That first harvest was a game changer. When we bought First Fruits Farm, many folks around here thought I must’ve been crazy—certified insane. No one laughed at me to my face, but behind my back? Plenty chuckled at this big rich guy without a clue. And had the situation been reversed—had I been a longtime North Carolina farmer, and some know-nothing NFL vet suddenly decided to move next door and grow sweet potatoes—I might’ve laughed too. I can’t picture Tom Brady bushwhacking on my land. But sixty tons of potatoes later, folks weren’t laughing at me anymore. I was a success. People started coming up to me and calling me the sweet-potato whisperer.
I knew that I wasn’t the reason we had such a successful harvest. It was all God. I think that He knew that with all the setbacks I’d suffered, I needed a victory. I’d felt lost. Helpless. Forsaken. That first year of farming was a morale boost—confirmation that I was doing the right thing. God was telling me, Don’t worry, Jason. I haven’t left you. I’m here. God showed up in a big way in 2014, and I couldn’t take credit.
Still, sweet-potato whisperer had a nice ring to it!
Yes, I knew God was behind my success. And I assumed that, with God’s help, every following year would be just as awesome as the previous one. It’s like what Paul wrote in Romans 8:31: “If God is for us, who can be against us?”
And, yes, a little ego started creeping back into my soul. Publicly, I gave God all the credit. Deep inside? I was thinking to myself, Hey, I’m a pretty good farmer! Our God is indeed an awesome God, and I was an awesome follower. Together, we’d fill the bellies of the hungry and needy with sweet potatoes.
With my confidence in full swing, and with my pride helping it along, I started running off at the mouth.
“We farmed five acres in 2014? We’re going to double it in 2015,” I started telling people. “We grew 120,000 pounds of sweet potatoes last year? We’re going to harvest 200,000 pounds this year.” Truthfully, I thought I was underestimating what First Fruits Farm would produce. I hoped our harvest would be more like 250,000 pounds—another amazing bumper crop. With God in our corner, I figured bumper crops were going to be the norm.
But I wasn’t done yet. I planned that after the crop was brought in on November 7, First Fruits Farm would throw an incredible harvest festival for all the volunteers who helped pick sweet potatoes that day. We’d have food. Music. Live entertainment. It was going to be an amazing celebration. We were going to show the world—or, at least, the Triangle area of North Carolina—that our God can do anything.
We planted our fields that spring, and, man, was it beautiful.
And then the rains stopped.
We experienced an extremely dry summer—one of the driest I remember. Without rain, the potatoes struggled to get a footing. And those that did—well, the deer were waiting for them.
While sweet potatoes are a popular crop in North Carolina, I’m the only farmer locally who grows them. Deer, as it turns out, love sweet potatoes. They love the vines. They love the potatoes themselves. They love everything about them. They’ll dig up the potato plants with their front hooves and pull them straight out of the ground. Although they didn’t notice my field in 2014, by 2015, the secret was out. The deer must’ve spread the news through their secret deer network or talked about it at their local watering hole. They must’ve said, “Hey, guys, this dumb farmer over here is planting a whole ten-acre crop of sweet potatoes, and it’s just for us!”
Deer don’t have the decency to actually finish eating what they start. They’re so trifling that they’ll dig up a sweet potato, take one dainty bite of it, and then move on to the next plant. They’ll nibble at that second plant for a moment and then, as if unimpressed with the quality of that one, too, move down the row to a third plant. They’re the strangest blend I’ve ever seen of being completely ravenous and wildly finicky. Do they taste one of my sweet potatoes and say, “Well, that’s an okay sweet potato, but the next one’s bound to taste so much better”? Are they marking their sweet-potato territory with their teeth?
I’m no deer psychologist, so I can’t say. All I know is that after having very little pressure from deer in 2014, an army of the animals seemed to surround every new bit of growth in 2015. If the deer owned an NFL ground mower, they couldn’t have cut down my sweet potatoes more efficiently.
The fields looked bleaker and sparser as the summer wore on. We farmers are taught to check on our crops throughout the year—dig up a mound here and there to better estimate what the yield is going to be. And as I dug up my test mounds, the results were…not encouraging.
That didn’t matter! I still had faith that God would give us a great harvest, just like I’d seen in a movie.
The movie was called Faith Like Potatoes, a Christian drama based on a true story. In it, a farmer moves to South Africa, becomes a Christian, and—bucking advice from scientists and fellow farmers and plain old common sense—plants potatoes during a terrible drought. Why? Because the Lord told him to, of course. And his faith was rewarded by a massive harvest of potatoes.
Hey, I was a farmer! I was called by God! And I grew potatoes too! Sure, my sweet potatoes aren’t even that closely related to regular potatoes, but still, I knew that I needed to have faith like potatoes. I knew that despite the lack of rain, despite the rather paltry test mounds I was digging up, despite the fact that apparently every deer in North Carolina was migrating to my farm, God was going to do a mighty miracle for us.
We love happy endings. Had this book ended with the 2014 harvest or with my miraculous tractor, it would’ve been just what Hollywood would want: a happily-ever-after ending, where the crops were always bountiful, the sun always shone, and the deer ate their own dang food.
Look at the Bible and you’ll see a more realistic depiction of life. Joseph’s deliverance of his brothers led to the captivity in Egypt. Moses’s walk out of Egypt got him to the Promised Land, all right, but that land was full of hundreds of years of strife and disobedience. The temple of God was built and torn down, rebuilt and torn down again. Even after we’ve had great success, life has a frustrating habit of reversing course—sometimes because of our own mistakes, sometimes because God still has lessons to teach us, and sometimes for reasons we might never know until we ask God in person.
“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven,” Ecclesiastes 3 begins in the King James Version. Football players and farmers, of course, pattern their lives by very literal seasons: With football, you’ve got the football season (naturally) and the off-season. In farming, you follow spring, summer, and winter religiously—planting early in the year, reaping late.
But those seasons have seasons too—seasons of success and of unexpected challenges.
Sports can teach you how to deal with those highs and lows. When I was with the Ravens, we alternated between winning seasons and losing years like clockwork. Mentally, I knew that farming had its own seasons too. You couldn’t grow a bumper crop every year. When I had money, I planned to use that cushion to ride out the bad years in preparation for the good ones.
But in 2015, I wasn’t ready to accept the ebb and flow just yet. My money was gone, but my faith was full. God loved me; this I knew. And because of that, I figured He wanted to reward my faith with success.
“God, I know You’re with me,” I said. “There’s no failure in You.”
As harvest day approached, my sweet potatoes weren’t looking any better. Even the deer were losing interest in our scant crop. But I wasn’t about to give up. We held a registration for volunteers to help us with our harvest, and more than one thousand people signed up. When we closed down the registration, I kept hearing from more and more people who wanted to come. I didn’t want to turn anybody away, so I encouraged anyone who wanted to come pick sweet potatoes to come pick sweet potatoes. God would make sure we had plenty. As harvest day grew closer, I was estimating that we might have as many as fifteen hundred people show up at our farm, ready to work.
As more and more people volunteered to help, the weather forecast for that Saturday grew more and more ominous. After a summer with hardly any rain, meteorologists were predicting a heavy downpour that day.
But I still had my faith! I was confident that if I did just the right things, I’d be able to move the hand of God in my favor. I started fasting on the Sunday before the harvest. I was going to have faith like potatoes, faith that could move mountains.
In reality, all of this “faith” was really just my own pride talking. I’d told everybody that First Fruits Farm would harvest 200,000 pounds of sweet potatoes this year. I had boasted. I had bragged. And even though I said it was all about God, it was about me, too, because I was the sweet-potato whisperer. I had a reputation to protect.
God knew I needed to be humbled.
All that week, despite all my prayers and all my fasting, the forecast barely changed. I clung to whatever hope I could. When the forecast on Friday said that the rain wouldn’t really start until the afternoon, I rejoiced. That won’t be good for our harvest festival, I thought, but at least we’d have a good morning to actually do some harvesting.
That Saturday morning, as more than a thousand people drove onto our farm and parked on the bare grass and dirt around our fields, I watched the blackest, heaviest, most ominous storm clouds roll in from the southeast. They were early.
“Hey, Jason,” someone said, tapping me on the shoulder. “Looks like there’s some really bad weather coming.” He wasn’t even looking at the clouds but rather at his phone. He was checking out the radar map, which had an angry dark-red patch—indicating a huge amount of rain—heading right toward our farm.
Sure enough, almost as soon as the last car of our more than one thousand volunteers rolled onto First Fruits Farm, the clouds opened up. It was as if the heavens had turned on a fire hose. It wasn’t just a gentle North Carolina rain; it was a monsoon.
“Aaaaaahhhhhh!” came the screams from our volunteers. “Oh, Lord! It’s raining!”
People were shrieking in terror, running for their cars as fast as they could, as if the sky were raining frogs. They cranked on their engines and tried to tear out of my makeshift parking lot, only by that time, the dirt underneath their tires was turning into sticky, slippery mud. For those who were trying to get out the fastest and revved their cars the highest, their tires churned the earth like a food processor, whipping the mud into a nice brown glue.
For a while, all I could do was just stand there, frozen in my rain slicker, as all my goals and hopes for the year were almost literally washed away.
I don’t know if you remember the online Mannequin Challenge from several years back, where people would record themselves walking or sitting or dancing or whatnot and then suddenly stop, rooted in place as if they were made of stone. That was me that morning: frozen and speechless. I was rooted in place, looking like a mannequin with vacant eyes and open mouth, as the rain pounded down. I watched as all my volunteers ran in every direction imaginable, like crabs on the beach.
My farm. My crops. It’s all going away.
Funny thing: the Wednesday night before, the youth-ministry pastor at our church had spoken on Gideon. In chapters 6 and 7 of the book of Judges, Gideon was called by God, and the Lord promised him a huge victory over the Midianites. But God wasn’t going to give him the victory in a way that might be misinterpreted as Gideon’s victory, born of his own strength. God thought that Gideon’s twenty-two thousand men were just too many, so He had Gideon whittle down his forces until he had just three hundred men. And, sure enough, God led the Hebrew commander to victory.
I thought about that as I watched more than one thousand volunteers run in terror and flee First Fruits Farm. I wasn’t left with three hundred people; I was left with fifty.
The rain kept coming. I eventually shook out of my stupor, pushed some cars out of the mud, and got to work. I could barely keep my eyes open as the sludge splattered off my face and shoulders. It was a cold rain, too, and the chill worked its way under my rain gear and clothes and dug under my skin. The fields were so muddy and sticky that our boots sank and slid as we worked. It was, in so many ways, a miserable harvest day.
But those fifty volunteers—those brave, hardy souls that stayed—didn’t seem to care. They were soaked to the bone, just as I was. The mud sucked at their feet, just as it did mine. They were, like Gideon’s soldiers, the faithful few—the few who remained of my volunteer army, who worked for hours in the rain and cold. They weren’t fighting Midianites; they were fighting the rain. But more importantly, they were fighting hunger.
Many of the remaining fifty were youth with Grace Christian Academy who had traveled all the way from Pennsylvania. They taught me something about character that day. Those young men and women, the faithful few who stayed, were the sort of people you’d share a foxhole with. They were the sort of people you’d want by your bedside if you were sick, who’d mourn with you if you were grieving, who’d stay with you if you were scared. I’ve heard the phrase fair-weather friends most of my life, and plenty volunteered that day. I don’t want to diminish their desire to help in the first place; just signing up and showing up illustrated that their hearts were in the right place. But on days like that, you need the stomach for it too. But when the rains came and almost everyone left, those sweet potatoes still needed to be harvested. Farmers don’t have the luxury of working only when the sun shines, and those fifty people who stayed understood that. They were my foul-weather friends that morning—friends you could count on when the world’s coming down around your ears, like was happening to me that day.
It’s my prayer that we’d all become foul-weather friends. So many people are in need. So many people are hurting and scared and sorrowful. If we call ourselves Christians, we’re called to bear one another’s burdens. Let’s ask ourselves, How well do we come alongside someone and work shoulder to shoulder with him or her in the rain?
Those fifty volunteers—those faithful few—helped harvest the thirty thousand pounds of sweet potatoes—potatoes that wouldn’t have gotten out of the fields otherwise.
That’s it: a meager thirty thousand pounds. I had thought that we would’ve grown two hundred thousand pounds of potatoes. I told everybody that’s what First Fruits Farm was going to do. I’d bragged about it. But despite doubling the land dedicated to the crop, I didn’t grow even what I’d grown the year before. Not even half that. Barely even a quarter.
I felt like such a failure. I felt like everyone was going to laugh at me again.
But at the end of the harvest, I looked up to heaven—the skies now done with their weeping—and gave thanks.
“God, thank You for what You’ve allowed us to harvest here. Thank You for these thirty thousand pounds of sweet potatoes. You’re the One who’s going to make sure this food goes where it’s needed. You’re the One who’s going to use these potatoes to feed the hungry, to give hope and encouragement to the poor. You’re the One who provides the increase. That’s not my responsibility. In faith, I know You’re going to do the rest.
“And, God, forgive me for allowing my selfish pride to get in the way of this harvest, to get in the way of accomplishing Your will. Amen.”
I learned a lot of lessons that year. I learned never to boast—never to count your sweet potatoes before they’re grown. I learned something about character, too, and that people of the truest, purest character—those foul-weather friends—are a rare and priceless find.
But maybe the biggest lesson I learned was this: God’s criteria for success is very different from the world’s.
One day not so long ago, Tay told me something pretty profound, something I sometimes forget, and something I wasn’t even thinking about in 2015.
“There’re so many people looking at us and our farm,” she said. “So many people have all these different expectations for us. So many people are judging us based on our success. But you know what? That’s them. We can’t fall into that success trap, Jason, and we cannot be focused on setting our value on being successful farmers. That is the trap of the world.
“God hasn’t called us to be successful,” Tay continued. “God has called us to be faithful.”
I think we all struggle to remember that sometimes. The world makes it easy to forget.
Most of our lives are driven by results. When I was in the NFL, it didn’t matter how hard you played or how skillfully you blocked or how exquisitely you snapped: in the end, it was all about wins and losses. Lose two or three games in a row, and the fingers start pointing. Blame starts flying. Lose four or five games? Six? Desperation sets in. I still follow a few of my former teammates on social media, and, man, if their team is having a bad year, their fans let them have it. They’ll praise those players when everything’s going well. But if you have a bad year, the people say, We’re going to shame you. You deserve it. I can’t emphasize enough how stressful that environment can be, how the pressure not only to do your own job well but also to make the team successful—even though you’re only a fraction of that team—can eat away at you.
It’s not just football. We’re all about success in this culture. We’re all about results. It doesn’t matter so much if Junior understands fractions, as long as he gets an A on the test. It doesn’t matter if Mary Jo loves playing the violin if she’s not first chair in the school orchestra. Post a cute video but it doesn’t get enough likes on Facebook or Instagram? Why did you bother to post it?
The Christian world is often no exception. Some pastors think that if their congregations aren’t growing, they’re failing God somehow. Or, on the flip side, pastors whose congregations are growing rapidly think it’s because God is particularly pleased with them. Then what happens if the numbers start slipping? All of us are pushed to watch for tangible, quantifiable results. We can be slaves to our own success.
God knows something we forget: Behind every number is a person. Behind every statistic is a story. While the rest of us follow our spreadsheets, God—in His infinite understanding—can look beyond all that. He can use our failures as much as our successes, our disappointments as much as our victories.
Now, don’t get me wrong: there are many people counting on the food we grow here at First Fruits Farm. We have many people and organizations depending on us. I take that to heart, and we strive to be excellent in everything we do. We sow and grow our seeds in faith, and we try to give excellent attention to every little detail. We celebrate when we pull in a bumper crop, and we should, because it means we’re able to feed more people.
But I remember Tay’s words: I wasn’t called to be successful. I was called to be faithful. I’m a farmer. I plant the seeds, care for them as best I can, and let God do the rest.
You weigh those sweet potatoes we harvested in 2015 and measure them up to our 2014 harvest, and that crop was a failure. Numbers don’t lie. But if I had grown three hundred pounds of potatoes that year, not thirty thousand, and been sincerely following God that whole time—following in faith—would I be a failure in His eyes? I don’t think so.
That wasn’t the last time we had a bad crop. We’ve had others since. But God has blessed us with bumper crops too. And sometimes we’ve had harvests that went right by the book. That’s the life of a farmer. You push through the bad seasons, you celebrate the good ones, and overall they seem to even out.
To follow God in faith means to trust in Him, but He doesn’t offer any guarantees that you’ll always be comfortable or always be happy. Tests and trials are part of following God too. Failure is as well. People who say that to be a Christian is to be happy and wealthy all the rest of your days…well, it seems as if those people never read the Bible.
When God first called me to be a farmer, He kept bringing me back to the story of Joseph. I’d read that story over and over again. God used it to plant seeds of His own in my life—seeds that grew thirty-, sixty-, maybe a hundredfold. But now that I’ve been a farmer for a while—now that I’ve had my share of financial and agricultural disasters—I look at that story a little differently.
Throughout Genesis 37–50, we see how God orchestrated Joseph’s life in amazing ways. “The Lord was with Joseph,” it says throughout the story. Preachers often say that he found favor with God. And you’d think that would’ve been awesome for him.
Hold on a second. You mean that when Joseph’s brothers conspired against him and plotted to kill him, he had the favor of God? When his brothers sold him into slavery, he had the favor of God? Or what about when Joseph was serving in the house of that powerful Egyptian official Potiphar and he was falsely accused by Potiphar’s wife and thrown in jail? That’s the favor of God? Or when he was stuck in that prison for so many years? Or when he successfully interpreted the dream of Pharaoh’s own cupbearer, and the cupbearer forgot to put in a good word for his old prison buddy? That’s favor?
Joseph’s story tells me that just because you’re doing the will of God doesn’t mean you’ll be protected from life. It tells me that even if God has big plans for you, it doesn’t mean you won’t encounter suffering along the way. When we follow God, He won’t always lead us through sun-dappled fields and beautiful hillsides. We’ll go through valleys. We’ll have to cross deep, dark places.
God is good, all the time. Can we still say that? Absolutely. But sometimes we have to get to the end of the story to see that goodness completely. Just like Joseph did.
I can feel Joseph. I can feel how he must’ve felt in prison. I can see the darkness. I can see the times when he feels like he’s all alone. I can see the times when he feels that God has forsaken him.
But God was still with him. It’s right there in the Bible: God was with him the whole time.
I am still tempted to make this story—my story, my wife’s story, my family’s story—all about me. I want to be selfish. But then, when I look at Joseph’s story, I realize that it’s not about me at all. It’s about God’s will being done. That’s it. Not my will be done, not yours, but God’s.
God knows that every sweet potato I grow goes to someone precious in His eyes, some part of His incomparable creation. Someone with his own story. Someone with her own part to play in God’s own huge epic tale.
What if my whole work on the farm—my whole life—is to help just one of those stories along. Everything that we’re doing right now, and everything we’ve gone through, could be just to help one family—a family that God is going to use in an awesome, incredible way. Maybe a little boy or a little girl in that family will grow up to do something amazing, and giving them a sweet potato that kept them going one day will be, in God’s eyes, the most significant thing I’ve ever done.
Success is nice, but I wasn’t called to be successful—at least not how the world defines it. I wasn’t called to be comfortable. I was called to be faithful. I was called to follow God in determination and humility and deep, deep awe. It’s God’s job to make that faithfulness work out in the end—to take whatever I grow and use it for His own awesome purposes.
Isn’t that what every Christian should be about? To follow? To forget about success and be as faithful to our calling as we can?
It’s not about me; it’s about Thee. Thy will be done, God. All the time.