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 only 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!
Missy still isn’t sure what my aunt Jan saw in her.
Missy: What did Jan see in me at nine years old? Well, you’ll have to ask her about that. She was the only teacher in my academic history from whom I ever received a smack. She announced a rule to the class one day that no one could touch anyone else’s possessions at any time (due to a recent rash of kids messing with other people’s stuff). The next day, I moved some papers around on one of my classmates’ desks before school, and he tattled on me. Because of her newly pronounced rule, she took me to the girls’ bathroom and gave me a whack on the rear. At the time, I certainly would have never thought she had picked me out to marry her nephew!
The thing that really stood out about Missy was her independence, which is probably still her strongest characteristic today. She took so much abuse from her friends for dating me. She would often tell me stories about being asked why she was dating a redneck, backwoods hillbilly.
Missy: Jase did not fit the mold of the boys I was used to dating. Granted, I did not date very often, but I had been in an off-and-on relationship with a football player for over a year. The reason we would keep breaking up was because I wouldn’t go further than a kiss with him. After a little while, he would come back, turn on his charm, and we would get back together. And the cycle would continue. October of 1987 was during one of these breakups. Once I went out with Jase, he was the only boy I thought about. When my old boyfriend came back around again and tried to convince me to get back together, I just wasn’t interested anymore. My friends knew how I had always felt about him and couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t try again, instead of dating this “hick from West Monroe.” I told them I just couldn’t explain it. I was moving on and was so much happier. My good friends trusted my judgment and grew to like Jase, but the boys at school pretty much had one another’s backs and gave me much grief. What did I care? I didn’t know what smitten was until Jase. I was smote!
After high school, Missy attended the University of Louisiana–Monroe and was singing in the choir. She invited me to come listen to her sing in a concert. I had a fast-pitch softball game that night and went straight to the concert hall after my game. I was covered in dirt from head to toe, and although I didn’t yet have a full beard, I hadn’t shaved in several days. When I walked in, everybody else was spiffed up, wearing dresses and suits and ties. People were looking at me like, “Who is this ham?” I sat down and listened to the concert. They were singing songs that weren’t even in English, and I thought it was terrible. But Missy was one of the best singers onstage, and I knew how much singing meant to her.
After the concert, Missy walked up to me and kissed me. I could feel eyeballs burning holes through me. I could sense everyone around us stopping and thinking, What in the world is she doing with that guy? It’s a feeling I’ve had many times since that night. But Missy never seemed to care what others thought about us. It didn’t bother her. However, it was difficult for me to believe that she would stay with me for the long haul when most people in her life were asking her why she was dating me. For both of us, it was always about our love for God and each other.
One of my many weaknesses as a young man was jealousy. I wasn’t a very trusting person until I was about twenty-five years old. I had definitely been influenced negatively as a kid because my dad had trust issues, and friends and family members who had problems in their relationships had also soured me. I had a rule that if you were with me, you shouldn’t even be alone with another guy. Since I didn’t attend Missy’s school, I didn’t know if she was seeing other people or talking to other guys. While I was sharing my faith with the people on my list, I encountered this guy who was really quiet. He attended school with Missy at Ouachita Christian School. I shared the Gospel with him and baptized him.
“Hey, I want you to do me a favor,” I told him. “Do you know Missy West?”
“Yeah, I’ve seen her around,” he said.
“I want you to watch her at school and let me know what’s going on,” I said.
Well, this guy was so quiet that I forgot about asking him to spy on my girlfriend. A few months later, I saw him at youth church.
“Do you want to hear my report?” he asked me.
I could feel the blood rushing out of my body. He had a notebook in his hands, and I didn’t like the way his body language looked. He acted like something bad was going on, so I figured my relationship with Missy was about to end. But his reports didn’t reveal anything bad, and Missy was being very loyal. To my surprise, he had never seen her alone with another guy.
When I was about twenty-five, I made a decision to be my own man. I decided I wasn’t going to worry about things that were out of my control or allow other people’s bad decisions to affect my life. It was that simple. I put jealousy to death, and one of the reasons was what I found in 1 Corinthians 13:7, which says that love always trusts. Of course, when Missy found out about my clandestine snooping years later, she wasn’t happy. It was hard for her to believe that I had really changed just because I made the decision to overcome my mistrustful tendencies. I believe it was because the Lord was working in me that I was able to make the change.
The year after I graduated from high school, I immediately went to work with my dad running a crawfish farm on our land. I got free room and board and a little gas money. The greatest benefit was getting to eat crawfish every day, but you talk about a hard way to make a dollar! We had about five hundred crawfish traps spread across our property, and we figured out that fresh bait was better than the artificial bait you could buy in bags. So we would catch fish from the river and use the trash fish for bait. We would wake up well before daylight and run the fishnets. We would send the good fish to the market, chop up the rest for bait, and then it was off to the crawfish nets.
We had a boat that was like a crawfish processing station. There was a table in the middle of the boat and it had a hole in the middle of it. We’d dump the trap into the boat and then sort the crawfish, tossing the old bait and other creatures through the hole. Usually, one out of every five traps had a snake in it—and one out of every ten snakes could kill you! After a while, we got good at spotting the venomous snakes in a trap, and that’s the only thing that halted production—stopping to kill a cottonmouth water moccasin! The traps were spaced far enough apart that by the time you finished cleaning out one trap and filling it with bait again, you’d arrive at the next trap. By the end of the day, you were knee-deep in nonvenomous snakes and a lot of filth! Really, the worst part of operating a crawfish farm was that after about a month of fish fins poking you and crawfish pinching you, you’d have a bad case of blood poisoning. My hands would swell up, streaks would go up my arms, and I would end up in the hospital every few weeks.
But the money for the family was good, and we were eating crawfish every day. We figured out how to cook crawfish a hundred and one different ways. We were like Bubba from Forrest Gump—we fried them, stewed them, boiled them, and they were all good. It’s hard to mess up a crawfish. The worst thing you can do to crawfish is freeze them. Even though they’ll still be edible, they’ll lose their taste. I told you earlier that I’ve never mounted an animal in my life, but I wish we’d mounted the biggest crawfish we ever caught. We had a crawfish that was twice the size of any other crawfish I’d ever seen. It was as big as a lobster, and like an idiot, I ate him!
When crawfish weren’t in season, I made money by roofing houses, guiding duck hunts, and cutting firewood with my friend Mike Williams. When Mike was a kid, his dad made him cut firewood for a living. In my opinion, he became the greatest lumberjack in Louisiana and perhaps the USA. Mike was as wide as a hundred-year-old oak and just as tall! He was a firewood-cutting machine! I teamed up with him and we were probably cutting and stacking six to eight cords of firewood a day. I’m talking about cutting down trees, sawing and splitting them up, and delivering them to customers! Fortunately, Mike was faster with an ax than I was with a chain saw.
At the time, I was driving a 1970 Ford truck that I’d bought for a thousand bucks. In my world, if a vehicle runs and has air in its tires, then it’s worth a thousand dollars! The price never changes. I abused that truck for several years, only to sell it for a thousand bucks for an upgrade. It had a rebuilt hot rod engine and was fast! When we cut firewood in the rain, my truck would slide all over dirt roads and occasionally bounce off trees, so both of the truck’s sides were badly dented. After a while, I couldn’t open either door. It was real-life Dukes of Hazzard!
I remember the first time Missy approached the door and tried to open it. I told her the door wouldn’t open, and she started to go around to the other side. I informed her that the other door didn’t open, either. As she looked at me with a blank stare, I said, “Rule number one: if you want to go with me, you’ve got to crawl through the window.”
On our second date, I picked up Missy at her house and told her we had to make a pit stop to pick up crawfish bait at the fish market. We’d figured out a way to speed up the process by using the fish market’s gutbuckets instead of running nets ourselves. Through trial and error, we determined that the best crawfish bait was buffalo-fish heads. Unfortunately, when I pulled up to the market to get the garbage cans full of fish heads, I realized they had been outside for a couple of days. It was a warm day, and I could tell from the buzzing of hundreds of flies it was going to be nasty! I knew it was going to be the ultimate test of our relationship. The tubs were too heavy for one man to carry, so I told Missy, “I’m going to need your help on this.” She crawled out the window, and I led her to the trash cans filled with buffalo heads waiting for us. Like an idiot, the first thing she did was open the lid of a trash can. Immediately, she started gagging and dry-heaving in the parking lot.
“Rule number two,” I said. “Never pop the lid on a trash can.”
Much to my surprise, Missy regained her composure and helped me load the trash cans into the back of my truck. Right then, I realized our relationship might work out. She was climbing through windows and hauling fish heads.
A few months into our relationship, we had a campout down at my dad’s place. There were a lot of people from church, and we played games and fished into the night. We all gathered around a huge campfire, ate dinner, and sang songs together. Missy was clinging all over me, mainly because she was scared of everything flying in the air or crawling on the ground. It was one of those nights when you feel closer to God and everyone else because of the setting and the ambience—despite the bug activity. That was the first time we said “I love you” to each other. Now, there is still an ongoing debate as to who said it first. I remember clearly that she whispered, “I love you,” and then I responded. She is convinced that I said it first, but she was under the influence of bug paranoia. I believe her condition affected her memory.
Missy and I became best friends, and soon after our first year together I decided to propose to her. It was a bit of a silly proposal. It was shortly before Christmas Day 1988, and I bought her a potted plant for her present. I know, I know, but let me finish. The plan was to put her engagement ring in the dirt (which I did) and make her dig to find it (which I forced her to do). I was then going to give a speech saying, “Sometimes in life you have to get your hands dirty and work hard to achieve something that grows to be wonderful.” I got the idea from Matthew 13, where Jesus gave the Parable of the Sower. I don’t know if it was the digging through the dirt to find the ring or my speech, but she looked dazed and confused. So I sort of popped the question: “You’re going to marry me, aren’t you?” She eventually said yes (whew!), and I thought everything was great.
A few days later, she asked me if I’d asked her dad for his blessing. I was not familiar with this custom or tradition, which led to a pretty heated argument about people who are raised in a barn or down on a riverbank. She finally convinced me that it was a formality that was a prerequisite for our marriage, so I decided to go along with it. I arrived one night at her dad’s house and asked if I could talk with him. I told him about the potted plant and the proposal to his daughter, and he pretty much had the same bewildered look on his face that she’d had. He answered quite politely by saying no. “I think you should wait a bit, like maybe a couple of years,” he said. I wasn’t prepared for that response. I didn’t handle it well. I don’t remember all the details of what was said next because I was uncomfortable and angry. I do remember saying, “Well, you are a preacher so I am going to give you some scripture.” I quoted 1 Corinthians 7:9, which says: “It is better to marry than to burn with passion.” That didn’t go over very well. I informed him that I’d treated his daughter with respect and he still wouldn’t budge. I then told him we were going to get married with him or without him, and I left in a huff.
Over the next few days, I did a lot of soul-searching and Missy did a lot of crying. I finally decided that it was time for me to become a man. Genesis 2:24 says: “For this reason [creation of a woman] a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.” God is the architect of marriage, and I’d decided that my family would have God as its foundation. It was time for me to leave and cleave, as they say. My dad told me once that my mom would cuddle us when we were in his nest, but there would be a day when it would be his job to kick me out. He didn’t have to kick me out, nor did he have to ask me, “Who’s a man?” Through prayer and patience, Missy’s parents eventually came around, and we were more than ready to make our own nest.