And anyway, it’s not important why God chose me, because what happened isn’t really about me. And the lights all those women saw around me? Those aren’t about me, either. Those lights are about God. My story, and my testimony, is all about God. Everything I’ve gone through in my life is all about God. This book is a book about God and His presence in our lives.
So when I say, “Why not me?” I mean that I’m just like anyone else who has ever searched for God. I’m like anyone who has ever longed to feel God’s presence. For all the doubt and skepticism that kept me tied up in knots for years, I can honestly say I never stopped looking for God. I never stopped yearning for a relationship with Him. Even in my darkest moments, when I vowed to cut God out of my life, I never really did. I just kept talking to Him, and He kept pursuing me.
I was talking, and He heard every word. And He was talking, but I couldn’t hear a thing.
Maybe He picked me, because He got tired of me not listening.
But here’s the thing—God talks to all of us.
Yes, God was there with me at my speeches. But God is there with all of us, always, no matter what we’re doing. You don’t have to see a glowing light to know that God is with you. You don’t have to die and go to heaven to know you are in His presence. All you have to do is want to have a relationship with Him. All you have to do is look for Him. “Seek and you will find,” it says in Matthew 7:7. “Knock and the door will be opened to you.”
I did a lot of seeking and knocking. And finally I found Him. Or maybe more accurately, He found me.
I CAN’T WAIT to tell everyone that God is real. But what I’ve found as I’ve gone out and told my story is that, more often the not, the people I think I’m ministering to are actually ministering to me. I think I’m teaching them about God. Instead, they’re teaching me about faith.
I’ll give you an example. When the twins were in the NICU, we had a lot people praying for them every day. A woman who worked with my mom, Danica, and her husband, Danny, who was a pastor in another small town, came by the hospital one day to pray over the twins. A nurse told them they weren’t allowed to enter the NICU. They could have just left, but they didn’t.
Instead, they laid their hands on the metal door that led into the NICU, and they prayed for the twins right there.
Not much later, we learned Danny was gravely ill. Virgil and I prayed hard for him, just as he’d prayed for our twins. But then, one day when I was sitting in a doctor’s office, I felt another nudge from God. He wanted me to do more than just pray for Danny—He wanted me to give him $600. Now, the school year was just about to start for my two older kids, so we needed to buy new shoes and supplies. And our mortgage was due, and we had other bills, and we just didn’t have a dollar to spare. But here was God anyway, telling me to send Danny money. I called Virgil and told him about the nudge, and, as always, he didn’t hesitate. “Just write the check,” he said. I couldn’t understand where the money was going to come from, and I sat there in the doctor’s office and prayed to God to help me understand.
Just then—just then—I got a text message from a woman from my church. She’d never sent me a text before, and the text simply read, “Hebrews 11:1.” That was it, nothing else—just the scripture. I found a Bible in the doctor’s waiting room and quickly opened it to the passage. What I read astonished me.
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen” (KJV).
Out of the blue, my friend had sent me a message about faith. I immediately knew this was God talking to me again. While I was sitting there grappling with His instructions, He sent me a simple message—have faith in Me. That night, we sent Danny the money.
Only a few months later, Danny took a turn for the worse. He was losing weight fast, and he didn’t have long to live. Virgil and I went to see him, and I held Danny’s hand as we sat with him and his wife and prayed. I told him how much it meant to us that he and his wife had prayed over our twins in the hospital. And Danny, in his weakened voice, told me what it had meant to him when he received the money from us.
“We were in need, and I was praying and praying,” he said. “And then you sent us exactly what we needed. God answered our prayers.”
I sat there and thought, God used me to help Danny. But, like I said, whenever I think I am ministering to someone, they are actually ministering to me.
At one point during our visit with Danny, he looked at me and asked, “What is heaven like?”
I told him what it felt like to be with God. I described the almost unbearable joy I felt at seeing my younger self. Then I said, “You know, Danny, God took me before I felt an ounce of pain. There was no suffering. There was only joy.”
When I told him this, Danny smiled and turned to his wife. He didn’t say anything to her, and he didn’t have to. Danica was crying, not out of sadness but out of relief. “That’s what I’ve been worried about the most,” she said through her tears. “I can’t bear the thought of Danny suffering.”
Danny drew comfort from what I told him, but not for himself—he drew it for his wife. He didn’t even ask me about heaven for himself; he did that for Danica, too. He wanted her to know that, at the very end when his mind and body failed and he was at his most vulnerable, she didn’t have to suffer for him because he’d already be gone. He’d already be on his way to heaven.
What a great lesson in faith and love! How remarkable that God never stops ministering to me. The strength of Danny’s belief in God filled me with hope and inspiration. But God wasn’t done yet. As Virgil and I were leaving, I noticed a beautiful cross on the wall. I told Danny how much I liked it, and he said, “That’s my favorite scripture.” I hadn’t seen any scripture, just the cross. But then his wife stepped out of the way, and I saw a verse printed just to the side of the cross:
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen.”
It was Hebrews 11:1 yet again. And today, that verse is stenciled on my wall at home. I put it there to remind me of how Danny ministered to me in his last days of life, and I think of him every time I pass it.
God turns the tables on me all the time. When I think I’m teaching, I’m actually learning. Whenever I talk to my great friend Amber, I always get back much more than I give. When I spoke with Patricia about her daughter Heather, her faith in the face of such a terrible loss really touched my heart. Then there was Shearl and her brave son Mickey. Shearl would later explain to me that when she saw me in Walmart, she felt a strange urge to go over and talk to me. She shrugged it off and walked past me but then circled back. She passed and circled two more times before finally giving in to the urge.
So while I thought God put me in the flower aisle to talk to them, He actually put them there to talk to me.
Why? Because of Mickey.
Mickey is, in ways I can only admire, God’s warrior. He was ejected from a truck and suffered a broken back and severe brain trauma. If the first responder had shown up even a minute later, Mickey would have died on the road. He was in a coma for three weeks, and doctors told Shearl he probably wouldn’t make it. But on the day doctors told Mickey’s family to gather up and say good-bye to him, they instead gathered up and prayed to God to save Mickey’s life. They spoke life over him with scriptures. And within hours, Mickey’s condition changed. He pulled through.
Then doctors said he’d probably never talk or laugh—now he does those things, too. And while his life is extremely hard and his battle is sure to be long, Mickey has never once cursed God or doubted God or asked God why this happened to him. All of his pain and suffering has only made him more confident in how much God loves him. Even in the darkest darkness, he feels God’s presence.
Beauty from ashes.
Later, when I asked Mickey if it would be okay if I put his story in this book, he didn’t hesitate. “Yes,” he said. “I want God to use me. I want people to know that the God I worship is a loving God.”
THERE
’S ANOTHER QUESTION people always ask me: “What does God’s voice sound like?”
I don’t know if they expect me to say God has a big, booming voice that comes down from the heavens, but it’s not like that at all for me. When I hear God’s voice—when one of those thoughts pops in my head or I get one of those sudden nudges—what I’m hearing is my own voice. And because it’s my own voice, it can get confusing. Early on I used to confuse God’s commands with silly, random thoughts, like when I fought so hard not to leave a $100 tip, or when I almost didn’t tell Patricia about “blue rabbit.” But now I can recognize God’s commands, because they’re usually something I don’t want to do. They’re something that will probably embarrass me, and, like I said, I hate to be embarrassed. But that’s how I know it’s God and not me—He puts me in positions I would never put myself.
That’s not to say I don’t have internal debates over a thought, because sometimes I still do. And that’s because the enemy also uses my voice to talk to me. So I have to stop and ask myself, If I follow this instinct, is it going to help me or help someone else? Is it of the flesh, or is it of the spirit? And if you think about it for a while, you can usually figure out that, No, that is not God. That is of the flesh. You begin to recognize your own voice, the enemy’s voice, and God’s voice.
But God doesn’t use only words to speak to us. Sometimes it can be a feeling or the sense that you’re being drawn to a person or place. And sometimes, God comes to us in our dreams.
Remember I told you about the dream I had where my brother Jayson was singing and worshipping on the stage of a church? When I had the dream, Jayson was in his twenties and struggling mightily. All he felt was a deep resentment for how his childhood had gone and how his life had turned out. He became a hard-core, reckless drinker. He remembers waking up behind the wheel of his truck one night as the truck was barreling 60 miles per hour through a cornfield. Another time, he remembers driving his motorcycle the two hours from Oklahoma City to my hometown in the middle of the night. He was dead drunk, had no helmet on, and drove 130 miles per hour the whole way. He didn’t care enough about himself or anyone else to make any changes. He entertained the idea of a lonely, drunken death, and he was okay with it.
Eventually his behavior led to four arrests for driving under the influence. Through it all, Jayson never wavered in his feelings about God. While I was always of two minds—is He real or isn’t He?—Jayson would always flat out say, “God doesn’t exist.” When I’d visit him at his home and try to bring up God, he’d say, “Don’t come into my house and talk that hocus-pocus God stuff.” And so we never talked about God. But I never forgot my dream, and I clung to the hope that God would find Jayson. Oddly enough, I truly believed He would save Jayson, even while I wasn’t sure He would ever save me.
Well, today things are different. Today, Jayson stands on the stage of a chapel and sings and worships God—just like in my dream.
How did it happen? Oddly enough, my brother says it happened in a jail cell. He was there after his fourth DUI arrest and was facing ten years in prison. He remembers waking up in the top bunk in the cell. The man in the bottom bunk was a crack addict loudly proclaiming his innocence. The other one, a skinny older man, sat on the floor and quietly read a Bible.
After a while, Jayson got tired of hearing the addict’s excuses and explanations for why he failed a drug test. He leaned down from the top bunk and let the guy have it.
“Do you hear yourself, man?” Jayson said. “Listen to yourself! You’re here, because you did drugs! You did drugs! It’s what you do!”
Just then the old man on the floor spoke for the first time. Jayson remembers he looked like an aging hippie, with smoky glasses and a pirate ship and a compass tattooed on his chest. He reminded Jayson of Jerry Garcia. When Jayson finished haranguing the crack addict, the old man looked at Jayson and said, “Why are you here?”
It wasn’t a question, and Jayson didn’t answer him. He just lay back in his bed and stared at the ceiling. He knew what point the old man was making: who was Jayson to be berating the addict when he was a busted and broken addict himself? Those four words felt like a painful and devastating lesson for Jayson. They left no room for excuses or enabling behavior. They were a call for Jayson to finally take stock of himself and see how utterly wrecked he was.
And right there, in his top bunk, he turned the page on his old life.
The next day guards had the inmates step out of their cells so they could do a head count. When they went back in, Jayson noticed the old man wasn’t there. “What happened to the old guy?” he asked the addict. “What old guy?” he said. When Jayson made bond, he asked the guard how many people had been in his cell with him.
“How many bunks do you see, dumbass?” the guard said.
Had the old man been a hallucination? Even during his worst drinking binges Jayson had never hallucinated anything like that. Was it a manifestation of his dire mental state? Or had it been something divine? Jayson didn’t know for sure. But what he did know was that he went into prison a broken man, and he came out more whole than he’d ever been in his life. He came out wanting to change.
And he did. He went to AA meetings and stopped drinking. He went to a series of sermons called “Practical Atheists” and realized he wanted a relationship with God. And on November 2, at 12:47 p.m.—he remembers the day and time precisely—Jayson accepted Jesus Christ in his life.
God now comes first in Jayson’s life, and he gives God thanks and credit for the woman he calls “my No. 2”—his wife, Melissa. He met her after getting sober and taking a job at the Christian University where she worked. Jayson had no desire to be in a relationship, but God had other plans. Melissa is sweet and tender and strikingly beautiful, and “she has a smile so big it makes other people’s cheeks crease,” as Jayson likes to say. I’ve never seen him happier.
Today Jayson leads chapel time at the college where he works, bounding up onstage and leading other worshippers in song—just like in my dream. “Pain and fear can dominate your life for a long time,” Jayson says now. “But fear and faith cannot coexist. You have to choose which one you are going to serve, and that’s what I did. And now everything I do I try to do for the glory of God.”
God saved Jayson from the same darkness He saved me.
The other weird dream I had puzzled me for a long time. It’s the one that made me wake up Virgil and tell him I knew God’s perfect plan for us, except I could only remember scattered details, like a couple of numbers and a great wall. I had no idea what the numbers or the wall meant, until my uncle came over one night and opened up a Bible. He asked me for the first number I remembered, and I told him 16. He went to the sixteenth book of the Bible—the Book of Nehemiah. “What was the second number?” he asked, and I told him it was 6. He went to the sixth chapter in Nehemiah and began reading it aloud.
It was all about how Nehemiah built a great wall.
Actually, Nehemiah restored the broken-down walls of Jerusalem. It was a job that should have taken years, but Nehemiah completely restored them and fortified Jerusalem in just fifty-two days. “When all our enemies heard about this, all the surrounding nations were afraid and lost their self-confidence,” it says in Nehemiah 6:16, “because they realized that this work had been done with the help of our God.”
At least now I knew what the wall in my dream meant, but I still didn’t understand what it had to do with me. What kind of wall did God want me to restore? What was I supposed to do now? I kept thinking and praying about the wall, but I never got anywhere.
Then one day I came across a passage from the Book of Isaiah in a book I was reading.
“No longer will violence be heard in your land, nor ruin or destruction within your borders,” it says in Isaiah 60:18, “but you will call your walls Salvation, and your gates Praise.”
As I read it I realized that the wall in my dream had not been a literal wall. The wall was God’s salvation. God had restored my ability to acc
ept the salvation that Christ had died to give me, and now He was sending me out to tell others about it.
Now, I’m not in any way comparing myself to Nehemiah, not by a long shot. Even after everything I’ve experienced, I don’t have all the answers or even most of the answers—I’m just an ordinary Christian who loves God dearly and is constantly searching for ways to get closer to Him. And my realization about what my dream meant did just that—it brought me closer to God.
You see, Christ died for my sins, but for much of my life I didn’t believe that. I believed He died for other people’s sins, just not mine. I believed I was too horrible, too undeserving of his compassion. And so I couldn’t accept the salvation that Christ died to give me.
But then God gave me His wonderful gift, the gift of His glorious presence, and after that I did accept His salvation. I realized I wasn’t undeserving or unforgiveable. God broke my cycle of pain and secrecy. God ripped away my curtain of shame. And now God wants me to share my story with others in the hopes that they, too, can accept His salvation. When I talk about all the things that happened in my life, I am hoping it empowers others to talk about their own lives, often for the very first time. And when they do, God breaks their cycles of pain and secrecy. God rips away their curtains of shame. And in this way their salvation is restored.
God’s salvation was always there for them, as it was always there for me. God just needs us to accept it. He needs us to choose Him.
And that, I realized, is why God allowed me to think I’d be able to return to heaven, when all along His plan was to send me back. God gave me the opportunity to choose Him, and that’s exactly what I did—I chose to stay with God. Before that I could never fathom loving God more than anything else, but once I made the choice to stay with Him I couldn’t understand loving anything more than God. God gave me that choice so I would always remember choosing Him. The choice was everything.
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