The Wait: A Powerful Practice for Finding the Love of Your Life and the Life You Love - Softcover

DeVon Franklin is an award­-winning film & TV producer, bestselling author, renowned preacher, and spiritual success coach. DeVon is the ultimate multi-hyphenate. With a commitment to uplifting the masses through entertainment, Franklin has quickly become a force in the media as well as a leading authority on faith, spiritual wellness, and personal development. Beliefnet has called him one of the “Most Influential Christians Under 40,” Variety named him one of the “Top 10 Producers to Watch,” Ebony has distinguished him as one of the “Top 100 Influential African Americans in America,” and even Oprah has called him “a bonafide dynamo...a different kind of spiritual teacher for our times.” Franklin serves as President/CEO of Franklin Entertainment, a dynamic multimedia entertainment company with a first-look film deal at 20th Century Fox. As a filmmaker, Franklin is producing the inspirational true story Breakthrough starring Chrissy Metz in theaters Easter of 2020. Additionally, he produced the hit animated film The Star and the hit film Miracles from Heaven. Along with his work as a producer, Franklin is the author of The Truth About Men, as well as The Hollywood Commandments, New York Times bestseller The Wait (cowritten with his wife, award-winning actress Meagan Good), and Produced by Faith.

Meagan Good is an award-winning actress, bestselling author, and producer. She’s headlined some of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters including Think Like A Man, Think Like a Man Too, Anchorman: The Legend Continues, Stomp The Yard and the critically acclaimed Eve’s Bayou. She also starred in Deception for NBC and Minority Report for Fox. She is the New York Times bestselling author of The Wait. She’s also cofounder of The Greater Good Foundation, a non-profit organization that advocates for the empowerment and enrichment of young women.

The Wait —— CHAPTER ONE ——

NO SEX? YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS

Patience is not the ability to Wait,

but the ability to keep a good attitude while Waiting.

—JOYCE MEYERS

Just what is The Wait, exactly? The Wait is a conscious choice to pursue delayed gratification in the areas of life specifically related to relationships. It’s a decision to get your mind right, figure out who you want to be and what you want out of life, and use your time and energy to become the best version of yourself. Put simply:

To Wait is to delay the temptation for instant gratification in relationships in order to get what you really want in life and become the person you truly want to be.

That starts with saying no to sex. The Wait isn’t 100 percent about sex, but that’s where it begins. Sex is probably the most compelling aspect of human gratification. It’s such a powerful desire that outside of a proper healthy context it can cloud our judgment and cause us to make decisions that work against our own best self-interest. The untamed, untempered drive for sexual gratification has toppled empires, scuttled political careers, destroyed marriages, and squandered fortunes. Sex can be like a McLaren F1 race car: great in the right hands, but potentially disastrous when handled recklessly.

We’re willing to bet that you’ve experienced more of the latter. We know because we’ve done it. We’ve all made terrible decisions about who to flirt with, spend time with, commit to, and even sleep with that had nothing to do with our brains but everything to do with our bodies. Sex can become a gateway drug to all kinds of other choices intended to satisfy the need for quick pleasure: going out with that gorgeous girl even though you know she’s a hot mess, spending the weekend at that dude’s place even though you know you’re not the only one, or having just one more drink even though you know it will impair your judgment.

When we chase the high of instant gratification, we make choices that for many reasons are irresponsible and based on poor reasoning . . . or no reasoning at all. It takes time and self-control to take in information, let people reveal their true character, be consistent and disciplined, and give conflicts time to work themselves out. Delaying gratification means working at becoming more self-aware and humble enough to admit that our first impulses aren’t always smart ones.

Let’s be really, really clear on this:

One of the keys to practicing The Wait is giving up sex.

We know that for many Christians and non-Christians alike, the idea of giving up sex is too outrageous and impossible to consider. We get that. Yet based on our experience, we still believe that practicing The Wait until marriage will set you up for success and align you with God’s perfect will for your life in all areas.
SEX, WAITING, AND RELATIONSHIPS

At its heart The Wait is a book about relationships, but there’s no unwinding the connection between relationships and sexuality. Love and sex are the two sides of the same coin. When you have sex with someone outside of marriage, you’re not just setting off a chain of chemical reactions in your brain that make you think they’re a lot better for you than they probably are; you’re giving them a part of your spirit.

When you have sex with someone, you really are leaving them a piece of yourself and taking a part of them with you . . . whether you want to or not. So each sex partner, good and bad, becomes a part of your future. Does this make you think twice about who you choose—and have chosen—to get into bed with?

Sex is an act of trust. It’s about way more than physical attraction—yet when you think of it only as physical attraction you will see (or have already seen) that attraction lies and spellbinds. Strong relationships aren’t built solely on physical or sexual attraction. They’re built on good judgment. How many times have you become caught up with someone based mostly on sexual attraction? How have those relationships ended?

We don’t have to ask if they’ve ended, because they don’t last. They can’t. Before too long, the hormonal haze clears and all that matters is character, integrity, intelligence, values, spirituality, and self-esteem. A person who doesn’t have enough of those to suit you is a person you can’t tolerate for long.

Delaying gratification and getting greater control over your behavior—so that you can break the patterns that keep sabotaging you—is the key to finally finding the life and the peace that you hunger for. It’s the key to becoming who you’ve always aspired to be, an idea we’ll unpack in chapter two. But it all starts with giving up sex.
THE PROBLEM WITH SEX

Sex, of course, is a topic overflowing with religious, cultural, political, and personal baggage. Much of our popular culture is built around sexual titillation. In our business, the making of movies and television, actors are often cast as much for their good looks as for their acting talents. You don’t really think that all private detectives look like Denzel Washington, do you?

As a people, we’re alternately conflicted, fascinated, and appalled by sex in all its forms. Lawmakers crusade against pornography while their constituents consume it in record amounts. Abstinence-only sex-education programs deny teens basic information on the assumption that it will make them promiscuous, while the data show that teens are less sexually active than they’ve been in decades. The most popular magazines seem to be about nothing but sex: how to get it, how to give it, where to have it, how to be better at it, how to know if your partner is having it with someone else, and so on. We’re obsessed with sex, and at the same time we disapprove of our obsession. It’s no wonder that sex ties us in knots.

An old saying goes, “Success makes us forgetful and stupid.” Sex does the same thing. It makes us forget who we are and what we want. It makes us do things that we look at later and say, “What was I thinking?”

After we got married in 2012, we were asked to appear at numerous conferences and gatherings all around the country to share the story of our relationship and how God brought us together. Though we talked about personal growth and getting closer to God, the stories about us—online and off-line—mostly focused on one thing: waiting to have sex. No matter how deep our faith and how intense our devotion and duty to God, we’re still human, and human beings tend to be like twelve-year-olds when it comes to the topic of sex. (LOL).

Sex is pleasurable. Sex between two people who love each other body and soul is transcendent. But more often than not, that’s not the kind of sex most people are having. A good friend of ours once said to us, “I’m not getting married until I have what you guys have.” That’s flattering and humbling, but it’s also a reflection on how hard it is to find compatibility.

The two of us are not anti-sex. To be anti-sex would pretty much be the same as being anti-God. God created sex and we fully advocate the joy of experiencing it the way He intended. What we do know is that we’ve seen and known a lot of people whose higher aspirations for love, family, and success have landed on the rocks because they put the pursuit of sex before anything else.

The question, “to have sex or not to have sex?” is at the heart of The Wait. That’s not because the most popular question when we spoke at Morehouse College or at T. D. Jakes’s MegaFest or on Jimmy Kimmel Live! was “How did you manage not to have sex?” It’s because we saw the incredible and undeniable grace that came to our relationship when we decided to remain committed to celibacy before marriage.
WHY WE CHOSE TO BE CELIBATE

We both discovered independently that to be the people we truly wanted to be, we needed to take sex out of the equation.

DEVON: I had made a commitment of celibacy long before I met Meagan. When we got married, I had been celibate for over ten years. What motivated the commitment was the same thing that made me keep it. I was preaching about living a life that put the Lord first, and then I was going out and living a life that was the opposite of the discipline I was teaching. Trying to be two people started tearing me apart. The desire for peace and harmony within myself was a motivator to choose no sex.

I asked myself, “What if what I was doing with this other woman disqualified me for the full manifestation of the call that God has on my life? Would it be worth it?” Of course not! No sex is worth that! I could not reconcile the idea that at the end of my life God might say, “Here’s what I had planned for you, but because you showed yourself unworthy, I couldn’t do all I wanted to do in your life.” I was not prepared to take that risk. Whatever my purpose is in this life, I didn’t want anything to get in the way of that.

MEAGAN: I got saved when I was twelve and lost my virginity when I was nineteen. As a Christian, I felt a strong conviction about not having sex, but like most of us, I made excuses and swept those convictions under the rug. And in some relationships I tried hard to abstain; in others I just guiltily went with the flow because I had failed miserably, so what was the point. On some occasions I opted to not even acknowledge my reservations at all because the guilt was exhausting. I repeated the same painful patterns in my relationships over and over, but I didn’t connect that to sex for a long time.

Finally, I knew I had to make a commitment to take sex off the table. I knew I couldn’t do the same thing and expect a different result. I knew I was giving most of me but not all of me at this point. I already knew DeVon but didn’t know he was my husband. By the time I began to entertain the thought of celibacy, my life was an emotional mess. Going celibate helped me clean it up in all areas (even areas where sex played no part). If I hadn’t done that, I doubt we would have come together as husband and wife.

Later, when we got together and got the memo—the revelation that our relationship was going to happen and in fact was meant to be—we didn’t want to do anything to sabotage it. Since we had both been celibate at this point, we agreed that we would remain celibate until after we married . . . if we married. So we took a calculated risk: we would forego physical pleasure so that we could really get to know each other’s minds, hearts, and spirits and confirm that God was truly bringing us together.

Considering the potential payoff, it wasn’t much of a risk. Sure, we were passing up sexual gratification. But by achieving real clarity we avoided making a life-altering mistake either way. Of course, things did work out. We fell in love with each other as whole people, and the promised payoff has been a life filled with not just joy but the peace that comes with knowing we’re firmly in the center of God’s purpose.

Now, we won’t lie to you. It wasn’t always easy. There were nights when things would get hot and heavy and Meagan would stop us and say, “I can’t get down like this. I’m used to going all the way. So we need to cool off.” And we would stop right there, say our good nights, and part for the evening. That happened plenty of times.

But when it dawned on us just how important celibacy was for our union, we both said, “Lord, delaying gratification is powerful!”

How powerful? We saw the many ways that God blessed us and continues to bless us with a relationship built on mutual respect and deep understanding of who we are. We didn’t let sex distort our perceptions, cloud our judgment, or make us rationalize something we didn’t like. We fell in love as centered, intelligent people and children of God long before we fell in love with each other’s physicality or sensuality.
WHAT THE WAIT ISN’T

Despite all this, The Wait is anything but passive. You’re not sitting on your hands and hoping that things will turn out all right. You’re making deliberate, positive choices that change who you are and how your mind works. You’re also taking the resources you’ve been spending to chase after sexual gratification and using them instead to improve yourself in body, mind, and spirit.

We call this “strategic patience.” While you wait, you’re not putting your life on hold or wasting time waiting for something to happen. Instead, you’re taking all the time and attention that you’ve been projecting outward and turning it inward. That’s one of the most positive, life-affirming choices a person can make. From this perspective, you can finally see that hurling yourself into the path of potentially romantic relationships hasn’t brought you any closer to what you want. It’s time to try a different approach: letting love and purpose manifest in your life as a result of you working on becoming the best version of yourself.

Practicing strategic patience means understanding the difference between the two types of waiting:

1. Waiting that you choose.

2. Waiting that you have no choice about.

There’s a big difference between something you choose and something that’s forced upon you. With the first, you’re in control; with the second, you resent control being taken from you. The Wait is about changing your circumstance from the second type of waiting into the first. Instead of feeling resentful and angry when the pursuit of your desires hits a wall, think, “Okay, since I’m already waiting, I’m going to choose to use this time productively.” Your circumstances haven’t changed, but how you see them certainly has. Just like that you transform yourself from passive victim into active collaborator with God.

Other things The Wait is not:

· A punishment. God isn’t making you spend time alone as payback for some previous sin.

· Forever. We understand that not having sex is hard and could make a month feel like a year. But tell us this: What’s the longest time in recent years that you’ve gone without sex against your will—Days? Weeks? Months? Years? Could you do that again, this time because you choose to?

· Putting your life on hold. Hardly. Now you have time and bandwidth to work on you. There are definitely times when fast, aggressive action is required to get what you want. You can still practice The Wait while you’re actively going after all God has for you in life.

· Weird. We want to take the stigma away from waiting. What’s bizarre about valuing yourself, your body, and your God over all else? Especially if you’ve already been through the pain of multiple bad breakups, there’s nothing weird about waiting, no matter what anyone else says.

Most important, The Wait isn’t powerless. Though you might not see it, God has His hand on your life during this time, rearranging the scenery in order to set you up for good things to come.
THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT BEING CELIBATE

If only those facts were enough to convince people about the power of celibacy, but they’re not. When we talk about The Wait and suggest that people consider going without sex, we get stares of horror. Many people can’t even fathom going without sex for three months, much less years. On the male side, a lot of men have bought into the false idea that says that being a man means chasing lots of women. In that scenario, a man’s worth has nothing to do with his character, morals, or integrity. It becomes reduced to how many women he sleeps with.

As for women, our culture tells them that their sexuality is one of the most important things they have to offer and then shames them for displaying it. It’...