Most importantly, the process of putting together my book taught me how to listen to the Lord and the importance of saying “yes” to whatever He puts on the table. I still don’t feel qualified to consider myself an author, but I think that’s kind of the point. I never could have done this in my own strength. I did it because I was relying on the Lord, and I trusted that He would guide me every step of the way. I knew that He would provide what I needed to accomplish what He called me to do. And He did! 

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This publication, The Journey, is part of that legacy to push back darkness with light. He believed testimonies were powerful because they reveal what God is doing in ordinary people’s lives. He believed that stories could build faith, encourage believers, and help point wandering hearts back to Jesus. 

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“It Is Well With My Soul” was my father’s favorite hymn. The hymn had followed him through decades of faith, grief, service, and loss. His father, Benjamin Wofford Cox Sr., was a Baptist minister who exhorted faithfulness in God’s divine plan throughout life’s challenges. That faith sustained both him and the troops he served as a chaplain during WWII, where he sang the song with men on death’s door.

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Their story is a story of a young woman hiding in a closet, convinced she had ruined her relationship with God. It is a story of a teenage boy who was told he would never play sports again, only to walk out of church healed. It is a story of a husband and wife separated by hundreds of miles who experienced the same spiritual breakthrough at the same moment. 

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Before I found Jesus, I was on a bad path, so my parents were relieved to see this transformation. While they didn’t quite know what to think about the Holy Spirit’s move, they knew that their lost son had now been found, transformed, and was on fire for God. 

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The 2026 Summer Journey is Out Now, it is being distributed throughout the High Country this week!

If you want to start reading it is up on Issuu for free to read online.

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It was a prayer she had been trying to teach her young daughters to pray and believe about the worries in their own lives. But it’s a prayer that’s nearly impossible to pray when you’re pleading about the life of your daughter. 

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This is a story of God working to strengthen the daily walk of women in Avery County. I would like to say that the Embrace story begins with seven women coming together to build the Avery Baptist Association Women’s Ministry in 2015, but that’s not the real beginning. 

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Taylon Hope is a familiarity in Ashe and surrounding counties. However, more recently, she is becoming a national sensation as an up-and-coming artist in the world of country music. God has endowed Taylon with the beautiful gifts of singing, song composition and a deep compassion for others, but she is quick to proclaim that her best gift from on high is that of her family. 

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I was born and raised in the South 62+ years ago as the 4th child and only son of a Southern Baptist pastor. My wife was born 60+ years ago in Michigan as the 4th child of 7 and her parents were devout Catholics. In other words, we were raised in Christian homes with traditional Baptist and Catholic values. However, neither of us were really serious about Christianity until 40 years ago in 1977. That’s the same year we were married (May 7, 1977) and then moved to Boone (October, 1977).

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In that same period, 1977, my brother and I were invited by a friend of ours, who had transplanted from Boone to Asheville, to be his guest at a Billy Graham Crusade being conducted in Asheville. Much to our surprise, we were invited to sit on the stage with others, which was quite an experience. After the meeting, we were asked if we would help with a medical need in India that the Grahams were aware of. Of course, we said yes.

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Dad then explained the gospel to me, that I was a sinner. Even when I was 6 years old I knew I wasn’t a good kid all the time. I disobeyed, I knew I was a sinner and I didn’t want to spend an eternity in hell, so I asked Jesus to come into my life. It was a really childlike thing. I didn’t have a complete understanding. I couldn’t tell you the books of the Bible, but I wanted to be with Jesus and I gave my life to him. It was simple, childlike faith. 

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By then, I had given dating up to God. Though at work one day, there was a chef’s intern who asked my friend the baker if she thought I would go to dinner with him. When she told me that he was a Christian and only wanted to have someone to go to dinner with, I accepted. He invited me to a church that he was attending and I immediately felt that I had come home as soon as I stepped over the threshold. 

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Most people do not often connect love to pain, but, in actuality, these two are often closely intertwined. To need and experience love is to be human, but sometimes the depth of love is not known without loss. 

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My journey began here in North Carolina when I was born in Winston-Salem as the youngest of 4 kids in our family. A couple of years later my father took a job at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. Fortunately, we visited relatives here in the High Country on a regular basis which cultivated in me a sense that Western North Carolina was my home and instilled a desire to one day return to the Blue Ridge Mountains. James Taylor’s music during my high school years in the early 1970’s only intensified that desire. 

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A few years ago, K-LOVE Radio challenged their listeners with this: using only one word, describe what you're thankful for. My one word is “purpose.” Not too many years ago, Satan tricked me into thinking that I had no purpose and I sank into a terrible place defined as depression. I wouldn't begin to put a value on all I learned through that journey and pray that I will NEVER have to suffer being that sick ever, ever again. 

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From this humble beginning, Alice believed God had put certain goals in her heart. She put herself through business school, working hard toward the goal in front of her. “The Lord was involved in every decision, where to go, what to put my hand to, the moves, businesses, work. Everything was bathed in prayer.” Alice found herself dependent upon the Lord to guide her, and trusting it was Him who was directing the course of her life, where and when to begin the business she had envisioned as a child. 

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Although I grew up in a family that loved God, I was never truly sure what being saved meant. A friend prayed with me in sixth grade and told me that if I meant the prayer, I was saved, but between middle school and high school, I had many moments of questioning God about whether I actually belonged to Him. I never had peace about it. 

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I was 50 when I went to Atlanta. Wendy teases me that it was my mid-life crisis. I tease her that it could have been much worse! All teasing aside, I had almost gone to Redeemer in 2006, but decided not to since we had two children still in high school. At the time, Wendy told the Call Committee, “The timing just isn’t good for our family. If this were three years from now it would be a different story.” Well, the pastor who went to Redeemer left after 16 months, and they contacted me again almost exactly 3 years later and asked if I would consider a call now! This seemed to me more than mere coincidence, given what Wendy had told them. With much trepidation, and yet grieving our empty nest and figuring that I had one good call left in me, I accepted the challenge of being the Senior Pastor of a large urban church. 

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t is always easy to focus on the things we do not have, isn’t it? To dwell on what could have been? To sit and wonder “If only…” Yet, I pray as you read this story you will not dwell on my missing calf muscles or my broken body. Instead, you will see the many undeserved blessings God has given me. You will rejoice over the beauty that is found in brokenness and the hope that only Christ can bring in the midst of hopelessness. You will see He is a great Author writing a great story. You will see the joy found in the journey, and the purpose found in the pain. Elisabeth Elliot once said, “God’s story never ends in ashes.” I am so grateful for that truth. He truly does bring beauty from ashes. He truly blesses His children with good gifts, even those we would never deem good. For me, sacral agenesis never seemed good. As I look back on the last 28 years of my life, I can truly see the good God has done in and through it. I have discovered that with every journey there is real joy, you just have to find it. Where Jesus is, there is joy and hope. No matter the circumstances, they are good because He is good. I would never change the diagnosis given to me at birth. I would never trade it, because it has shaped my life and the lives of the Bolick family. Oh, what a precious family He has given me! I could weep as I dwell on each one of them and the blessing they represent in my life. 

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