Focus on the Family Magazine - February/March 2021

COMMITMENT / cOuPlES
ALL SIGNS POINTED TO ANOTHER BIG
CONTRACT for NFL center Jason Brown. He’d
been cut by the St. Louis Rams a few weeks earlier
in 2012—a casualty of a head coaching change—but
plenty of teams were still interested in the 28-year-old
offensive lineman. Jason had already rejected an offer
from the Carolina Panthers; another former team, the
Baltimore Ravens, seemed eager to get him back.
Before talking to the Ravens, Jason and his wife, Tay,
traveled to San Francisco. Tay hoped her husband
would accept an offer from the 49ers. For Tay, a Bay
Area native, it would mean being closer to family. It
would mean coming home.
But when Jason returned from the 49ers facility and
opened the door to their hotel room, he told her he’d
turned them down.
Tay was angry. Her husband was rejecting multimillion-dollar
deals! He seemed like he was disinterested
in playing professional football—a profession millions
would love to have.
“So what’s the deal, Jason?” she asked. “You turned
down the Panthers. You turned down the 49ers. . . . If
you’re not going to play football, what are you going to
do?”
Jason took a deep breath.
“God is telling me that we need to sell our home in St.
Louis and move back to North Carolina,” he said. “He’s
telling me to purchase some land there. Because God
is telling me that . . . He wants me to be a farmer.”
Jason had actually been thinking about this move
for months. He felt that God was calling him back to
the basics: Family. Faith. The rich Carolina earth that
his family had called home for generations. But he’d
not told anyone else about this seemingly crazy seed
that God had planted in him—not even his wife, not
until now.
Tay stared at Jason for a minute. How could he drop
this bomb on her in the middle of a marriage that was
already struggling?
“Jason,” she finally said, “I’m so happy God is sharing
all these things with you, because He’s not sharing any
of this with me!”
For richer or poorer
Jason and Tay met nearly a decade
earlier, after Tay graduated from
Duke University and Jason was a
standout lineman for the University
of North Carolina. Jason insists
that Tay was literally glowing when
they first met, as if God had put a
spotlight on her. It took Jason just
one date to know that Tay was the
woman he wanted to marry.
They seemed perfectly synced:
Their priorities were faith, family
and education. They both had big
dreams—she wanted to become a
dentist, he was destined to play in
the NFL—and they were determined
to pursue those dreams together.
They married in May 2005. He was
20, she 22. And at first, everything was
wonderful. They lived together in a
modest townhome as Jason closed out
his college career—studying together,
laughing together, praying together.
“And then came the call from the
world,” Jason says.
Dreams take sacrifice. Tay pushed
dental school back a year to help
Jason deal with the tragic loss of his
brother in Iraq. Then Jason was NFL
bound, but he had no control over
who he might play for. Any one of
32 teams might draft him, which
made it incredibly difficult for Tay to
choose a dental school.
Finally, they decided that Tay
would apply for dental school in
North Carolina and make the state
home base. Jason would play football
wherever the NFL asked him to.
They agreed to try a long-distance
marriage during the season.
“You make the best choices you
can at the time with the information
and the wisdom you have,” Tay says.
“And when you’re 20-something years
old, that’s what we thought would
work out best.”
Jason ended up on the Ravens,
and the separation was painful.
When their first child, J.W., was born
in 2007, Jason felt the distance growing
between them.
“I was not offering the quality time
or the emotional support that [Tay
and J.W.] needed,” he said. “I was
providing for my family, but there’s
a huge difference between being a
father and a provider.”
Because they spent so much of the
year apart, Tay says that they didn’t
really have each other to depend
on. “We were slowly pulling apart. . . .
Where it says [in the Bible] that ‘the
two shall be as one,’ we were drifting,
and not really being one.” >>>
February / March 2021 FOCUS ON THE FAMILY 13