I stayed up late to read through the journals, seeing for myself how Sarah was always thinking of ways to help people and be of service. As I read, I began to feel an overwhelming sense of purpose, and I realized that I had inherited Sarah’s. I would keep her work alive through my life. Those are pretty big shoes to fill, I remember thinking. Just as quickly, I pushed away my fears: Well, they’re the only ones you’ve got.
Sarah’s funeral was held at her home church, First Baptist Church, Woodway. The service was exactly what she would have wanted. In her journals, she mentioned a song she particularly loved, “How Beautiful,” which she hoped to play when she eventually married. Dad asked me to sing it, and I was afraid to. But I knew it would be what Sarah wanted, so I just asked her to help me through it. It was the only time I didn’t cry at the funeral.
I recently talked to Aunt Debbie to get her blessing to share Sarah’s story. She told me many people, young and old, later said that the service inspired them to accept Christ and to go into ministry or mission work. A day or so after the service, the letters started arriving. Sarah had written notes to every single member of her graduating class, telling them about Jesus and saying she was praying for them. She wasn’t preachy, just saying that in times of trouble she had found comfort in prayer and she wanted everyone to know they could come talk to her if they needed that support of Christ. She had mailed them a few days before she died, wishing everyone a great future. It was a powerful lesson in creating a legacy by choosing your words with intention. We are on this earth such a short time, cruelly short in Sarah’s case. What message did I want to leave behind?
I wasn’t the only person Sarah visited after her death. She came to Aunt Debbie and her boyfriend in dreams as well. She told him that she was okay, and he saw many kids around her that she was teaching. A girlfriend of Sarah’s told Aunt Debbie she saw Sarah in heaven, living in this big mansion, with white pillars . . . Aunt Debbie told me she nearly fainted, because what this young woman described was something Sarah had told her father about a week before her death. They were driving to check out Howard Payne, because she had been offered a scholarship there and had never visited. She was so excited on the two-hour ride. “I have this vision,” she told her dad, “that I’ll live in this huge house. With a big balcony and huge colonial pillars.”
“Well, you better marry someone rich out here,” Uncle Boyd joked.
“Or someone who loves you a lot,” Aunt Debbie recalled saying quickly. She told me: “I did not want her dreams crushed. If she wanted a mansion, I wanted her to have that dream.”
My aunt has extended that loving heart to so many. That poor boy who hit the horse, who set Gracious Will into motion, later reached out to her. He was just thirteen, a little kid, and his mom called and said, “My son’s gotta tell you something.” Aunt Debbie had to make a choice: Make this kid feel more terrible than he already did or tell this boy that he was okay and all was forgiven. She chose the latter, refusing to be bitter. Sarah’s boyfriend went on to be the great man that Sarah saw in him. He became an EMT. Another friend of hers named his daughter after Sarah. “I recently saw her, and she is such a beautiful, kind young woman,” Aunt Debbie told me.
Shortly after Sarah died, I started reevaluating what I was spending time on. The push-and-pull games with Jason now seemed childish, and I felt like God wanted me to make space for bigger things. Jason stayed very active in my dad’s church and went on to become a pastor.
I started journaling when I saw how Sarah could express herself so beautifully on the page. On May 13, 1996, I wrote: “I am starting a prayer journal. Sarah dying taught me how much I take for granted. God, help me keep this promise and please keep me accountable.”
God and Sarah began to keep me accountable, so I stuck with it. I listed the people I prayed for and the things that scared me. And as I wrote, I started to get to know myself better, readying myself for what was before me.
Part Two
6
Taking Flight
July 1997
The Casa Hogar Elim orphanage was about a dozen miles from the Texas border town of Laredo and a world away for us kids from church youth group. There were about a hundred of us that first time I went. On the bus from the airport in San Antonio, we leafed through magazines, showing each other a Ford Mustang convertible we had to have and the red, white, and blue Tommy Hilfiger ad for the white polo that was different from every polo we already had because this one was Tommy Hilfiger. I had begun to picture myself not just wearing the clothes in the magazines but being in the magazines.
It felt like I was getting closer. I was sixteen, just a few days from turning seventeen. On my birthday, July 10, I was going to fly to New York for meetings with record labels. I had plateaued on the Christian circuit and needed to go mainstream. Buster came to us shortly after Sarah died and told us the label was folding, so it seemed like all that work producing my gospel album would never see the light of day. My Nanny, one of my biggest champions, came to my rescue and gave my father $7,500 to do a pressing of the record so we could make CDs and tapes to sell ourselves at concerts. We named the album Jessica, and used one of my black-and-white Mickey Mouse Club audition headshots as the cover, giving it a sepia tint to make it look arty. I dedicated it to Sarah, and just as I had done with the Jump for Jesus videos, I was relentless, selling those CDs every chance I got.
Dad treated it like a business card, and he was effective. My vocal coach, Linda Septien, got us hooked up with Tom Hicks as a potential investor in my career. He was a near billionaire who had recently bought the Dallas Stars hockey team. I used to joke that my dad called 1-800-ENTERTAINMENT LAWYER, to find Tim Mandelbaum, but now I know it was from talking with Linda. Tim was in New York, where all the music labels were, and he shopped my CD around to drum up interest.
And there was. After the trip to the orphanage, we were flying straight to New York to meet with eight labels. Tim had lined up the meetings over a couple days, and I would basically be auditioning at each one, with my dad pitching me as my manager.
But first, there was the weeklong mission trip to the orphanage. When we drove up to the two-story complex of sun-bleached stone, everyone got quiet. Now we weren’t a bunch of pampered extras from Clueless. We’d seen poverty up close on mission trips before. As a group, we traveled to the Bowery mission in New York to sing and serve at the soup kitchen. And we’d done vacation bible school in Belize, where our van broke down during a rainstorm in the middle of the jungle. We were stranded, and I made everyone get out and pray in a circle around the bus. You know, to heal the van, I guess. Maybe it worked because a busload of soldiers, all with rifles on their laps, happened by. No one said a word the whole way back to the city limits. When we finally got back to the hotel, Carol Vanderslice, my Sunday school teacher, told me she thought, Great, I’m going to get the pastor’s daughter killed.
But there was something humbling about the trip to the orphanage, knowing all the kids who surrounded us had no one but each other and Mama Lupita, the woman who ran the organization. There were about eighty kids of all ages milling around in worn hand-me-down T-shirts with slogans and outdated video game characters. The orphanage had no running water or electricity, and since it was not state-owned, it relied solely on donations and the work of church groups like ours cycling through. Mama Lupita—Guadalupe Carmona was her real name—started the orphanage in 1986 when she took in four kids whose father couldn’t care for them after their mother died. My dad told me Mama Lupita also visited prisons to pray with people, and the women there often asked her to take in their kids, too. It just grew from there.