A Greater Story Read online

  “This is an incredible story!”

  Steve Harvey, media mogul, Emmy Award–winning comedian, and New York Times bestselling author

  “Sam is no stranger to our stages. We’ve been inspired by his story. I’m honored Sam calls North Point home.”

  Andy Stanley, founder of North Point Ministries

  “The minute I met Sam, I called everyone I knew and said, ‘You’ve got to have this guy speak at your event.’ Eight years later, I’m still telling people to check out Sam.”

  Jon Acuff, New York Times bestselling author

  “Sam has helped us tremendously at Reach Records. I’m sure anything he writes is a must-read.”

  Lecrae, Grammy Award–winning recording artist

  “Sam has an opportunity to bridge a racial divide in the church. Maybe that’s a part of the greater story here as well. His story is incredible.”

  Jeff Henderson, founder of Preaching Rocket and lead pastor at Gwinnett Church

  “Sam’s story is one of adversity and triumph, humility and learning, brokenness and building. I’m grateful that he is willing to give so many of us a window into the pivotal moments that have shaped him. Those of us who know Sam are inspired by his resilience, his passion to be a winner, and his drive to show others that they have a greater story to tell too.”

  Reggie Joiner, founder and CEO of Orange

  “I want to read anything Sam Collier writes because he is an empowering leader who offers fresh insight and prophetic instruction for living our best lives!!”

  Danielle Strickland, international speaker, author, and global social justice advocate

  © 2020 by Sam Collier

  Published by Baker Books

  a division of Baker Publishing Group

  PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

  www.bakerbooks.com

  Ebook edition created 2020

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  ISBN 978-1-4934-2349-1

  The author is represented by the literary agency of The Bindery, LLC.

  Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007, 2013, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

  Scripture quotations labeled NASB are from the New American Standard Bible® (NASB), copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. www.Lockman.org

  Scripture quotations labeled NKJV are from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  Scripture quotations labeled WEB are from the World English Bible.

  I would like to dedicate this book to Mom and Dad, Lamar and Belinda Collier. You saved my life.

  And to my twin, Sara, you gave me a life to fight for.

  Contents

  Cover 1

  Endorsements 2

  Title Page 3

  Copyright Page 4

  Dedication 5

  The Words That Changed Everything 9

  PART ONE: You, Here and Now 17

  1. Family Matters 19

  2. Church Clothes 33

  3. The Day My Life Became My Own 59

  4. The Road to Restoration 71

  5. When Faith Is Tested 85

  PART TWO: By God’s Amazing Grace 95

  6. Killing It, before It Killed Me 97

  7. My Ebenezer 107

  8. No Losing 115

  9. A God Dream 123

  10. Dream Killers 141

  PART THREE: Changing the World for Good 157

  11. A Greater Story 159

  12. The Art of Sacrifice 167

  13. Family Reunion 181

  Acknowledgments 197

  Notes 199

  Back Ads 205

  Cover Flaps 209

  Back Cover 210

  The Words That Changed Everything

  Every miracle is a reaction to the impossible. I would dare say that without the impossible, miracles would not be needed. Are you in need of a miracle? If so, I’m glad you’re reading this book, because I was. My hope for you as we travel through what some would say is an inconceivable journey, which is my life, is that you would be inspired. Not only inspired but also filled with an unwavering hope that if God could do it for me, he can do it for you too. Here’s my miracle story.

  It was the fall of 2013 when my family and I found ourselves sitting inside a small studio within the thirty-seven-story NBC Tower in downtown Chicago, by way of Atlanta, Georgia. That was our first time in the Windy City. My twin sister, Sara, my father, Lamar, and my mother, Belinda, had traveled from Atlanta to be there, and now we were being taken through hair and makeup and ushered around by the senior producer, a woman named Dorothy. She seated Mom and Dad in the front row of the live studio audience and Sara and me on the couch right next to Steve Harvey—the Steve Harvey—the mogul, comedian, award-winning radio personality, producer, actor, author, and, most relevant to my story, television mega host. He was everywhere, doing everything it seemed, including humbly helping a pair of twenty-four-year-old twins find their birth mom. Or at least trying to help.

  A year prior to this turn of events, we Colliers were sitting in the living room at the family house, watching a Falcons game, when Dad broke the only rule he’d ever given us in relation to watching football: NO ONE TALKS during the game. He waited quietly until a random fourth down and then hollered, “You know what you need to do?”

  It wasn’t a question.

  We knew better than to holler back, even as our expressions communicated our shock. “You need to go find your parents!” Dad said, his voice still raised.

  What you must understand about my father is that hollering was normal for him. I doubt he even knew he was doing it. In his head, he was speaking at a normal pitch, but to us? Hollering—no question. Still, we forgave him. He’s from the part of the country where everyone shouts and thinks it’s normal.

  “What are you talking about?” I remember asking him.

  As a family, the subject of “finding our birth mother” was new. Sara and I had never been interested or uninterested in “finding” anyone or anything, because we’d never really felt that anything was lost.

  “Well, you need to know where you came from,” Dad said. “You’re getting older. I think it may be time. I mean, you don’t want to grow up and marry a cousin, do you? Because that could happen! You could marry your sister or brother, and you’d never know it!”

  Sara and I both side-eyed him, chuckled, and thought, So that’s your argument, huh?

  Although we didn’t admit it, Dad was right. My sister and I wouldn’t have known our biological cousins or siblings if they were staring us in the face.

  Dad then went on to holler, “And another thing. God told me Steve Harvey is going to help you do it! If he can’t help you, no one can.” It was in that moment I got up and left. “Dad,” I said as I walked out the door, “I think you’ve lost your mind.” I told my sister that she was in charge of this craziness and left.

  “I’m sorry to tell you that nothing turned up,” senior producer Dorothy had told my family. The show’s producers had received Sara’s letter a month prior, explaining that we’d been given up for adoption at birth and wanted to reunite with our biological mother and sibli
ngs, if we had any. “We know that if anyone can help us,” she’d written, “it’s Steve Harvey.”

  But evidently, even Steve Harvey has his limits. He had tried everything, we were told, but all roads led to a dead end. “Still,” the producer had been kind and offered, “if you’d like to come on the show and make a plea to the nation to help you find your mother, we will pay your way here and back . . . you and your parents too. It would be a nice addition to our weeklong Mother’s Day specials.”

  Figuring we had nothing to lose, we’d flown to Chicago and were sitting on the set, waiting, as an assistant cued the audience for applause to bring us in from a commercial break.

  “Sam, let me ask you, what do you know about your birth mother?” Steve Harvey said.

  The truth is, we didn’t know much. As we prepared for the show, Mom unlocked the safe and pulled out our decades-old adoption paperwork, about one hundred pages of it that communicated the hard facts of our origin story—that we’d been born to a broken mother who, in her crossroads moment, decided that our best shot at life was the foster care system or adoption.

  As I stood at a Kinko’s copy center at two in the morning, photocopying those dozens upon dozens of pages to send to Steve Harvey’s team, I gathered up the details of my mother’s circumstances.

  Legal Name: Elinor Lynette Redden

  Age: 21

  Residence: Augusta, Georgia

  Marital Status: Single

  There was evidence of welfare and extreme poverty. There were Child Protective Services reports and claims of prostitution. There were indications of the use of hard drugs—crack and cocaine among them. There were plentiful facts about our mother, but the news on our father was thin. The general consensus, as far as we could tell, was that he had completely deserted our bio-mom and was consistently strung out on drugs.

  Nobody would have blamed me for holding on to rage for that man, but my posture toward him was warm. Was this because I had been raised by a loving dad? Maybe. But context has a way of providing clarity and creating empathy. Given the era my biological father grew up in, he was probably just doing what he had seen older men do. Like so many African-American men of his generation, he was a product of the social, economic, and environmental factors at work in the world around him. The prevailing emotion I felt as I read about him was something resembling pity.

  What a terrible set of circumstances he had. What a frustrating way to live.

  As I continued to read, I discovered that my bio-mom and bio-dad had had more kids before Sara and I came along. This unbelievable realization struck me under the copy center’s fluorescent lights, as high-speed machines whirred and ground around me. I had a brother. I had two more sisters. This news struck me as insane. Three young kids. Three mouths to feed. And then, along came twins. Even a mature, emotionally stable woman could have buckled under the weight of that. For my mother, I imagined, it crushed her.

  People who study drug addiction say that smoking crack consistently causes the user to experience a terrible mix of emotions, including irritability, anxiety, depression, aggression, and paranoid behavior. Yes, the highs are high, but the lows are equally low. So in addition to facing all the usual fears associated with being a young, poor, single mother, our mom probably dealt with at least some of those crippling effects. Sara and I consider ourselves blessed that we were given the gift of life in the first place. Many women who find themselves where our bio-mom found herself would have chosen abortion over adoption. Whatever her motivations, and whatever her reality, I like to believe that her decision to give us up had been based in love, even if it hadn’t been. She let go of us and sent us upriver like the baby Moses in a basket, trusting that God would meet us, hoping that someone would find us, believing that somehow, some way, we’d be all right in the end.

  “The twins are looking for their birth mother,” Steve Harvey was saying, “and their adoptive parents support this search. They’re here, in fact. Lamar and Belinda, would you stand?”

  The only mom and dad Sara and I have ever known stood up from their seats in the front row as the crowd around them erupted with applause. From the couch where we were sitting, we looked at them with pride. They were our heroes. Our rescuers. Our version of Jesus.

  Out the corner of my eye, I took in my twin sister embodying all the beauty of a woman mixed with an uneasy smile in regard to who might enter the stage. If Sara was an actress, she could easily be cast as Serena Williams in an HBO movie special. My sister is a combination of academic smarts and physical fitness: she can float through complicated calculus problems as if she were playing tic-tac-toe, and focus on staying physically fit like an Olympic athlete. With espresso-brown skin and eyes that always warm my soul, Sara is simply breathtaking. That day she was sporting a short, curly, cropped hairstyle, which allowed her high cheekbones to command attention.

  Looking at my mom in the audience, I knew the viewers would define her resting face as a genuine smile. A tall, slender, graceful woman, my mom could easily pass for a long-distance runner. Her caramel skin tone accentuates her compassionate eyes and intuitive nature.

  I think my dad’s honesty shows up in his face. His eyes tell a story of triumph through faithfulness. He could be described as having an average build, but his broad shoulders give him a soldier-like frame. Looking at him in the audience, I realized how all my life I had thought he could fix anything, solve any puzzle, stay calm through any crisis. I still believe that to be true.

  My dad had been at every basketball game I’d ever played. All along the way, my mom made sure that Sara and I were given every educational opportunity any child could ever have. They’d introduced us to the living God—Jesus Christ himself. They’d loved us. And for the millionth time, there they were, laying aside their own agenda, to help Sara and me further God’s plans for us. There Dad was again, being Dad. Standing at attention, living in the moment, clapping with the audience as Steve asked him and Mom to stand.

  They deserve every moment of this applause and more, I thought to myself. Man, my parents are the greatest.

  During that emotional moment, Steve Harvey looked at me and said, “Now I know I said that we didn’t find your birth mother, but that’s not the case.”

  He paused and then said the words that would change everything for Sara and me: “Elinor, come on out.”

  Part One

  You, Here and Now

  1

  Family Matters

  I sustain myself with the love of family.

  MAYA ANGELOU

  “Family” doesn’t always mean “blood.” If you want to know one of the secrets to happiness in life, copy and paste that one onto your heart.

  When I was a kid, my dad had a barbershop—Silver Star Barbershop. Still today, all these years after Dad left that business, Silver Star stands strong, one of the oldest businesses in the Sweet Auburn district, an area known primarily for being the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta. Sweet Auburn is where Martin Luther King Jr.’s father pastored. Sweet Auburn is where Dr. King grew up. Sweet Auburn is where the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church and Dr. King’s only organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, reside. My dad’s Silver Star Barbershop was nestled between history. I didn’t know any of this as a kid, you realize; to me, it was just “where Dad worked.”

  Most Saturday mornings, I’d be wakened from a deep, peaceful sleep by my dad hollering (of course), “Sam! Let’s go! We gotta get down to the shop! Let’s gooo!”

  The truth was that I loved going down to the shop. What I didn’t love was having an alarm clock that yelled.

  In Dad’s defense, my comatose state required a little hollering. From time to time, Dad would give up on trying to wake me and just leave me there to sleep. Around noon, I’d call him and ask why in the world he’d left me home. “Are you serious?” he’d say with a chuckle. Nuclear war couldn’t have woken me up.

  I’d hang up the phone and slink back to bed, determined n
ot to miss his wake-up hollering the next time. That next time would come, and I’d heed the call. Father and son! Off to the Silver Star. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.

  Our journey to the shop always began with a quick stop at Chick-fil-A to get Dad’s morning coffee and two chicken biscuits—one for him, one for me. It was followed up by the sounds of Kiss 104.1 FM, the oldies station, with the fly jock Tom Joyner and his crew trash-talking us onto I-20 East. We’d munch our biscuits to the I-75/85 North interchange, where the fog would clear and our exit would appear. Auburn Avenue—there it was. We were close, and I was glad.

  I want you to think of the best of soul food dishes—whether it’s collards, baked chicken, fried chicken, mac and cheese, banana pudding, or barbecue. Imagine the aroma of these dishes being personified into the warmest and most secure hug on a cold day. That feeling is Auburn Avenue. Walking outside the Silver Star Barbershop, you’d see Henry’s Grill and Lounge directly across the street. It was an old-fashioned restaurant with a big cursive neon sign on top of the building. To the left of the barbershop was Poro Beauty Salon, where women entered wearing scarves covering their heads and exited with beautiful permed, teased, or silky straight hairstyles from the pressing comb. The Royal Peacock—a once-upscale nightclub boasting celebrity superstar performances by B.B. King, the Four Tops, and Atlanta’s own Gladys Knight and the Pips—hosted reggae parties during my youth. A block up from the barbershop was the Atlanta Daily World newspaper, the first black-owned daily, and the African-American Panoramic Experience (APEX) Museum. At the corner of Auburn Ave and Piedmont Avenue was the beaux-style Atlanta Life Insurance Company complex. At the end of the block stood Big Bethel AME Church, or what I thought was a castle. The wide arches and a tower at the southern end, all covered with noble rough-hewn stones, gave the church a gothic feel. Perched on the top of the steeple was a white cross, and on the front as well as the back of the steeple were two blue neon cross signs with the words “Jesus Saves.” To this day, driving on I-75/85 at night and seeing the bright neon “Jesus Saves” sign cutting through the darkness provides me comfort on many nights.