeding the homeless in New York, hearing their stories, and trying to help them. Many of them had AIDS and didn’t have the money to pay for their medications. I knew they might not have long to live and knew the importance of sharing the love and healing of Jesus. I did wonder, at times during the trip, What have I gotten myself into?

  As the week progressed I became more comfortable, not so much with the tracts, but with helping people. We went out on the streets of New York and fed the homeless. I heard the saddest stories from many who had lived on the streets their entire lives. Some had lost everything—homes, spouses, children, jobs, money—because of addictions. The entire experience was so humbling. I realized there were hurting people everywhere. My heart broke for them. I came to New York City to help change others, but they opened my eyes and helped change me.

  We didn’t have a lot of free time during this trip, but I was determined to do something I’d always wanted to do. One of my favorite parts of the morning news shows was seeing the people who stood outside the studios and sometimes got on camera. Since I was in New York, and I didn’t know if I’d ever make it back, I figured this was my chance. One morning I got up around three and left for the Today show. A few of the other girls came with me. We walked to a subway stop in Queens, jumped on a train, and somehow found our way into midtown Manhattan. We arrived early at the Today show and parked ourselves next to the railing. The night before I bought a pink poster board and a Magic Marker and made a sign. People with signs always seemed to get noticed before those without.

  Once the show started I waited for my chance. Several times Al Roker stepped outside to meet the crowd and report on the weather. When he came close to me and my friends I held up my poster board sign and jumped up and down. My sign worked! I made it on camera. Back home in South Carolina my parents’ phone blew up. One of my cousins out in Washington recorded the show for us since it runs on a three-hour delay out there.

  Getting on camera on Today was fun, but I had a bigger reason for going to the show and holding up my bright pink sign. Even though I was a biology major who planned on going to dental school, I was already starting to have doubts about this career path. When I went to the Today show I didn’t just want the cameras to notice me. Deep down I hoped someone with the show might notice me and offer me an internship. They didn’t, but the experience gave me a great story.

  In the end, the mission trip to New York was not the start of my television career, but after I returned to school, I did begin to question my future. I felt God urging me to get serious about my life and career. By the end of my sophomore year, my unease centered on my decision to major in biology. I had loved my science courses in high school, but the college chemistry classes were ridiculously tough. I had already passed Chem 1 and Chem 2, which meant Organic Chemistry was next. In school, my fellow students always talked about how hard Organic was. As time went on, I started to realize orthodontics wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life, which made the classes even harder. It’s not easy to excel in something you don’t care that much about. When I told Dr. Boyd about my hesitancy he reassured me, saying, “Ainsley, I know you can do this. It will provide you with a great life. The biggest emergency you’re ever going to face is a broken bracket or a call about a wire poking a patient in the back of the mouth. You rarely work weekends and you will do really well. And I’ll help cover the cost of dental school.”

  Dr. Boyd’s reassurances worked for a while but my growing sense that I wanted to do something else just wouldn’t go away. By this point, I knew acting was not an option. I had to find a major that fit my personality. I spoke to girls in my sorority who I admired and had similar interests and time-and-time again I kept hearing the allure of public relations as a career. I hated the thought of telling my parents I was going to change majors because all of my life my father preached “Earhardts never quit.” I heard that for the first time in fourth grade when I was the only girl on my soccer team and I was not a good player. All the boys made fun of me and I desperately wanted to quit the team. My dad wouldn’t let me. He never let any of us quit anything and now I wanted to quit my major that came with a built-in, sure-thing career. Knowing my parents would never let me do something so drastic, I put my head down and trudged ahead. For a while.

  Finally I knew I had to make a change. I was struggling through my classes and didn’t want to go on that way for the rest of college and then dental school. At the same time, in my heart, I felt this draw to public relations

  One day my sister, Elise, called me and told me to turn on my television. She said Leeza Gibbons was being interviewed about growing up in South Carolina and was talking about how she landed her own talk show and about her experience at the University of South Carolina. She spoke highly of the journalism school and this sparked my interest further. Leeza was one of my role models. She was always active in our community and did a lot of work for juvenile diabetes. My mom has type 1 diabetes and Leeza’s niece (who lives in my hometown) does too. So when Leeza spoke . . . I listened. I admired her and wanted to follow a similar career path to hers.

  I immediately started talking to people in my community who had connections to the journalism school at South Carolina. When I was in middle school, Martha Fowler hired me at South Carolina Educational Television to anchor a weekly newscast, which aired in schools around the state. I stayed in touch with Martha and saw her at church on Sundays. I approached her about the journalism school, explaining my interest in public relations, and she set up an appointment with one of her friends who was a public-relations professor at the university. I met with that professor and immediately knew this was where I was supposed to be. However, I was hesitant. Transferring to another college meant losing credits and delaying graduation. Plus, I had developed many lasting friendships at FSU, and there was also a great PR school there.

  And yet a part of me was excited to start over again and make new friends at USC. Going to school in Columbia meant being closer to home and being surrounded by many people I had known my entire life. Plus, the University of South Carolina was a part of our family identity. My dad and uncle had gone there and I grew up going to most of the football games with my parents or grandparents. My mom’s parents were graduates o
f South Carolina too and actually met on the Horseshoe, a green space on campus. The South Carolina Gamecocks were in my blood.

  I didn’t know what to do. Rather than worry over the decision I prayed and gave it to God. I told Him that I would do my part and apply to both journalism schools and leave the rest up to Him. I turned in applications to the journalism school at FSU and at USC and waited.

  The easiest part of being a Christian is that when you give something to God, you have to trust He will make your path straight. He did that in this situation by making the decision for me. I never anticipated being rejected from the journalism school at FSU. After all, I was a biology major with good grades. Compared to biology, journalism was not the most challenging of majors. I had felt like the whole application process was little more than a formality. Imagine my surprise when I received a rejection letter. I could not believe my eyes. I called the admissions office and asked them why.

  “You didn’t fill out the application correctly,” the woman on the other end of the line said. “You did not check off the box declaring the field in which you wanted to major.”

  All I could think when she said that was, Wow. That does not sound like me at all. I am meticulous with everything I do. I make sure every i is dotted and every t is crossed and every box declaring a specific area of major is checked off. Then I heard from South Carolina telling me that I’d been accepted. Now my decision was a no-brainer. In the words of Yogi Berra, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” So that’s what I did.

  First though, I had to tell my parents. I thought they would be disappointed in me for wanting a change. After all, the Earhardt kids were notorious for trying something—tennis, softball, soccer—and then not wanting to continue. But, when I finally got up the courage to talk to my mom about my decision she surprised me.

  “Ainsley, you should try it,” she said. “If you don’t like it you can always go back.” That was what I needed to hear.

  While this may sound like transferring was easy, it wasn’t. Even after the rejection letter from FSU I wondered if I was making the right decision. But having my parents’ support made the decision a little easier. Mom was right: if I didn’t like USC I could always go back to FSU. The parents who never let me quit anything were now allowing me to grow up on my own. They were teaching me a valuable lesson by letting me live my life. I got to choose now. They basically told me: You are an adult and you can always change your course if you are unhappy. It’s a lesson I wrote about in my first children’s book and something I will always teach my own daughter. My father says you only have one life. This is not a dress rehearsal. Follow your heart and the Lord will guide you.

  When I agonized over the decision of whether or not to transfer, God took the pressure off me and made the choice for me. At the time I thought the decision was purely about my major and my future career. Little did I know that God had other plans.

  3

  Meeting Jesus at a Frat Party

  Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!

  —2 CORINTHIANS 5:17

  NOT LONG AFTER I started at Fox News I went down to Panama City, Florida, to report on what really goes on during spring break on the beach. I expected to find a lot of kids just having fun, but what I saw shocked me. Maybe it was because I saw it through the eyes of a thirtysomething reporter who’d recently landed her dream job, but my heart broke for the girls I interviewed. Whenever our cameras showed up, girls started flashing us and doing crazy stuff for attention. I also interviewed several girls who’d been arrested for underage drinking. One girl, I will never forget, begged me not to put her face on television because her grandmother watched Fox News.

  It was a hard story to report, mostly because I knew how few of them were considering the consequences of their actions. I made my share of mistakes along the way, but back then we didn’t have to worry about cell-phone pictures or social media. The kids growing up now will always be haunted by the mistakes they made years before because now everything is so public.

  My first two years at FSU were about fun. I didn’t think nearly as much as I should have about my future or being serious about school. Even though I was taking some really difficult chemistry and biology classes, I always found the time for friends and parties. But, as the end of my second year approached, I knew it was time to start thinking about what I really wanted to do with my life and get serious about pursuing it. That’s why I changed majors and it is why I transferred back to my hometown of Columbia and the University of South Carolina. When I first went away to school more than six hours from home, I wanted to be able to stretch my own wings. Now I was ready to get back to what was familiar. I missed my family, but I also missed South Carolina. Although geographically, Florida is the South, culturally it is not. South Carolina is known for sweet tea, barbecue, shag music (our state’s official dance is the Carolina Shag), tailgating at football games, nice people, going to church on Sundays, lovely ladies, gentlemen with manners, and family. People who grow up in the state rarely leave. And most who move away eventually come back. The culture and traditions draw you in, and once you experience them, you realize how blessed you are. This state—that I had been so anxious to get out of—was calling me back home and I couldn’t wait any longer.

  One of the worst parts of transferring from one school to another before your junior year is finding a roommate. Normally after two years of college you have a strong group of friends and two of you connect enough to want to room together. All of my friends were four hundred and fifty miles away. Thankfully I connected to a fellow ADPi named Kathryn who was transferring from the College of Charleston. The two of us talked on the phone for hours the summer before we started at USC. We became fast friends and that made the transition into a new school much easier. We decided we were going to live together and affiliate with ADPi at our new school.

  I then moved to Nantucket with a high school friend for the summer. I got a job waitressing at two different restaurants, made a lot of money, and spent it all on rent. Nantucket is a beautiful island, but outrageously expensive for a college student. While I was there, Kathryn called informing me she didn’t want to live on campus and had signed a lease to share an apartment with two other girls. That left me having to find a new roommate. A friend in ADPi at USC told me about another girl transferring into the sorority from the University of Florida. Her name was Clara and she was a sweet, southern girl from Beaufort, SC. I called her and we instantly hit it off and decided to room together. Once again God was working behind the scenes arranging things perfectly for His grand plan.

  Clara had two guy friends she’d grown up with, Jeremy and Matt, who were always at our apartment. They were good people. We always had thought-provoking conversations and many of them were about God. They suggested the four of us do some kind of Bible study together. Before college I’d never done a Bible study of any kind. About the only Bible reading I’d ever done was a list of emergency verses printed on a purple bookmark that I kept in one of the Bibles my dad gave me. Emergency verses are those you read when something goes wrong, or you feel like it might. If you are in danger, you read Psalm 91. When you are depressed, read Psalms 34 and 139. When worried, read Philippians 4 . . . that sort of thing. It worked. When I was worried or down, in doubt or discouraged, I read the verses I was supposed to read. But that’s about as far as my Bible knowledge went.

  Clara, Jeremy, Matt, and I talked about what kind of Bible study to do, and none of us was quite sure because we didn’t have a lot of experience with it. However, Chuck, another friend I met at USC, had a suggestion. Chuck was also a journalism major, but he was unlike anybody I’d ever met. The two of us spent a lot of time together studying and got to know each other very well. It was a strictly platonic relationship, as Chuck was in a very serious relationship with a precious girl who eventually became his wife. She was very well liked and had a strong Christian faith.

  So
did Chuck.

  He had recently become close to God and his life changed dramatically. Apparently Chuck had a reputation on campus for being very social, to put it mildly. He had even won an award in his fraternity for being the biggest partier. But by the time I met him it seemed like all the stories were about someone else completely. I didn’t have to dig very deep for him to tell me what had happened.

  “God changed my life,” Chuck told me.

  I was intrigued. He was such a nice guy, talked favorably about his girlfriend, treated her with respect and love, and was one of the happiest people I had ever been around. I wanted what Chuck had, but I wasn’t ready to give anything up to get it. Chuck went from literally dancing on the bar to reading his Bible and singing praise and worship music at the Fellowship of Christian Athletes meetings on campus. I wasn’t ready to make such a radical life change. I wanted one foot in his world and one foot in mine. I still wanted to have fun, party, go to bars, and do everything most other college students did. Sure, I wanted God in my life, but some areas were off-limits to Him.

  When I mentioned to Chuck that Matt, Jeremy, Clara, and I wanted to do a Bible study, he suggested a thirteen-week workbook by Henry Blackaby called Experiencing God. From the start I realized this wasn’t going to be like any other book I’d worked through. I’d always believed that God wanted me to be a good person, and if I was good enough, He’d let me go to heaven when I died. The problem for me was, I never felt like I was good enough. When I looked at my life I knew I had disappointed God and let him down. I also felt helpless to change this. Helpless probably isn’t the right word because that makes it sound like I tried to change and just couldn’t. The problem was there were things I really liked doing, things of which I believed God did not approve. I still smoked. I still drank. And even though I wanted to get close to God I didn’t want to give up anything to get there. All of this left me feeling like God remained very far away even as I tried getting closer to Him.