CHAPTER ONE

The Good Life

Love.Don’t we all just want to find love? Be loved? Give love back to someone who has shown us love? You answer that in your heart. For me, I grew up knowing love in the way that perhaps you did too. I was the youngest child of four. My sister and I are the only children to my parents’ union, and I have two older brothers. We had everything we needed and most of what we wanted growing up. I was very entitled and a bit ungrateful as a teenager and adolescent, but I was loved. Life was good. I grew up as a preacher’s kid and dealt with all the stigmas attached to that. My father is a great man of God, whose love for God is evident in the way he cares for others. He gives everything he has to the members of the church and community. He does everything ultimately to please God and to provide for us. My mother is the classic first lady. She leads the women’s ministry, sings on the praise team, and annually hosts conferences for the women’s ministry. She also helps my dad administratively and shows extraordinary care for the members as well. My sister is one of the best physical therapist ever-I get to say that because she is my only sister. Her patients, doctors, and colleagues believe the same of her.

I have an extended family, and we all grew up together like siblings. Summers and holidays were a lot of fun. We spent most summers with Granny and Pawpaw. All of the grandchildren enjoyed summers with my grandparents while our parents traveled and worked. My Pawpaw had a farm, and there we saw everything from chickens to pigs. We raised them and ate them. I watched my older cousins do most of the harvesting of the garden and gathering fruit from the trees. I was a tad bit spoiled. Even beyond my younger cousins. I was always the baby.

Being the baby played out in various ways in my life, both good and bad. At family gatherings, we would sing, laugh, pray, and eat until we could no longer do any of them due to fatigue. Life was good. I knew love. I knew what it looked like and how it felt. I wasn’t missing anything, so I thought. I had friends who wished they had my family. I had it made.

When I was 12 years old, I gave my life to Christ, and I was baptized in a river in South Carolina near the first church my Father pastored. I was a church girl. I knew all the lingo and -isms that go along with church and its functions. I never missed a service, Sunday school, Vacation Bible School, conferences, choir anniversary or revival. I knew church, but knowing Jesus personally was something that was superficial. I knew Him through my Dad and Mom and the church. I knew Him through my grandparents, family members, and church events. However, it was my freshman year in college, March of 1999, that I completely surrendered my life to Christ during the University of Illinois Black Chorus Sacred Symposium. One of the guest clinicians began to play the popular hymn “Holy, holy, holy” on the organ. I can remember entering the building and the next thing I remember was me on my knees. I didn’t know how I arrived mid auditorium and on my knees, but in that moment, I knew that something bigger than me was clearly asking me to surrender all to Christ. I later learned that person