There were good years. There were hard ones. There were moments when I was not easy to live with, not easy to follow, not easy to believe in. And yet, somehow, we kept moving forward. Looking back now, here’s the turn I didn’t see coming. I thought I was chasing a platform. God was building a marriage. I thought charisma would carry me. God gave me a woman who would stay when charisma ran out.

December 30, 2025, will mark 30 years since Tomeka and I got married.

Thirty years.

That’s 360 months.
1,565 weeks and 3 days.
10,958 days.
262,992 hours.
15,779,520 minutes.

Enough time for God to expose illusions, burn off pride, and replace ambition with covenant.

When I look back, the story doesn’t begin at an altar. It begins with two very different trajectories crossing in the same room.

Tomeka was a student at Oral Roberts University. Focused. Disciplined. Grounded in ways I didn’t yet understand.

I was something else entirely.

I was a disciple of Carlton Pearson. At the time, he was everything I thought I wanted to be. Articulate. Charismatic. A powerful persuader of people. He could sing and preach. He could move a crowd.

If I’m honest, most of us were there to see the show.

The atmosphere at Higher Dimensions Evangelistic Center fed that appetite. The choir. The Hammond B3 already roaring before the doors opened. The call-and-response preaching that felt alive, electric, urgent. Black Pentecostal fire brushing up against Charismatic expectation, always flirting with the spectacular.

That was the air we breathed.

And in the middle of all that noise, Tomeka caught my eye.

She was there with another man, who she still insists was “just a friend.”

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