I can’t recall a Sunday in my childhood when we weren’t at St. Stephen’s Missionary Baptist Church in the Walnut Hills section of Cincinnati.
I loved the music at St. Stephen’s. The singing was fully alive. To this day I carry warm memories of being there, and inside my head I can hear some of the songs we sang.
Even as a boy, when I listened to the choir sing, I knew they were connecting with God. I don’t remember all the adults in the choir, but I do remember Sister Maxine. She had an unbelievable, soul-piercing voice. I felt good just being there and listening.
Every Sunday morning I wanted to get to church on time so I could hear the choir and sing with the congregation. I have to admit, though, that the preaching didn’t do much for me. More than anything else, I went for the music.
But then, when I was about 10 years old and in fourth grade, something important happened—something that would change the course of my life. That’s when I finally started to pay attention to what Floyd Brown, our pastor, was saying.
I vividly remember it. It was Easter Sunday, 1987. I gazed up at the choir. Their shining faces and joyful voices were better than any rock group I’d seen on TV. I was totally immersed in the music. One man near us was clapping his hands and jumping up and down—he too was totally lost in the music. To my left, a woman ran up and down the aisle, shouting and praising God. I thought she was probably a little crazy, but there was no mistaking the joy on her face.
A woman near me rocked back and forth in her seat as she sang. Then she stopped and cried out, “Thank you, Jesus!” By then, the choir members had their hands raised and were singing joyful praises.
I leaned over and whispered to my mother, “What’s going on?”
“That’s their way of responding to God,” Mom said. Very quietly, she explained, “Shaun, some of these people have big problems—so big they don’t know if they’ll come out of them. But they will. Others are in the middle of trials, and life is hard for them right now—very hard.” She pointed to one friend. “That lady has been having a bad week, and she has many burdens. When she comes to church, she can let go of them all and know that God will bless her. Some others are saying, ‘God, I believe in You.’ Others are saying, ‘With Your help, God, I’m going to make it through another week.’ ”
“That’s cool,” I said.
By then, Mom’s arm was around my shoulder. She talked to me about how much Jesus Christ loves each one of us. “Jesus can pull us out of any trials—no matter how big they are,” she told me.
I listened to her—and I kept watching everyone. Some of them did act strangely, but now I understood—they were responding to God’s love in their own way.
Finally I turned and said, “Momma, I need to know this Jesus.”
Patiently, she explained to me that Jesus loves me, had died to take away my sins and wants me to love Him in return. She spoke in such simple terms that I didn’t have trouble understanding. Although that wasn’t the first time I had heard the good news about Jesus Christ, it was the first time the words got through to me. Momma then explained that if I truly loved Jesus, I would be obedient to Him in every way.
All the messages I had heard for the 10 years I’d been going to church and Sunday school fell into place that day. It all made sense. So as I listened, I silently prayed my first significant prayer: “God, I don’t know much, but I do know how to be obedient.”
At the end of the service that Easter Sunday, Pastor Brown looked out at us and asked, “Do any of you want to give your life to Christ? Does anybody want to join the church?”
I turned to Mom and asked, “Can I go?”
She nodded.
I walked up to the front, and Pastor Brown welcomed me and prayed for me. The next Sunday, I was baptized and joined the church.
Very early I learned that we make choices. We can make choices that enable us to live blessed lives on earth and eventually lead us to heaven. We have to choose which path we will follow—we have to choose to love, to forgive, and to enjoy being alive. And we show how we’ve decided by the way we live. We practice obedience.
I’ve also learned that Jesus wants to love us and help us to make those right choices. I can’t say I’ve always made the best ones, but I’ve made many good ones since the day I decided to follow Jesus Christ. And the result of that obedience has been blessing in my life.
Growing
That decision to follow Jesus Christ was just the beginning. From that day on, I tried to live like a Christian in every area of my life. And when I entered high school, I started to think even more seriously about my faith.
As I looked around, I saw how some people compared themselves to others, and I decided that was a foolish thing to do. Or I noticed they made bad choices because they felt it brought acceptance from their peers. Some of my classmates drank and others were involved in sex because that’s what they saw their friends do.
That kind of behavior didn’t make sense to me. I decided that I had to recognize right from wrong for myself and then do the right thing just because it was the right thing—even if it wasn’t the popular thing. I didn’t want to compare myself to others or think I was better than someone else. I just wanted to be a person who followed his heart and his convictions. I wanted to be the best Shaun I could be.
Even when my friends didn’t do what I thought was the right thing, that didn’t excuse me from needing to make good choices. I just didn’t get into that comparison game or start judging others by how they behaved. Several people I knew were like the guy who says, “You’re shooting heroin, and that’s bad. I may smoke a little weed now and then, but at least I don’t do heroin.” He’s saying he’s better because his habit isn’t as bad as the other, so that makes him a better person. Even as a teenager, I realized that those who compare themselves like that are off the track as much as the people they criticize or judge.
For me, right and wrong have always been pretty simple. Either something is good or it isn’t. And I believe God has blessed me with the ability to pay attention to what is right and stay away from what is wrong. That has helped me avoid a lot of problems in life.
For example, ever since high school, people have offered me alcohol or wanted me to smoke weed with them. I’ve always refused. Back then, I didn’t think of the consequences, only that I just didn’t feel right about doing either one. I’ve never been drunk or high, and I don’t feel I’ve missed anything by living sober. Now that I’m older, I realize the effects of such things on people. Drugs and alcohol can destroy a life. I knew I didn’t want them to destroy mine. So, for me, the principle has been very simple: If it doesn’t feel right to do—even though I can’t explain the reason—I don’t do it.
Take the matter of sex—which I write more about later [in the book]. I knew it was wrong to have sex outside of marriage. Some of my friends—both Christian and non-Christian—went ahead and became sexually active in their teens, but I couldn’t believe it was right. And later I learned the teachings of the Bible about sexual immorality and realized I was right to not get caught up in that trap. As a result, I abstained from sex until I married.
Learning From Mistakes
A lot of my friends like to party. “Let’s hit the clubs,” they’d say. “Let’s party.” I was often the ringleader who got them to the club, but I knew where to draw the line. But some of them would start to drink and wouldn’t stop until they were drunk.
When I would go to the clubs with them, I went because I wanted to be around people I liked. I enjoyed talking, laughing and hanging with my friends. Just being around them kept me entertained all night. When it was time to leave, I left. Sometimes I had to leave early because things had gotten out of hand or I felt I needed to get away from situations I knew I wasn’t supposed to get into. I never felt I had to stay just because some of my friends did.
One day, though, I asked myself if I was doing the right thing by encouraging my friends to party—friends who obviously couldn’t control themselves. I started to realize I had been wrong to take people with me who couldn’t handle the temptations around them.
One big event especially convinced me of this.
During my senior year, we finally came to that great moment many of us had looked forward to: spring break.
A bunch of us guys decided to go to Panama City, Fla.—the popular meeting place for most of the schools on the Eastern Seaboard. My mom had one big question: “Who’s going with you?”
I told her that it would be me, Brian, Ray and another friend, Steve Beegle.
She noted that Ray and Steve knew how to drive—and I didn’t. So she said, “Shaun, I think you need to learn to drive too.”
That was a great idea. And I knew what she was really thinking: You need to learn how to drive so you can take over in case the others get drunk.
So by the time spring break rolled around, I had my license, and off the four of us went.
All of us had heard stories about the drinking and wild parties, so on the drive south I said to the others, “You know, we’re going to see a lot of drinking. So what are we going to do?”
“I’m not going to drink,” Brian said.
“Cool—then I won’t either,” I said—even though I was never interested in drinking anyway, no matter how many times I was around it.
“I’m not going to drink either,” Ray added.
Steve agreed. No drinking.
It was about 3 in the morning when we checked into a motel near the beach. We slept a few hours and then headed out to the beach to see all the honeys. We also saw a lot of our friends from Boone County and other places. It seemed as if the whole country was there.
That afternoon we ate, strolled around and saw people. Around sunset, somehow we lost Ray. We looked around but never could find him—not on the beach, not in our room … he just wasn’t around.
We went out to eat some dinner and then decided to look for him again.
As we began walking toward one of the hotels where we’d heard there was a party going on—it was close to midnight by then—we caught sight of Ray about 20 feet ahead.
“Man, what have you been doing?” I asked.
“I was just over here chilling,” he slurred.
I stared at him and repeated my question. “What have you been doing?”
“Man, I’m messed up,” he mumbled. “I’m drunk.”
“Yeah, we can tell,” I replied.
He felt humiliated, not so much because he was drunk, but because he had broken his word.
“I’m really messed up,” he repeated. “I’ve been drinking all day.”
We all walked back to the hotel room, put Ray to bed, and then turned in ourselves.
Tough Love
Early the next morning the phone rang. I knew it was my mom. “You guys doing good?” she asked. “How was y’all’s first night?” “We’re doing fine,” I said.
“Ray didn’t have too much to drink, did he?”
I started laughing. “Mama, we made a pact we’re not going to drink, so we’re all just over here chilling.”
“Really?” she said. “So Ray didn’t drink last night?”
I didn’t answer the question and changed the subject. It wouldn’t have done any good to lie anyway. Mom would figure that out too.
We talked a few more minutes before I hung up the phone. I smiled as I thought of Mom’s incredible sense of always knowing what everybody was doing. I never did find out how she knew Ray had been drinking—but we didn’t fool her. She knew.
Looking back, it was to my advantage to have a mother like that. She was the queen of discipline. She kept things very strict in our home. All my friends knew that too, because if they were in our house, Mom disciplined them as well. But Mom balanced her discipline with love. One way she did this was when she told my brother, my friends or me—which she did often—“No matter what trouble you get into, I’ll get you out of that trouble—the first time. After that, you’re on your own.”
I laughed just about every time she said that. I laughed, but I knew she was serious. So did my friends. We all knew it was because she was also serious about loving us and wanting us to make good decisions—and be obedient.
Obedience
“I don’t know much, but I do know how to be obedient.”
Today, 20 years after I prayed with my Mom on that Easter Sunday, I still say those same words to myself almost every day. That simple sentence has become the spiritual slogan for my life. I believe a major reason I am who I am today is that I remember those words, try to live by them and never want to forget them. 
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Shaun Alexander is the star running back for the recent Super Bowl-contending Seattle Seahawks. He was voted the MVP (Most Valuable Player) in the National Football League for the 2005 season. Shaun was born in Florence, Ky., and now lives in Washington with his wife and two children. To read more about Shaun, look for his book Touchdown Alexander in a book store near you.
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