Author Archives: Joshua Rogers

Throughout my 20s, one of the biggest sources of stress in my life was the fear that God didn’t really love me and that I would never really know where I stood with Him. At one one point, however, I put His love to the test: I went on a sinning spree that took me further than I wanted to go and convinced there was no way back.

For a lot of my single years, I was hopelessly awkward. No doubt, there were still attractive things about my personality (or at least my mom says there were), but overall, I was kind of weird.

Ten years ago, I had an email exchange with my friend Bethany Greenoe, in which she offered some marital advice to me. I wasn’t even dating anyone seriously at the time, but her words were so meaningful that I saved the message in my “Memorable Emails” folder.

While I vividly remember many moments from my wedding day, there’s one moment that still moves me, and I hope it always does.

The night before my wedding as I was drifting to sleep, I decided to ask God for a small favor.

Some of the people I most admire love themselves really well. They’re not hard on themselves. They give themselves room to grow and figure things out. They like themselves. I find it easy to be around those folks. There’s something special going on with them.

Although I got a lot of things wrong when I was dating, I had one general policy I still do not regret: I felt it was best to keep my hands off the women I dated.

When I first started dating my wife, we were eating dinner one night and she asked a question that I didn’t think was very controversial: “What do you want to do with the rest of your life?”

In my response, I mentioned that I wanted to return to my home state of Mississippi and run for Attorney General, and I also said I wanted four or five children. She looked at me like she was waiting for me to announce that I was joking. I wasn’t.