Romancing the Authors Week: The Hickmans on Finally Getting it Right

Next week chat with authors from down South about how life as a Southerner--whether born or transplanted--has affected their life and faith!


Today’s a very special day. It’s my first time to invite as my guest my dearest Beloved, my Babe, my hubby Pastor Randall Hickman. Randy is the Lead Pastor of Stonehill Community Church, serving the NC communities of North Charlotte and Lake Norman. We planted Stonehill nearly a decade ago. Since its beginning we’ve witnessed many miracles. We took our three children around in Lake Norman, knocking on doors and started our church with new converts. We invited 33 people to serve the Lord that first year. But we’ve also known tragedy, when in 2001, our daughter Jessica was taken suddenly in a car accident.

Randy and I have been married going on thirty-one years. Our two sons are both studying the arts in college, are scholars, and both of them serve Christ wholeheartedly. But before our husband and wife ministry endeavors, we were a couple called out of darkness into the awesome light of Christ. So we’ve painfully and joyfully known the highs and lows of being in love.

RANDY: I like to think more about those high-high’sJ

PATTY: Yes you do. You’re the most optimistic person I know. Which is why I feel it’s my place to balance that out with practical crabbiness. Babe, you’ve married a lot of couples in your years as a minister. This week, my friends and guest authors have shared about the highs and lows of being in love, and have offered the woman’s viewpoint. To balance that out, I’d like ask you, what advice do you like to give new husbands at the starting gate of a marriage commitment?

RANDY: I like to start with the marriage vows. As for me, I was more interested in the honeymoon’s activities than paying attention to my responsibilities and commitments as a new husband. I had no real concept of what it meant to love, honor and cherish and certainly no idea of how I would fulfill the vows I was making. I have been impressed with young couples who seek out mentors to help them through the first years of marriage. I wonder now how differently our first years would have turned out had I, along with all the passion, also had a mentor to go to for help.

PATTY: Yes, we like to tell other couples that it’s a sign of maturity to ask for help. For me, the biggest turning point in our marriage was when you came home from work one day when you were on the staff at NASA. Do you remember that?

RANDY: Sure, I cried for three days…more tears in a couple of days than in my entire life. I could only pick up one radio station in my basement office and every day at noon the show host would read a page from a book written by a missionary. One day he retold a story about missionary Charles Greenaway. Greenaway’s story arrested me… a selfless life, losing his entire family on the mission field while still keeping the faith. I saw my life flash before my eyes and realized how “about me” my life had been. By the time I stopped crying I knew that my life had to be about something bigger than me and my little world. As you know, I was able to meet Rev. Greenaway a few years later. It was such a privilege.

PATTY: Yes, it was an iconic moment. From my side of your story I remember how contrite you were. I had nearly given up praying for you and for us. I realized how hard-hearted I had grown. My pride over “your sinful condition” was just as toxic to our relationship as your indifference to God. I harbored bitterness, pride, and resentment and was in desperate need of God’s forgiveness too. Pride is just as blinding as apathy. Your newly broken state brought me to my knees. But I was so thankful that God was restoring us. We were on the verge of a break-up back then. From that point on you came home and established a family altar. We were so radically turned on to Christ, we got rid of the TV for seven years. Our evenings were spent praying, reading the Bible, reading books aloud, playing games together. Our kids loved it and they loved their “new” dad and mom. Those were some of the most blessed years of our marriage. Life became nearly effortless, doors opening, miracles walking right up to our door. We had embarked on a new adventure—that of saying “yes” to anything that God wanted for us.

I remember early in our marriage, though, how I came slowly awake to the fact that you had only adopted a faith from your family. You had not surrendered to the Christ they served. And coming from a family where my mom had been married three times, I had no inner guide for anything except survival mode. I would get up at night and pray in the babies’ bedroom. They would stand up in their cribs and I would say, “Let’s pray for Daddy.” I remember Josh, who’s now twenty-nine, dropping to his knees and putting his face to the mattress and praying in his sweet toddler voice for you. I prayed for nine years before this turn-around.

For wives who continue to pray that their husbands will take on the “shared yoke” of the family priesthood, how would you encourage them?

RANDY: For me it was all about grace--unmerited favor. You gave me the “benefit of the doubt” that when I said that I was going to begin taking the spiritual lead, you stepped back and let me go—even though I knew nothing about the Bible. Though I had never done anything to prove I could be the spiritual head of the family, knowing you believed in me gave me the will and confidence to try.

PATTY: Yes, but I was arrogant having only a small knowledge about the real truths of God’s Word. We both had to become students of the Word. Even our past church teaching wasn’t enough. We had to pursue maturity. In my novel, Painted Dresses, it's a story of painted over lives. We probably looked like a stable couple to the outside world. But it's that tendency to paint over, something I learned from childhood, that leaves us withdrawing from God what he's already seeing anyway.

RANDY: In our counseling sessions now, I often hear women who have had to fill the role of spiritual leader in the home confess how difficult it is to “loosen the grip” and cooperate with their husbands in a transition of power, so to speak. However, what we’ve seen in the past is that until the wife finally let’s go, the husband never really assumes the role God intended for him to take.

PATTY: It’s that shared mutuality that Paul told the Philippians about. We had to learn to live like soldiers, back-to-back, protecting each other while resisting the enemy. In that situation, we ladies are afraid to fully trust. But it’s such a testament to the husband to see the wife’s example of full surrender to God in practice. We have to trust that there will be benefits beyond our wildest imaginations. And, yes, even benefits to intimacy. What I found as a wife was that our intimacy grew deeper after your surrender to God. I think that some men think that they’re love life is enhanced by unhealthy practices like viewing porn. It’s just another lie of the enemy. You often speak to men about unhealthy addictions and how damaging they are to a couple’s love life. That in mind, why is it that a man who surrenders to Christ suddenly finds his mate more responsive?

RANDY: I can remember the day when my lust turned to love. In the beginning, I don’t think I really knew the difference. (You’re just sending this letter to a friend, right?)

PATTY: Sure, Babe. Only one person will read this. =D

RANDY: Many men, like me, were introduced to porn at an early age. Growing up in a culture where the “s” word was not spoken, we were only informed by the photos we had seen and the “great advice” we got in locker rooms at school.

Take all that “toxic knowledge” into the marriage bed and it’s a recipe for disaster.

Pre-marital counseling, which most couples don’t receive, should encourage a couple to talk about what the other is looking for in all areas of marriage including their sex lives. Disaster happens when we leave something as important as intimacy up to locker room chatter and dirty books. And now the accessibility includes Internet play lands for adults and teens. Porn has taken on an incremental danger compared to when we were children.

I’m not saying that women never respond to lust, I’m just saying that “responding to love” seems to have a much better “shelf-life”.

PATTY: If I may interject, the bitterness that comes from that type of oppression simmers until it one day spills over in a big toxic wasteland of emptiness. The wife wakes up one day, fed up, used up, and desperate to fill the void left behind by empty intimacy instead of Christ-honoring love.

RANDY: But I will tell you this…as your husband I am committed to trying this “love thing” over and over and over, till we get it right. You could call it a sacrifice for love.

PATTY: You are so funny. But this has been very courageous of you, Babe. And I want to thank you for sitting in a place in cyberspace highly inhabited by ladies. I know this was a sacrifice of your chaotic schedule to do this.

RANDY: I hope it’s helped.

PATTY: I’m confident that it has. Tomorrow, we’ll chat with two novelists who also happen to be married. Stephen and Janet Bly will share their story of how one romantic get-away dissolved into the shock of a diagnosis that no couple ever wants to hear.

Remember that your posts are entered each day this week in a Romancing the Authors Book Give-Away on Friday following our Mystery Guest Friday Special Valentine’s Day chat.

I pray that your love life has been greatly blessed by the authenticity of those who’ve gone on ahead and learned from their mistakes the joy of surrender to Christ who sets us free.

Romancing the Authors Week Book Give-Away

This week join Patty and bestselling authors each day as they chat about "The Pinnacles and Pitfalls of Being in Love." Three copies of Patty's novel Earthly Vows will be given away following a drawing Friday. Your name is entered each day for your blog post on that day. So if you post every day, that's five entries!

Here's Our Guest Line-up:

Monday: Join Patty and popular romance novelist Deb Raney as Deb talks about her own struggles as a wife and how she found a steady plane in her real-life romance.

Tuesday: Patty chats with romance author and head fiction editor Karen Ball. Karen shares how she and her hubby found restoration through a change in how they communicate.

Wednesday: Patty and her hubby, Senior Pastor Randy Hickman talk frankly about marital issues that nearly destroyed their marriage. From porn to the priesthood, the Hickmans share frankly their personal marriage transformation.

Thursday: Husband and wife writers Steve and Janet Bly share how quickly life can turn rhapsody to tragedy.

Mystery Guest Friday: A beloved bestselling novelist shares about the Greatest Romance of all time.

To win a copy of Patty's novel Earthly Vows, simply post once a day to have your name entered for a book give-away on Friday!

Please revisit Friday p.m. for winners' list. I'll need shipping addresses.

Tract -N- Treat

There were many things that I gave up when I joined my husband in ministry and often that involved surrendering holidays to the work that it takes to plan a church event. Instead of being home on Halloween, we were busy assembling dunking booths and setting up tables for cupcake sales and goldfish bowl penny toss games. The church event on Halloween has become an expected event in many communities, so there is no shortage of them. But Randy and I talked about Halloween’s meaning to culture and realized one thing—the one night that our neighbors come knocking at our door, we’re at church.

That is when we birthed the idea Randy calls Tract –N- Treat. We order tracts for our church members to pick up the Sunday before Halloween. In advance, we stamp the backs of the tracts with our ministry info in case someone has questions about God or they just want to find us. For the families who live in an area not highly trafficked by local children, we invite them to our home for chili and fellowship. I wear my usual costume—a giant Hershey’s kiss—and prepare my bowls of treats along with tracts.

We use the kinds of tracts that express the love of God rather than the typical turn-or-burn materials that often get passed around during Halloween. Our neighborhood is kid city and I can’t wait to finally get to meet neighbors that I wouldn’t otherwise meet if I didn’t stay home and prepare for their arrival.

The leaves are beginning to turn orange and yellow and neighbors are already setting pumpkins out on their front porches. As the neighborhood changes from summer to autumn, we look forward to showing neighborly love through a simple tradition.

The Meaning of a Winning Life

At a fundraising dinner for a school that serves learning-disabled children, the father of one of the students delivered a speech that would never be forgotten by all who attended. After extolling the school and its dedicated staff, he offered a question: "When not interfered with by outside influences, everything nature does is done with perfection. Yet my son, Shay, cannot learn things as other children do. He cannot understand things as other children do. Where is the natural order of things in my son?" The audience was stilled by the query.The father continued. "I believe that when a child like Shay , physi cally and mentally handicapped comes into the world, an opportunity to realize true human nature presents itself, and it comes in the way other people treat that child."

Then he told the following story: Shay and his father had walked past a park where some boys Shay knew were playing baseball. Shay asked, "Do you think they'll let me play?" Shay's father knew that most of the boys would not want someone like Shay on their team, but the father also understood that if his son were allowed to play, it would give him a much-needed sense of belonging and some confidence to be accepted by others in spite of his handicaps. Shay's father approached one of the boys on the field and asked (not expecting much) if Shay could play.

The boy looked around for guidance and said, "We're losing by six runs and the game is in the eighth inning. I guess he can be on our team and we'll try to put him in to bat in the ninth inning." Shay struggled over to the team's bench and, with a broad smile, put on a team shirt. His Father watched with a small tear in his eye and warmth in his heart. The boys saw the father's joy at his son being accepted. In the bottom of the eighth inning, Shay's team scored a few runs but was still behind by three. In the top of the ninth inning, Shay put on a glove and played in the right field. Even though no hits came his way, he was obviously ecstatic just to be in the game and on the field, grinning from ear to ear as his father waved to him from the stands. In the bottom of the ninth inning, Shay's team scored again.. Now, with two outs and the bases loaded, the potential winning run was on base and Shay was scheduled to be next at bat.

At this juncture, do they let Shay bat and give away their chance to win the game? Surprisingly, Shay was given the bat. Everyone knew that a hit was all but impossible because Shay didn't even know how to hold the bat properly, much less connect with the ball. However, as Shay stepped up to the plate, the pitcher, recognizing that the other team was putting winning aside for this moment in Shay's life, moved in a few steps to lob the ball in softly so Shay could at least make contact. The first pitch came and Shay swung clumsily and missed. The pitcher again took a few steps forward to toss the ball softly towards Shay. As the pitch came in, Shay swung at the ball and hit a slow ground ball right back to the pitcher. The game would now be over. The pitcher picked up the soft grounder and could have easily thrown the ball to the first baseman. Shay would have been out and that would have been the end of the game.Instead, the pitcher threw the ball right over the first baseman's head, out of reach of all team mates. Everyone from the stands and both teams started yelling, "Shay, run to first! Run to first!" Never in his life had Shay ever run that far, but he made it to first base. He scampered down the baseline, wide- eyed and startled.

Everyone yelled, "Run to second, run to second!" Catching his breath, Shay awkwardly ran towards second, gleaming and struggling to make it to the base. By the time Shay rounded towards second base, the right fielder had the ball ... the smallest guy on their team who now had his first chance to be the hero for his team. He could have thrown the ball to the second-baseman for the tag, but he understood the pitcher's intentions so he too intentionally threw the ball high and far over the third-baseman's head. Shay ran toward third base deliriously as the runners ahead of him circled the bases toward home. All were screaming, "Shay, Shay, Shay, all the Way Shay"Shay reached third base because the opposing shortstop ran to help him by turning him in the direction of third base, and shouted, "Run to third! Shay, run to third!" As Shay rounded third, the boys from both teams, and the spectators, were on their feet screaming, "Shay, run home! Run home!" Shay ran to home, stepped on the plate, and was cheered as the hero who hit the grand slam and won the game for his team. "That day", said the father softly with tears now rolling down his face, "the boys from both teams helped bring a piece of true love and humanity into this world".Shay didn't make it to another summer. He died that winter, having never forgotten being the hero and making his father so happy, and coming home and seeing his Mother tearfully embrace her little hero of the day!