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

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

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. Live Free is his most recent book. 

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.

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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...