Centered Read online

  Praise for

  Centered

  “A remarkable story in which family, deep self-reflection, and an unshakable belief in a path predestined by God triumph over fortune and comfort. There truly is no testimony without a test—a point Jason proves many times over in this wonderfully impactful read.”

  —John Harbaugh, head coach of the Baltimore Ravens

  “Former NFL player Jason Brown walked away from comfort and familiarity in 2012 to accept a new calling that was out of his comfort zone. As owner of First Fruits Farm in North Carolina, Brown is known today as the Sweet Potato Whisperer. Farming has stretched him and his family yet brought them closer together and benefited countless families in need. The stories Jason shares point to a heavenly Father who loves to bless those who are obedient to His call.”

  —James Robison, founder and president of LIFE Outreach International

  “This story chronicles the sacrifices, trials, and ultimately the provision, protection, purpose, and blessings that Jason and Tay Brown found as they left wealth and riches to follow God’s call to serve in His kingdom. As Jesus said, ‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person’ to do this. Their lives offer inspiration to everyone, and this book gives pause and a chance for self-reflection of one’s own choices and priorities. Jason and Tay Brown are an inspiration of courage, faith, and commitment to God, family, and community.”

  —John Mahshie, executive director of Veterans Healing Farm

  “Jason Brown’s inspiring journey told in Centered is a powerful self-reflection of a life filled with pride, humility, and a series of twists and turns that ultimately drove him and his family to give it all up, only to gain it all back and more, through his dramatic decision to walk by faith and follow God’s confusing and, at times, questionable calling. Centered is real faith at its core, depicting the challenging pressures of today’s society as well as its destructive and thinly veiled version of success. Jason’s most honest and vulnerable moments turn today’s cultural views upside down and thrust readers into questioning the depth of their own faith and personal relationship with God, forcing them to reexamine their own priorities, beliefs, and choices to live with divine purpose.”

  —Chip Paillex, president and founder of America’s Grow-a-Row

  “Centered is engaging, enlightening, and reflective. Jason tells a very personal story—from being bullied as a child in a racially segregated community to becoming the highest paid center in the NFL, then retiring at the height of his career to follow God’s calling for him. His joy and fulfillment from helping others, while overcoming his own despair when his farm was on the verge of bankruptcy, is motivating. This is an excellent read from an inspiring person.”

  —Bubba Cunningham, director of athletics at the University of North Carolina

  “Jason Brown’s story is bathed in Scripture, and his journey through faith and obedience is cut straight from the Old Testament. Examples of Job, Joseph, and Daniel all come to mind as Jason rises above worldly success and acts obediently to share Christ with the hurting.”

  —Edward Graham, Samaritan’s Purse

  “Jason Brown’s story is a remarkable testament to living a life that exemplifies the true qualities most of us desire but too often fall short of attaining. At age twenty-seven, at the height of his NFL career filled with prestige, fame, and worldly fortune, he walked away from it all. Jason’s rock-solid faith led him to farming and a new life, of abundance and blessings for his family and neighbors in need, well beyond anything he could have imagined.”

  —Joe Lamp’l, Emmy Award–winning creator and executive producer of Growing a Greener World and founder of joegardener.com

  Centered

  All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked (GNT) are taken from the Good News Translation in Today’s English Version—Second Edition. Copyright © 1992 by American Bible Society. Used by permission. Scripture quotations marked (KJV) are taken from the King James Version. Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. (www.zondervan.com). The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica Inc.™ Scripture quotations marked (NKJV) are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  Details in some anecdotes and stories have been changed to protect the identities of the persons involved.

  Copyright © 2021 by Jason Brown

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by WaterBrook, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

  WaterBrook® and its deer colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Author is represented by Alive Literary Agency, www.aliveliterary.com.

  All photographs, with the exception of those credited, are courtesy of the author’s personal archives.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Brown, Jason, 1983- author. | Asay, Paul, author.

  Title: Centered : trading your plans for a life that matters / Jason Brown with Paul Asay.

  Description: First edition. | Colorado Springs : WaterBrook, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020022396 | ISBN 9780593193358 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593193365 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Obedience—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Vocation—Christianity. | Brown, Jason, 1983- | Farmers—Religious life—North Carolina. | Christian biography. | African American football players—Biography.

  Classification: LCC BV4647.O2 B755 2021 | DDC 270.092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020022396

  Ebook ISBN 9780593193365

  waterbrookmultnomah.com

  Interior book design by Diane Hobbing, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Jessie Sayward Bright

  Cover photograph: © James Ross/Stocksy

  ep_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1: Stuck

  Chapter 2: Planting

  Chapter 3: Brothers

  Chapter 4: Faith, Family, and…Fortune?

  Chapter 5: A Different Sort of Field Goal

  Chapter 6: The Farm

  Chapter 7: Disaster and Deluge

  Chapter 8: Sweet, Sweet Potatoes

  Chapter 9: Failure and Faithfulness

  Chapter 10: The Real Harvest

  Chapter 11: Dirty Miracles

  Chapter 12: Feast

  Photo Insert

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  Stuck

  Be careful what you pray for. The thought crept into my mind as I squinted through the cloud of mayflies and mosquitoes buzzing all around me, biting me, sucking me dry.

  I was in the middle of my farm in 2014, mowing fields on an ancient tractor that wheezed and growled as I ran over and cut and crushed the stubborn Carolina growth. Brush hogging, they call it, and the job’s just as tough and ugly as it sounds. The sun beat down on me
like a mallet. Sweat ran down my face, turning my shirt as wet as a washcloth. Dust billowed up from the parched ground in angry, empty clouds, the grit coating my clothes, my hat, my skin.

  It got inside me too. With each breath, I sucked in Carolina dirt. Every time I blew my nose, black mess came out.

  I prayed for this, I thought. I gave up mansions and millions for this. I gave up comfort and luxury and a career that countless kids all over America dream of. For this. A kingdom of mosquitoes and dust. And the land, like the mosquitoes, was slowly sucking me dry.

  * * *

  ···

  Two years earlier, that land looked like heaven to me. To own and run a farm was more than a dream; it was my calling. And I believed in that calling so much that I was willing to throw away a lucrative career in the National Football League to follow it. This was what God wanted me to do: for my wife, Tay, and me to give up our comfortable lives and sink our hands deep into family and faith and the good earth. We followed God’s call here, away from a mansion in St. Louis to a broken-down farmhouse in North Carolina and a thousand acres of trees and fishponds and rich, rolling farmland. In October 2012, we bought this little corner of Carolina. And when I stepped onto the property for the first time as its owner with Tay and my oldest son, five-year-old JW, I couldn’t contain myself.

  “God has blessed us with a place flowing with milk and honey!” I shouted.

  JW looked around and frowned. “I don’t see any milk,” he said, “and I don’t see any honey.”

  I bent beside him, wrapped one arm around him, and pointed with the other to the land we now owned.

  “Hey, son,” I said. “See those pastures full of green grass?”

  He nodded.

  “Those pastures can supply food for cows that make the milk we drink. And see all those beautiful wildflowers?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “Bees love those wildflowers,” I said. “They buzz over to each flower and gather pollen, which they take back to their hives to make honey.”

  JW smiled. “I get it now, Dad.”

  He looked over the farm with a bit of wonder on his face. His new home was a living illustration of God’s design and provision. On this plot of land, God’s greatness and His goodness were on display for everyone to see, even a five-year-old on the verge of a strange new chapter in his life. I could see it too. I could feel it.

  Jesus said in Matthew 6:33, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” Tay and I prayerfully sought out the kingdom, and the righteousness, of God. And this—this corner of Eden—is what was added to us. A blessing. A gift.

  But sometimes even God’s most precious, most miraculous gifts come with little asterisks attached. Sunshine is a gift, but too much sun and your crops will wither. Rain is a gift, but too much rain and the crops will be stunted or wash away. Children are gifts as well, but no parent on God’s green earth will tell you they’re easy to give birth to or easy to raise.

  In 2012, Tay and I had our land flowing with milk and honey.

  Two years later, we knew it was filled with sweat and tears too.

  By that summer, the summer of 2014, Tay and I were pretty much broke. Everything we’d counted on to get First Fruits Farm up and running was gone—evaporated like a puddle of water on a hot, dry summer day. Milk and honey? All I could see was the dust. I couldn’t wait for our financial situation to get better. We needed to plant. And though a farm our size needs a really good tractor, I didn’t have enough money for even a bad one. So I borrowed a hand-me-down dinosaur of a tractor, a 1968 Allis-Chalmers, from my father.

  It should’ve been in a museum. Maybe it’s a miracle the thing ran at all. It was fifteen years older than I was, and it had rolled off the assembly line years before the Beatles broke up. Heck, the Allis-Chalmers company itself went out of business before I graduated from high school. Sentimental farmers might keep an old warhorse like that running, but typically, fifty-year-old tractors don’t do much more than gather cobwebs and sprout rust.

  Sometimes when another farmer came to visit or I ran into one in town, I’d try to glean all the wisdom I could from him, and during the conversation, I’d always mention my borrowed tractor.

  “I’m hoping I’ll be able to make it work for a while,” I’d say. “Can I be a successful farmer with a tractor like this?”

  Some would shake their heads. Some would laugh. More than one of them said, “Jason, if I had that big farm of yours, I’d go out of business with that tractor.”

  I’d go out of business with that tractor.

  I thought about it as I rode that tractor that hot, dusty day. Acres and acres of brush and dark, dry dirt spread in every direction. Another mosquito bit the back of my neck. The sun felt as strong as a jackhammer. And I knew right then that going out of business was a real possibility. Possibility? Some might’ve looked at our situation and said it was all but guaranteed.

  The tractor wasn’t going to last forever. It might not last the afternoon. I thought about the money I’d sunk into the farm already. I thought about the money I’d set aside that was supposed to equip and staff the farm—the cash that, through an almost unbelievable string of setbacks, had vanished. I thought about what I could’ve had if I’d stayed in the NFL: houses and cars and financial security for my kids and my wife and me. I thought about my family and how much they’d already sacrificed to share my dream.

  Everyone thought I was crazy when I turned my back on the NFL to follow God and become a farmer. Was I about to show them that they were right?

  The field was empty except for me and my tractor and this sea of dust—the dust I’d sacrificed so much for.

  No one was within a mile of me. I was all alone.

  But not really.

  “God!”

  I shouted it above the tractor’s wheezes and gasps.

  “God! I cried again, turning my face up to the sun and empty sky. “I don’t mind praying to You, but every time I get on this thing, do I have to pray that it starts up?”

  No voice from above. The cicadas buzzed, the mosquitoes whined, but I didn’t hear a thing from God.

  This is my life now, I thought. This is what I gave up my career and my wealth and my glory for. No playoff runs. No cheering fans. Just me and dirt and mosquitoes. If I’m lucky. If I don’t lose it all. I could feel the tears in my eyes.

  I was tired and scared and furious with God. I was close to despair. I cried out in my pain, anger, and desperation. I felt as though He had forsaken me.

  I didn’t hear Him, but I knew He was there. I still believed He had an amazing journey ahead of me, just as He’d made the journey behind me. From a big fat kid to an NFL starter to a clueless farmer, God was plotting my path one strange step at a time. And I was just as amazed as anyone about where it would lead.

  CHAPTER 2

  Planting

  The earth—the ground and dirt and dust we walk on—is part of us. The Bible says so. Right in Genesis 2, we’re told that God “formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (verse 7). And ever since Eden, we’ve needed to work that dust and dirt to survive. Our very lives depend on it. “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (3:19).

  Farming, pulling life from the ground, isn’t easy. My family farmed for generations. They all felt the sweat on their faces as they plowed and planted and harvested. Farming is a part of my history as far back as we can trace.

  But being a black farmer, especially before and during the civil rights movement, came with not just the promise of sweat but also the fear of blood.

  My grandfather Jasper Brown owned a two-hundred-acre farm near Yanceyville, North Carolina—a farm just about eighty minutes f
rom where I live now. He grew up farming. He raised four children on that farm. He knew how hard farming was, being at the mercy of the weather and your equipment and the volatile markets. If Jasper’s farming experience is anything like mine, he never knew what any year might hold for him. If everything cooperated, he might grow a bumper crop. But if something went wrong, he probably wondered how he’d keep his family—his wife and four growing kids—fed.

  I don’t know whether or not my grandfather loved being a farmer. But I do know that he wanted to give his own children a choice he never had: the choice to leave the farm if they wanted to, to make their own way in classrooms or boardrooms or air-conditioned offices.

  But that meant that they’d need an education—a good one. And in the late 1950s and early ’60s, the schools in Caswell County were still segregated, as was the case in much of the South. My grandfather wanted to change that.

  Yanceyville wasn’t unusual. All across the South, the civil rights movement was budding and growing. African Americans were pushing for their God-given rights that had been withheld for so long. But change is never easy, and that sort of change frightened and angered many white southerners. And some, including the powerful Ku Klux Klan, were determined to stop progress by any means possible. As Yanceyville started moving toward school desegregation, the KKK threatened local black leaders and civil rights activists. They even printed notices in the local newspaper. The message was, “If you put your black children in our schools, we’re going to hang you.”

  These weren’t idle threats. Black men were regularly harassed and beaten, and lynchings were still happening all across the South. Churches were being burned to the ground. And very often, local law enforcement would just look the other way. So, when a push toward desegregation started gathering steam and the KKK began posting threats in the local paper, everyone took them very seriously. Black leaders were scared, and many—including the president of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—resigned, fearing for themselves and their families.