How Do You Know He's Real?
Monthly Column by Amy Hammond Hagberg

(Photos courtesy of Joey Meddock)

24-year-old Lauren Harf-Loveless has been a professional wakeboarder for more than 8 years. She has been a familiar face at the Gravity Games, U.S. Open, The Pro Wakeboard Tour, and the X Games. But by far her favorite wakeboarding moment was her win at the 2003 Worlds in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil riding right under the famous Christ Statue on Corcovado Mountain.

Lauren is currently attending college studying Radio/TV Broadcasting. She and her husband Jon are also Directors of Operations for a Jr. High youth group called The Element at their church where his father is the Senior Pastor. Lauren’s passion in wakeboarding now is teaching and coaching and she has developed a successful wakeboard coaching business – find out more at www.wakecoach.com.

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My journey began with a car accident. It was a rude awakening for my whole family. This was the startling thing, the big thing that shook us up enough to know that we needed God in our lives.

I was born in southern California, so of course I learned to surf at a very young age. I’ve always loved the water. My family moved to the land-locked city of Orlando, Florida when I was about 8 so it looked like my surfing days were over. As it turns out, now I surf on a much smaller board, a wakeboard. For my brother and I, wakeboarding was a weekend thing at first – a way to hang out with our dad who worked all the time. A guy who lived across the lake from us was a competitive wakeboarder and gave us lessons in exchange for using our boat. He encouraged my brother and me to try entering tournaments and we started doing really well. We got the bug and competed every chance we could.

I went to a Catholic school from 4th grade all the way through my senior year in high school. Because of the theology and religion classes I had a lot of head knowledge about Christ, but no idea what being a true Christian was all about. To my mom, who was raised Catholic, the whole thing was about going to church every Sunday. But it didn’t mean much because our family wasn’t necessarily living the life – we were just going through the motions. Even in high school my friends would joke about it. We’d be little devils Monday through Saturday but come Sunday morning we were right in the front row at church.

During my senior year of high school… I started touring for wakeboarding. As soon as you get on tour you want to be accepted and you want to be welcomed by the other riders. And there is a lot of drinking and a lot of drugs and a lot of stuff that I really hadn’t been exposed to much. There was some of that sort of thing in my high school of course, but on tour I was hanging around with people who were much older than me.

Fortunately I got to be good friends with another wakeboarder around my age named Emily Copeland. Because Emily was from Denver, she used to come down to Florida to train during the winter months. One year her mom made arrangements for her to stay with us during those months because her brother was unable to make the trip as usual. She was supposed to move in for one winter and ended up staying for three years! Emily is an amazing Christian who at the time was really coming into her own. She had known Jesus her whole life but she was out on her own making a stand for her faith. I can’t tell you how glad I would become that she was my friend.

One of those years my grandmother was visiting from California. My mom took her for the day to Tampa to visit her brother and sister. On the way home from dropping her off my mom was in a terrible car accident. The car flipped and a guardrail went through the back window. She was really, really hurt. She broke the exact same vertebrae that Christopher Reeve (Superman) broke in his neck. At the hospital the doctors sat us down to prepare us for the very good possibility that she would not walk again. They said they were going to do surgery and do the very best they could, but she could be paralyzed.

Through it all I had Emily there as my support system. She suggested we pray for my mom during the entire surgery which was something I’d never experienced before – the power of prayer. I’d never been in a situation where I felt like that was the only thing I could do.

My mom came out of the surgery amazingly well and she is perfectly fine now. She even began training to run a marathon after her recovery. And that is definitely the grace of God, there is no doubt about it. While she was recuperating my mom shared something that really struck me. When we were little and would leave the house to go off to school she would say a little prayer asking God to wrap us in his coat and protect us from the bullies and peer pressure and other things that might happen that day. She told me that the last thing she remembered before the car flipped over was the sensation of her arm slipping into the sleeve of a coat. It was God telling her that he was going to take care of HER now - his child.

The accident was a huge turning point in my faith. It was the first time I realized that God really does care what we’re doing and knows exactly where we are at every moment. And it affected my entire family. We all started attending a non-denominational church where we would grow in our faith and later be baptized. For the first time I understood what it meant to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. It truly was the greatest decision I could have ever made for my life. I finally realized that I would not have to carry the weight of my life alone. I now had someone who had come before me and promised to walk along side me as my very best friend.

(Excerpt taken from How Do You Know He’s Real: God Unplugged. Books are available at www.hesreal.com.)

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