PAIGE
Transformation is bigger than a moment. We will mess up a lot trying to get it right. Sometimes, the mess-ups and relapses are even more devastating because when you know better, you expect to do better. The devil had double-digit wins over us for many years. We would remove ourselves from the daily grind and temptations, make goals for our relationship, and pinky promise to do better, just to find out three months later that one if not both of us had still not evolved past the evils we vowed to leave behind. We would be devastated and disappointed, feeling like our sins would always be greater than us. My disappointment in myself made me forget that God would take my position and use it for good—to help me relate to other people. What if I handed sin over to the Lord and asked Him to use it as a battle plan? Then, when people saw us showing up for battle every day instead of hiding in the shadows of shame, others would look at us and think, Look at what they overcame. Maybe I can, too.
That was my role. As long as we live, there will be evil to confront in this world, and God would defeat these demons with me. When I say, “with me,” I don’t mean God and I are side-by-side equal in power; I mean “by way of me.” He would be the reason; I would be the works.
Life would not be perfect. No, we did not get all the solutions to our problems. Yet, the theme of freedom was overwhelming to me. Nothing about this conference or my baptism erased anything about my past, but my husband and I were free from the labels and stigma that came with it. Not because this was some feel-good seminar where people just agreed that there were no consequences for their actions. But rather it was a group of people who felt free to pursue the right thing because living in freedom means receiving the gift of new life from Jesus Christ. Josh and I wanted to serve out of love and purpose, not out of duty and expectation. Josh immediately opened our home to provide this same curriculum to veterans. As a leader of the small group, he learned more than he did when he was participating. As I observed each of these veterans leave my home at the end of the night, I saw them shift into more comfortable, friendly people who seemed to see our home as a safe place to talk about both God and their time of service. As for myself, I prayed that God would give me the courage to evolve in front of people. I wanted to be better in my job, I wanted to be a more intentional parent, I wanted to show more love to veterans, and I wanted my church (the body of Christ, not just the gathering place on Sunday) to be able to count on me. Asking for this understanding made me realize that He was constantly equipping me. The storms still came when Josh traveled for five straight weeks, when we had a rough season, and when Nan passed away. These were all times that tempted me to fall apart, but I had created a habit of seeking God every day, so even when I was afraid, hurt, or sad, I couldn’t be uprooted. I asked to see those moments the way God saw them, and even when I didn’t feel like it, it pushed me to lead and respond in love. In the choice of fight or flight, I have committed to fight. No more numbing, no more making myself too busy to think about life. I would take life as it came, believing that every season is equipping me for what is next.
PAIGE AND JOSH
Still the questions remain: Why am I here? Why did this happen to me?
As humans we want to be able to give this answer in one hundred words or less. That’s not a purpose; that’s a synopsis of what we’ve already done. What we’ve already done should build our faith, remind us of God’s promises, and help us grow. It shouldn’t pigeonhole God into a life mission that only reaches the extent of our understanding and resources. If that was how it worked, our life mission would be like selecting a major in college—choosing a future based on what we already know about ourselves.
Here is what we’ve gathered in our individual attempts to answer those questions as well as forging a path together to live life to God’s best intentions for us. It’s taken us more than once for God to show us our purpose—we’re alive so that we can reach heaven and take as many people with us as we can by being the love of Jesus to others and using the Bible as self-application. Heaven is the destination, Christ-like love is the vehicle, faith and obedience are the map, and our talents, resources, and possessions are the streets we navigate. For us and our goal of bringing people to Christ through athletics, we learned that “athletics” is just the name of another street; it’s not a vehicle or a destination. As our journey continues, we turn onto streets with names like Parenting and Money, and we know there will be a street called Free Time in Retirement. God didn’t ask us to turn down those streets to settle down and stop moving; He asked us to go down those streets to pick people up! The more people we pick up, the more we’ve understood why we turned onto that street in the first place. After a while, we willingly take the detours.
We hope our detours are what help people the most. Writing a book was a huge detour. It was something that
