The Contest

Have you ever won a contest?

I have.

On the last week of the seventh grade, I was late for school. It was one of only two or three times I can ever recall us being late for school.

My family disagrees about what put us behind schedule that day. But fate, as it turned out, intended for me to be late for school that morning.

That was one of the few mornings that I was still in the car when the local radio station we listened to on the way to school was playing trivia.

I love trivia games. Jeopardy! has long been one of my favorite TV shows. I dialed the number into my Mom’s bulky Zach Morris phone and waited with my finger on the button.

The trivia question that morning was: “What is the length of a dollar bill?”

As the DJs spun Time is Tight by Booker T and the MGs, you could almost hear the sound of everyone in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee searching frantically for a ruler. As chance would have it, I knew the answer to that question by heart.

I pressed call, expecting to hear the busy signal. To my great surprise, local airwave legend Jack Cheatwood answered the phone and said, “WDXE trivia, can you tell us how long a dollar bill is?”

“Six inches,” I said.

“We have a winner!” he replied.

It was an exhilarating experience. I had never won a contest before. I didn’t even know what the prize was.

After school that afternoon, Mom drove me to the radio station and we found out. I won a huge family-sized ham from Big John’s Bar-B-Q and seven free rentals from a local video store.

Just in time for summer vacation, my trivia victory filled my imagination with visions of serene summer days filled with pork and VHS rentals. Victory was sweet.

The Victory

The day after I convinced Christy Lusk to marry me, one of our mutual friends told me that I had won the lottery. She was pretty, intelligent, and–above all–a devout Christian. He was right, but neither he nor I truly understood how right he was.

On the day we got engaged, I weighed a little more than 310 pounds. It was rare that I ate anything that didn’t come from either a deep-frier or a pizza oven. Over the next few years, my eating habits–and my weight–would get worse.

The destructiveness of my eating habits wasn’t clear to Christy until we had been married for a few weeks. As a physician, she knew that the way I was eating would eventually be fatal. But I didn’t listen to her. I ignored all of her nags, her pleas, her impassioned speeches. I responded to them all with an angry, “I wish you would just leave me alone.”

Until she realized one day that all she could do was pray for me. So she began praying for me in earnest, as my mom and grandmother had done for several years. Each day, multiple times a day, Christy took her case to God, pleading that He would change my heart and that I would change my ways.

By our fourth anniversary, we had built a house, begun new jobs, moved to my family farm, and had two babies–and I had added 100 pounds.

Still, she continued to pray.

She prayed as I ate unholy amounts of junk food.

She prayed as I fell asleep as soon as I came home.

She prayed as I no longer fit into clothes I had purchased a year before.

She prayed as I struggled to fit in the front seats of cars that we test-drove.

She prayed as she listened to my breathing stop for agonizing periods of time each night.

She prayed for me so often that my oldest daughter began to copy her. Among my daughter’s precious little-girl prayers for her dolls, her pets, and her Sunday school teachers, she would always include a word about “Daddy’s weight.”

 

Living Faith

I wish I could say that my heart was so touched by all of this prayer that I immediately changed my ways. If I did, I would be a liar.

In fact, if you ever get the impression that I am in any way the hero in this story, then I am telling it wrong. Throughout my life, I have consistently been my own worst enemy at every turn. If anyone deserves hero status for pulling me out of the depths of my gluttonous depravity, it’s my wife.

Not only did she pray, but she put action behind her prayers.

When I nearly passed out at church one Sunday, I would have gladly ignored it, but she forcibly checked my A1C at home and made an appointment for me go to the doctor. When I found out that I had diabetes at that doctor’s appointment, and my own fear and ignorance of the condition overwhelmed me, Christy is the one who taught me how to check my blood sugar.

She is the one who told me that I would have to exercise daily. She is the one who patiently filled every pill box slot, cooked every meal, and packed every lunch I ate for nearly a year until I learned how to follow good dietary principles.

I have lost nearly half of myself, but in no world could I have ever done it without Christy. And, in no world have I ever been a good enough man to deserve a wife like her.

The Wounds of a Friend

At some point in your life, you have probably felt the urge to tell someone you love that you are worried about them and the decisions they are making. It is never easy to share an unpleasant truth, but I am certainly glad that Christy was honest with me about my eating habits. I was, quite literally, headed for an early grave.

If you love someone who is hurting themselves, speak up today. They will be glad you did.

As the Scriptures say in Proverbs 27:6, the wounds of a friend are faithful.

I can think of no better wounds than those which bring healing.

I can think of no better friend than the wife of my youth who brought me to that place of healing.

I enjoyed sharing that ham and those movie rentals with my family in middle school. And every day that I am able to breathe without struggling, move without hurting, and work without pausing is a day that I feel like I have won a mighty victory.

But all of that pales in comparison to the prize that is my Christy, the woman who loved me too much to leave me alone.