10
Trust God . . . Period
BEFORE I WENT BACK to Emory that week in 2003, I needed to sit down with Kevin Myers. Kevin is my pastor, and six years earlier he had led me down a life-altering path.
He introduced me to Jesus Christ.
At that time, in the fall of 1997, Cheryl and I were busy raising four kids, and I was busy trying to make a name for myself as a sportscaster on the national level. In all honesty, the latter is what was driving my very existence. My identity was tied more to that career quest than my status as a husband and father. I was raised Catholic and was your run-of-the-mill churchgoing altar boy as a kid. A kid who quickly drifted away from anything church related or God related when I went off to college at the University of Georgia. Sunday mornings were designed to sleep in and shake off the effects of too much Saturday night fun, not to set an alarm clock so I could hit the 9:00 mass. On occasion I’d go to church with my folks on a weekend at home, but it had been so long that I hardly remembered when to stand, sit, or kneel.
So knowing that background, we fast-forward twenty years or so. It’s 1997, and Cheryl and I have this great family, a beautiful home, and good jobs, and in our minds, God has had nothing to do with it. We had tried a couple churches along the way, but nothing long term, and had gone back to our norm of leisurely Sunday mornings. But many of our kids’ friends were going to church every Sunday, and they were asking Eric and Maggie, in particular, since they were the older of our children, why they didn’t go to church. Eric and Maggie in turn asked us, and we really didn’t have an answer. So Cheryl and I had this fairly deep discussion and decided it might be good if the kids had some consistent exposure to this whole “spiritual thing” and we would scout out a few potential landing spots.
One of those was a church called Crossroads. It was a nondenominational, Bible-based church we had driven past a million times, sometimes wondering aloud, “What is that place with the blue roof?” It didn’t really look like a church. There was an office trailer at one end of the parking lot, a playground at the other, and in between was a stone building with a blue roof.
On one Sunday afternoon, the parking lot virtually empty, I stopped by to see if a door was open, hoping maybe I could grab some printed information and take it home. Turns out there was a church member there that day, and he explained that Crossroads was just about ten years old. When it started, they had held services at a movie theater for the twenty-five or so people who attended and later in a jazzercise studio. Now they had this real building for the 150 or so who called it their church home. I had no idea when I stood there chatting with this stranger that over the next twenty years this Crossroads would change locations again and again to bigger, more accommodating spaces, would change its name to 12 Stone, and would serve upward of twenty-five thousand people every weekend at a main campus with half a dozen satellite locations. All I knew right then was that this little place with the blue roof had a service for adults and a separate one for the kids at the same time in one of the meeting rooms there. This sounded like it might be worth a try. And remember, Cheryl and I were doing this for the kids. Right.
The first service we attended was unlike anything either of us had ever experienced, and we weren’t sure that was a good thing. There was no organ music. There was a band. There were no time-honored hymns being sung. There was something I later learned was called contemporary Christian music being sung, and people were clapping along with it. Let’s just say my comfort level was not exactly high at this point. There were no suits and ties. There were jeans. And there was no priest. There was this guy, Kevin Myers. He was the most gifted communicator and teacher I had ever heard, and it appeared he knew the Bible back and forth. I hadn’t opened one in about a quarter of a century, but that day I was immersed in it, because if you didn’t own a Bible, you were welcome to take the one where you were sitting. I remember taking notes on the handout we were given at the door as if this information was going to be on some final exam I had to prepare for. Which I guess is kind of true.
Anyway, Kevin posed a couple questions that day. “Who’s the provider in your family?” and “What are you pursuing, happiness or wholeness?” Well, I had this. (1) I’m the provider, and (2) happiness. Seems I was 0 for 2. Over the next few weeks, we explored these questions at Crossroads, and long story short, a light just seemed to go on for me. And it was shining on a life that was in need of recalibration. I was living such a me-centered existence that naturally I viewed myself as the provider, and I was all about the next thing that would make me happy—something I would buy, some recognition of my work that would let me throw back my head and puff out my chest and say, “Look at me!” And now here I was on what used to be laid-back Sunday mornings at home taking notes about God the provider and this Jesus, who came to serve, not to be served, and how happiness is okay, but wholeness is what it’s all about, and the only way to be the husband and father I need to be is to have a heavenly Father who’s directing my steps, and the only way to do that is to surrender to the God who made me, who sent his Son to die for my sins so that I can be forgiven and have a relationship with God through Jesus. Shoot, I even started clapping along with those songs that were now becoming familiar. After about a month, I cornered Kevin after a service.
“Hey, do you wanna grab lunch one of these days? I don’t know how to put this exactly, but God’s messin’ with me.”
“I’d love to. How about Wednesday?”
Wednesday, December 10, 1997, became my “spiritual birthday,” the day Kevin and I sat at an O’Charley’s restaurant in Lawrenceville, Georgia, talking about where I had been in my life, where I saw myself going, and this kind of gnawing feeling that there had to be more to my existence than my job and its stranglehold on me. He said four words I still remember. “You’re a prayer away.” So that’s what we did. Right there at the table. Prayed to turn a me-centered life into a Christ-centered life. Took about twenty seconds to say a prayer that changed me for eternity. Blackberry.
Now I just had to live it out.
Here’s a story you may find amusing. At least it is now. It was sort of gut-wrenching at the time. The 1998 PGA Championship was going to be played in Seattle at Sahalee Country Club, and so several weeks before, media day was held. It gives the national golf press and the TV crews from Turner and CBS a chance to play the course and talk to the course superintendent and others as part of our preparation for the championship. I had been a new Christian for about six months and had, I guess you could say, a peaceful, uneasy feeling in some ways when it came to going public with my faith.
There were days when I’d be walking into a Family Christian Store to buy some music or a book and would actually break into a sweat thinking somebody was going to recognize me and ask me what I was doing there or, heaven forbid, quiz me on something biblical. One day I bought one of those Christian fish symbols to put on my bumper and then stood in the parking lot for ten minutes getting up the nerve to stick it on. I was worried about what co-workers might think and say, like, “What’s Ernie doing driving around with that on his bumper? Shoot, I once heard the guy drop four F-bombs when we ran the wrong highlight in postgame.”
So back to Sahalee. I was standing in my hotel room that morning getting ready to head to the golf course with my buddies from Turner, and I decided this was the day I would wear for the first time in my life a WWJD (What would Jesus do?) bracelet. The fish on my bumper hadn’t raised any questions, so now I would take the next step. I took the elevator to the lobby, saw my co-workers waiting with their golf clubs, and promptly took the elevator back up to my room and took off the bracelet. Then I put it back on. I took the elevator back downstairs and joined up with my buddies, and off we went to play eighteen. I will admit that during the course of the day, anytime I’d be talking to somebody I would be watching their eyes to see if they were noticing what was on my wrist. During those hours on the golf course, it hit me. Here I was, having made a decision to put an end to a me-centered life, and all I had been doing all day was thinking about . . . me. You could have hit me right between the eyes with a four iron and it wouldn’t have had the impact of that simple realization.
This life was not going to be about what I wore or what I put on my bumper. It was going to be about the way I lived each and every day. And the only way to live a life of faith was to be in tune with the Holy Spirit. It was about being obedient to a voice that wasn’t mine.
I had help in this journey from men just like me—fathers, husbands, businessmen. Fifteen or twenty of us would gather at Crossroads at 6:00 a.m. every Friday for Bible study. Men like Corey Baker and Doug Moran would share their stories, we would dive into the Word, and I would gain a whole new appreciation for the Bible. It wasn’t this antiquated bunch of stories that had no relevance in modern times, as had been my opinion for ages. It was a book for the ages, a love letter from God to his people packed with practical, everyday wisdom. I can never thank guys like Corey and Doug enough for the hours they spent pouring what they had learned through the years into me. And the same can be said of the members of the study I joined a couple years later and am still attending on Thursday mornings going on fifteen years now.
Tim Cash started the group. He was a pitcher whose arm problems kept him from reaching the major leagues as a player. But he reached the majors as a leader of Baseball Chapel, holding Sunday services before games and mentoring countless players, leading many to a new life in Christ. He invited me to join his group, which met in the back of a barbecue restaurant outside Atlanta. Among our number are a couple guys whose names you’ll recognize right off the bat: Jeff Foxworthy, the comedian and TV host, and Hall of Fame pitcher John Smoltz. There are other former professional baseball and football players in the group, along with a few local businessmen. But when we walk into that room, nobody has a professional title.
We’re there to grow as men of God. It’s that simple. Sure, while we’re devouring bacon and eggs and grits and biscuits and gravy, we’ll hear Smoltzy tell a story or two about games he’ll never forget, and Jeff will trot out some new material and a “you might be a redneck” joke or two. But when breakfast is done, we get down to business. And that means helping a brother through a tough time, or holding each other accountable to stay on the right path, or breaking down biblical teaching we can’t quite get a handle on. (That happens a lot with our crew.) So to Tim and Jeff and John, and Chuck Scott, Todd Peterson, Lowry Robinson, Tom Tabor, Lester Archambeau, John Burrough, Mark Parker, Paul Byrd, Todd Greene, Bruce Coker, Brett Butler, Todd Weiner, Mike McCoy, Trey Miller, and the others who will give me an incredibly hard time for leaving them off this list—thanks, fellas. My life would not be the same without you.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, Cheryl turned her life over too, though it took substantially longer than it did for me. Cheryl’s a deep thinker. (I stay more in the shallow end.) She accepts very little at face value, and when it came to this matter of faith, she wanted proof. I made a decision for Christ knowing I still had a ton to learn, while my wife wanted to learn as much as she could before making any kind of commitment.
There were passages in the Bible she could not agree with, and there were stories she could not believe. Kevin made regular visits to our house after December 10 to walk us through the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, and in the course of those kitchen table discussions, there were moments of clear realization and outright skepticism.
Let me be totally honest here. It got messy around our house. While Cheryl could appreciate the step I had taken, she wasn’t there yet. I’m trying to clean up my language, trying to set aside time to get into the Bible, stopping by a Family Christian Store to buy Steven Curtis Chapman CDs and a fish for the back of my car, and she’s looking at me and asking, “Are you the same guy I married fifteen years ago?” It’s hard when you’re coming at something as pivotal as faith from different angles. Kevin was in the middle of this, providing not only biblical perspective but also commonsense talk about life—our lives.
“Look at where you’ve been—these adoptions, the way you care for this special-needs child,” Kevin would say. “I’m telling you, your lives reflect the love of Jesus Christ more than the lives of so many people who have identified as Christians their entire lives. Let’s not get hung up on labels. Let’s just get intentional about your faith. I’m telling you, you’re living Christian lives, but you just don’t know it. And even though you weren’t paying any attention to God, he was paying attention to you. How’d you wind up at that particular orphanage in Romania, Cheryl? Ernie, why’d you immediately say, ‘Bring him home’ when your wife described this kid’s condition? Did those things just randomly happen, or was this the work of a Creator who orchestrates life in ways we can’t begin to understand? That’s how the Holy Spirit works, guys—gives you just a nudge, Cheryl, and says, ‘That’s the boy . . . the one with the blond hair . . . the one who can’t walk or talk . . . that’s the one.’ That’s the Holy Spirit who whispers in your ear, Ernie, ‘Bring him home’ at the very moment your wife is asking for an answer over a static-filled phone line from Romania. Now if your answer to those questions is that it just somehow happened, we need to go back to square one. But if you believe there’s a grand design being played out before our very eyes, then let’s press on.”
And we did. And we hit brick walls. And we obliterated some. And we agreed to disagree on some things, but on others there was firm common ground that steadied us, like the belief that this life isn’t all there is. That there is something more. That there is life everlasting. That this family we have on earth, which includes a Romanian orphan with a fatal disease, will someday be reunited in heaven. It was that eternal perspective that for Cheryl trumped all those things she was struggling to wrap her head around. Her spiritual birthday was March 25, 1998.
Blackberry . . . the size of Montana.
So now you know why Kevin Myers was the other person I needed to speak with. He had been a spiritual mentor to me for going on six years now. He made himself available for the multitude of questions I would throw at him and always had a scriptural basis to underscore his response. I valued his friendship. We were both husbands and fathers. We were roughly the same age. I was a little older—he was a good bit wiser. He had a much better handle on the stuff that really matters, and I was trying to get there.
So now we were sitting in a local Starbucks talking about how having a doctor speak one particular c word can pretty much knock your world off its axis, and was it okay that I wanted to punch God right in the nose? We began to unpack what I said I believed, going all the way back to that day in December 1997. Was this diagnosis going to shake my faith to its core, or was my faith going to carry me through this trial? Did I truly believe what the apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, that in all things God works for the good of those who believe? He didn’t say all things except non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Yeah, I believed that. We talked about Job in the Old Testament having his life turned upside down, yet through it all, though he openly questioned what God was doing or was allowing to happen, he never lost his faith.
“In times like this, you have a couple options,” Kevin told me. “You can turn on God, or you can turn to God.”
We talked about the ninth chapter in the Gospel of John where the disciples asked about the blind man by the side of the road. Why had this happened to him? Who had sinned, this man or his parents? Jesus’s response was, in essence, “You’re asking the wrong question. It’s not why this happened but how God is going to use it for his glory.” I got that. But the moment of that heart-to-heart talk in the middle of a busy coffee shop that would mark my life was yet to come. Kevin pulled a pen from his pocket, grabbed a light brown Starbucks napkin, and wrote down one word.
“EJ, this whole thing is about this: trust.” He held up the napkin to show me and then went back to writing.
“Is it going to be trust with a question mark? Is it going to be ‘I’ll trust God if the next test at Emory comes back the way I want it to’? Or is it going to be trust. Period. You trusted him with your life six years ago. It’s easy to trust him when things are going great and you’re being blessed with good things left and right. How does that trust feel right now, while you’re looking up from this valley you’ve never been in?”
And that’s why I had to talk to Kevin Myers. And that’s why to this day, whenever I send an email, my signature at the bottom of the message looks like this:
Ernie Johnson Jr.
Trust God . . . Period.