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  Having Tay by my side didn’t hurt either.

  Glowing

  When you look at medieval or Renaissance paintings of Jesus or Mary or the saints, they often have halos around their heads—bright disks of yellow or gold radiating from their faces like a sun. It was the painter’s way of encouraging the viewer to look more closely at the man or woman and remember the saint’s role in God’s story. This person, the painter tells us, is special. This person is walking with God. See him. Notice him. Behold him.

  Now, I’m not saying that Tay’s a saint. But when I first saw her, she was glowing. No joke.

  Let me back up for a minute.

  When I first arrived at UNC, I was ready for a serious relationship. At first I was determined to find that relationship the right way. I prayed to God to send me the right person. I prayed and I prayed and I prayed. I promised God that I would abstain from any sort of sexual immorality—to be pure and save the gift of physical intimacy for only my wife. I said, God, I’m going to leave it all in Your hands.

  But I also put Him on a timetable. And instead of me waiting for God to show me the right person, I thought I’d give Him a helping hand. I saw some cute girls running around on campus and thought that maybe God had chosen one of them for me, and me for her. I was trying to force God to pick someone I wanted Him to pick.

  God wasn’t having any of that. Every time I approached one of these young women and asked her out to dinner or a movie, she would turn me down flat. It wasn’t “Sorry, Jason, the time’s not right.” It wasn’t “Can we just be friends?” It was just the straight-up, flat-out “Get lost” sort of rejection. After a couple of months of this, I was getting pretty discouraged.

  Meanwhile, I was watching some of my more womanizing teammates have the time of their lives. It’s not that hard to be a ladies’ man when you’re part of the football team, and those guys made the most of it. My route of staying pure and trusting God was getting me nowhere in the relationship department. God was not working fast enough for me. So I decided to take the matter into my own hands. When a few of those friends invited me to a little hole-in-the-wall club in Durham, North Carolina—home to Duke University and just a half hour from Chapel Hill—in late April 2002, I decided to go and try it their way for a change. I went to the club with the worst of intentions.

  My intentions that night fit right in. The nightclub was not what you’d call a real classy establishment. It was the sort of place that changed its name every couple of years after a fight or a shooting or something, and it was filled with plenty of people who also had the worst of intentions. I had already gotten three phone numbers from three different women when I looked across the room and saw Tay. I could tell right away that she was different—very, very different—from anyone I’d danced with that evening. She was dancing with a few of her friends, and she was absolutely luminous. Not figuratively: literally luminous. There was, truly, a glow about her. Maybe it was a trick of the club’s lighting, but it seemed God was making sure I noticed her—pointing the equivalent of a big neon arrow at her. Behold, Jason.

  So I walked up to her and used what must’ve sounded like the corniest pickup line ever.

  “Girl…you’re glowing.”

  “Excuse me?” Tay said with a wrinkle of her nose. “What did you just say?”

  “You’re glowing,” I repeated.

  We introduced ourselves. I asked her if she wanted something to drink.

  “I don’t drink,” she said with a frown. Strike one. (I learned later that she never went to nightclubs, either. She was there that night only so that one of her best friends wouldn’t have to be there alone.)

  “Oh, no, no,” I said, trying to recover. “I didn’t mean alcohol. Of course not alcohol. I meant, can I get you some water?”

  We talked for the rest of the evening in a quiet corner of the club. I could see from the very beginning how much we had in common—how important faith was to her, how smart and determined she was to succeed without ever losing track of God in her life. When closing time came and everyone started pushing for the door, I had Tay hold on to the back of my shirt and walk behind me while I used my offensive-line skills to clear a way to the parking lot. There, I showed her my 1999 Chevrolet Tahoe, which I hoped would impress her.

  It didn’t. Strike two.

  I asked her for her phone number.

  “No,” Tay said, and my heart sank. Glow or no, neon sign or no, it felt like I’d struck out again.

  “I’m not giving you my number,” Tay repeated, “but I’ll take yours. And I’ll call you. Maybe.”

  Tay

  When people meet Tay today, they think she’s the quietest, most introverted, most loving person they’d ever met. And she is.

  But they don’t see the lion.

  She reminds me a little of Jesus in that respect: the lion and the lamb. Everyone wants to choose the lamb side of Jesus. They want to see Him as being so meek and mild and loving and, of course, being our best friend. No one wants to talk about the lion side of Jesus—the guy who turned over the tables in the temple market or said in Matthew 10:34, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” When Jesus comes back, He’s coming back as the Lion of Judah, and we better watch out. He’s not playing around.

  So many people see only one side of Tay. They see only the lamb. My children and I know about the lion—that fight she has inside her. She needed that fight growing up.

  Some people might think that because Tay graduated from Duke University, one of the country’s most elite and most expensive colleges, she must’ve been born wealthy. But it’s just the opposite. Tay grew up south of San Francisco, in the San Mateo/Palo Alto area. Her mother was just seventeen when she had Tay, and for a long while it was just the two of them, trying to figure out how to make it in a hard world.

  Tay and her mom weren’t wealthy people. They didn’t have a car. They didn’t have a washer and dryer, and Tay remembers walking block after block with her mother, carrying their clothes to the laundromat. They’d walk to the grocery store, then walk back carrying bags and bags of food through some very bad neighborhoods.

  But God was with them—both Tay and her mom believed that. Her mother taught her valuable lessons and instilled character inside that little girl with every step through those neighborhoods. She taught her to fight. To never give up. To never make excuses.

  Back then, Tay and her mom fought for everything they had, and they always, praise God, had food on the table. But those lessons stuck with Tay. They stuck with her through high school, where she fought like crazy to succeed and excel. They stuck with her as she worked to raise money for college and applied for scholarships. They stuck when she made her way into Duke, where she had a job straight through college to pay for tuition as she made her way through dental school. She worked and fought for everything she’s achieved. She’s a lion, through and through.

  Maybe it was only fitting that she’d make me fight for her too.

  * * *

  ···

  The day after Tay and I met at that dive in Durham, she called me and we arranged to go out to dinner that Saturday. The afternoon of the date, I threw away all the trash in the Tahoe and bought a single white rose for Tay, which impressed her way more than the Tahoe did. I had hoped to take her to what qualified as a pretty fancy place for a couple of college kids: Outback Steakhouse. But the hostess told us there’d be a two-hour wait for a table, so we went right next door and ate at Bob Evans instead—a chain that sells and serves down-home comfort food like country-fried steak and pot roast. It was just a humble country meal, but it was real. And that made it a pretty fitting first date with Tay.

  The very next day, I called my parents.

  “It’s over,” I said. “I’ve found the one. God sent me the woman I’m going to marry.”

  And
He had.

  We dated for about fifteen months and got married on July 25, 2003. We were both still in college. I was just twenty years old.

  Ducie died less than two months later.

  Looking back, it feels like Tay came into my life at a crucial time. If I hadn’t had her support in the days right after Ducie’s death, I’m not sure what I would’ve done, what bad choices I might’ve made. The tragedy shook me to my very core. I thought about quitting school. I contemplated quitting football. When I lost my brother, a big part of my foundation was knocked out from under me. But Tay, along with my parents, gave me another foundation to rely on—another source of comfort and support when I needed it more than anything in my life.

  Over the next couple of years, that foundation grew bigger and stronger. When God chose Tay for me, He chose well.

  We were completely compatible in every way, it seemed: We loved God. We both wanted between three and five kids. She was finishing up her own degree when we met, preparing for dental school, and she was smart and driven, just like I was. We both dreamed big, and we were focused on achieving those dreams and ambitions. We didn’t have time to party. We didn’t have time to goof around much. But when we got married, even though we were both working really hard, we saw each other every day. Everything felt normal. Like that Bob Evans meal, it felt real.

  But as my graduation inched closer, and as the NFL draft drew nearer, our shared future was going to be challenged in some unprecedented ways. During those years in college, we’d shared the same priorities that I’d embraced way back in middle school: faith, family, and education. But now our future was on the threshold, knocking at our door. And it didn’t just come with a big cardboard Publishers Clearing House–like check; it came with some new demands too.

  Decisions, Decisions

  For most careers, college graduates can choose, within reason, where they’ll be employed. They can apply to the businesses and corporations they’d most like to work for, ignoring those they’d rather not. They might only send résumés to the cities or towns where they’d want to live. They might get multiple offers, and they can choose the one that seems to them the best: the best money, the best location, the best fit for them and their families.

  It works differently for draft-worthy NFL-bound football players. There’ve been a few exceptions, but for the most part, the National Football League tells you where you’re going to work. And that can make planning for the future, especially when you’re newly married, a little more difficult. I knew that once I was drafted, I could be heading to any one of thirty-two teams located in every possible area of the country. I might be heading to Boston or Miami or Seattle. And if Tay and I were just concentrating on my career, we could relocate together.

  But as hard as I’d been working in the sport of football, Tay had been working hard to reach her own goals in the field of dentistry. As excited as my family and friends were for my opportunity, her family and friends were just as excited about her future. Her family had sacrificed a lot to help send her to Duke, and they had hopes and dreams for Tay. She needed to apply to dental schools well before I knew where I’d be playing professional football.

  Both of us knew from the first night we met that we each had big goals. We knew how serious we were about those goals. After all, we’d spent the past two years watching each other work like crazy to achieve them. We knew what our priorities were: We valued our faith. We loved each other. We wanted to start a family and pour all the care and attention we could into our children. Neither of us was trying to pursue selfish goals without thinking of the other.

  But those opportunities—those dreams we had that we’d sacrificed so much for—were calling us. And our families, our friends, the whole world would think we’d be absolutely nuts if we ignored that call.

  By the world’s logic, the decision we made was a good one—the best possible one. We decided to keep our home base in North Carolina. I’d go wherever the draft took me. Tay would apply for dental school at UNC. She’d become a Tar Heel, just like me. And we’d just be sure to make our relationship work around our careers.

  One of my teammates, Ronald Brewer (we called him Brew), asked me what team I wanted to go to. I told him, hands down, that it would be awesome if I were to be drafted by the Carolina Panthers. They’re my home-state team, after all, located right down in Charlotte and just a couple of hours away from most everything I’d ever known.

  Brew asked, “So is that what you’re praying for?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m just praying for God’s will to be done.”

  “Come on, Jason,” Brew said. A committed Christian, he quickly broke out Scripture, quoting from Psalm 37:4: “The Word says, ‘Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.’ ”

  I had to explain to Brew that just because I desired to play for the Panthers at the time, it didn’t necessarily make them the best fit for me, my family, or my career. Only God knew what the right fit would be. I didn’t have a crystal ball. I couldn’t see the future. I wanted the decision to be where it belonged: in God’s hands, not my own.

  Drafted

  By my senior year at North Carolina, all the experts said I was one of those surefire NFL players. Most of them, including ESPN’s draft guru Mel Kiper, said I was almost guaranteed to be a “first-day” guy, meaning that I’d be drafted in one of the draft’s first three rounds. Friends and family encouraged me to throw a party on that “first day,” a Saturday, so that we could all celebrate my success together.

  Yeah, I’d heard that before. But I didn’t want to celebrate too soon. I’d seen other guys throw first-day parties only to end up feeling discouraged or even humiliated when they weren’t drafted until later or not at all. Not to mention how uncomfortable it was for those of us at the party!

  So, instead of throwing a party, I went fishing. Tay and I went to my parents’ house in Henderson that day, where they have a small pond in their backyard. While my mom watched the draft on TV, I brought out a lounge chair, set it up right by the pond, and took a nap. I slept right through not getting drafted. And I was very much at peace about not being picked.

  The next day, during the fourth round, I got a call from Ozzie Newsome, the general manager for the Baltimore Ravens at the time.

  “Hey, Jason,” he said. “We’re on the clock, and we just wanted to know if you would love to come and be a Baltimore Raven.”

  “Daggone right, I would!” I said. “Thank you very much.”

  I wasn’t lying to Mr. Newsome. Baltimore was a great fit for me—better, I think, than Carolina would’ve been. God always knows what He’s doing, doesn’t He? And it was still close. Only two teams, Carolina and Washington, were closer to Henderson and my parents’ backyard pool. I was just a five-hour drive away from the Ravens’ training facilities.

  And although it’s always gratifying for your ego to be drafted early, my agent (Harold Lewis, of the National Sports Agency) said that being drafted in the fourth round was the best thing that could’ve happened to me. Based on the NFL’s bargaining agreement with the player’s union at the time, first-round players were locked into five- and six-year deals. That sounds good on the surface; I originally wanted to sign as long a deal as possible, because a longer contract equals more security. But, as Harold pointed out to me, it also locks players into lower wages for a longer period of time. That same bargaining agreement limited the amount teams could pay their draft picks too.

  As a fourth-round pick, the Ravens wanted to give me only a three-year contract. In the fourth year, I’d be a restricted free agent (which meant that I could talk with other teams but the Ravens could match any contract offer and keep me). And in the fifth year, I’d be an unrestricted free agent, which meant I’d be free to sign with any team I wanted to.

  “I know how good of a player you are,” Harold
told me. “You’re going to outperform your rookie contract. And because you’ll hit free agency sooner than the players drafted ahead of you, you’re going to be able to break the bank that much faster.”

  So now I knew where I was headed and where I’d be working, God willing, for at least the next three years: Baltimore.

  I was drafted by the Ravens about the same time Tay was accepted by UNC. That meant we were going to be separated—live physically apart for much of the year and try to make a long-distance relationship work as best we could. It was the sort of concession I think many couples in our position would make. When the American Dream calls, you answer. You must answer, people say. Do you know how many people would kill to be in your position? they’ll tell you. How many people would give their lives for that opportunity you have right now? If you have an opportunity to climb that corporate ladder, to make a boatload of money, to be a professional athlete, then you better do it.

  So you start shifting your priorities around. You start making those calculations. You start compromising.

  God’s math is always different from our own. He’s a jealous God, and when we start compromising—when we make that American Dream our priority instead of following Him—we fall out of alignment. We forget our priorities. We lose our center.

  When I was growing up, my mom must’ve said a thousand times, “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” I never knew what that meant. If there’s a piece of cake right in front of me and I eat it, sure, it’s not in front of me anymore. But I still have the satisfaction of eating it, right?

  But my mom knew what she was talking about. You can’t have everything, even if the world tells you that you can. Every choice comes with a cost. And sometimes the cost can be pretty high.