The Calloways: One More One Last Try

CBN.com In 1965, 21-year-old Ronnie Calloway met 19-year-old Jackie Smith. Two weeks later they were engaged. Two weeks after that, they married.

“About two, perhaps three years after we got married that I started playing around,” Ronnie admits. “It was during the time that we’d just had our first child. I really had no reason to play around but I did.”

Jackie recalls, “Ronnie wouldn’t come home. He would go out and he would stay out late, come home early in the mornings.”

“I started out by lying and then cheating,” Ronnie says. “Smoking marijuana. I didn’t drink a whole lot of whiskey, but I did drink whiskey. Just everything that was wrong.”

Nancy remembers the arguments. “He would say, ‘Don’t accuse me. If you accuse me, why wouldn’t I do what you’re accusing me of doing? So stop accusing me.’”

Ronnie knew exactly what he was doing, and he had no conscience about it. Thus, the arguing continued.

“I would start little arguments because I knew that I wanted to go out Friday, Saturday, Sunday night,” Ronnie says.

“Ronnie was not satisfied at home and no matter what I did it wasn’t enough,” Nancy says. “I knew that if God didn’t fix this, we were going to divorce.”

Ronnie never knew what true love was. His biological father left when he was two, and his stepfather was physically abusive. To Ronnie, love meant sex.

“Growing up in the neighborhood that I [was] in, I thought love was having a bunch of ladies,” he says.

“I had been trained to stay in a bad marriage,” says Jackie. “My mom and dad were married for 53 years. It wasn’t all peaches and cream, but my mother would say things like, ‘Just go on, just pray. You don’t have to pay attention to everything that’s going on.’

“I was depressed. I had begun to think about what’s wrong with me. I just began to have very low self esteem.”

As the years passed, wounds grew deeper, resentments stronger. After 28 years of marriage, the Calloways called it quits.

Jackie says, “I felt like such a failure. I didn’t want to think about what happened to my life.

“It was like I was the walking dead,” says Ronnie. “Every cell in my body was dead.”

Jackie says, “I was hurt, I was wounded. I was still bleeding. I felt like I had been betrayed. It was such a horrible betrayal. I was mad at God, just to be honest with you. I was mad at God.”

Ronnie admits he was prideful. “I just said, ‘You know, I can do this. I don’t need the Lord or anybody else. Jackie, I don’t even need you.’”

On the other hand, Jackie couldn’t understand why Ronnie always had to have other women in his life. “The Lord said to me one day, ‘I have made you creatures of choice. Ronnie Calloway made his choice, now what’s yours?’

“I had to repent for being mad at God and ask Him to forgive me because I knew at that point I really needed Him to walk me through this.”

The divorce took its toll on both of them. Jackie began drinking, and Ronnie’s wild lifestyle left him jobless and homeless.

Ronnie says, “My day to day was trying to find a place to shower, find a cup to urinate in. Trying to find a place to change clothes. Something to eat. It was horrible and it was cold.”

Ronnie found himself living out of a utility van.

Jackie says, “I had an inflated opinion of myself. The Lord began to show me how I didn’t trust Him. I had been trusting in my ability to hold different positions. I had trusted my paychecks to support me. I had not been the loving and kind wife that I thought I had been to Ronnie.”

Ronnie says, “I really thought about how selfish I had been all these years to do somebody like that. I just felt like a worm, a snake in the grass. Low down and dirty.”

Ronnie’s wake-up call came straight from the Lord. “Spring was coming around. I climbed off that van, looked in the passenger mirror, and God informed me that I can’t live this life without Him. Spoke to me face to face.

“I was desperate. I was desperate to get back in the will of God and to do things right and to do things according to His purpose and according to His will.”

When Ronnie asked God to forgive him for his choices and to help him become a true man of God, Ronnie began to realize everything that he’d lost. He wanted his family back but he believed there was no way Jackie would ever take him back.

But God had been working on Jackie’s heart too!

“The Lord said, ‘I want you to start listening to Ronnie Calloway.’ I said, nooooo! It’s like he had been able to do whatever he wanted to do and now just because he was ready to repent, I had to go back to him?”

Jackie didn’t understand what the Lord was telling her to do, but she knew she had to trust in God and not in the hurts of her past.

“OK God, I’ll do what you say, but if he hurts me again, it’s all Your fault,” she prayed.

When Jackie really listened to Ronnie, she realized he had changed. It took some time but God did a miracle. After seven years of being divorced, Jackie and Ronnie remarried.

“So standing there on my wedding day, I was flooded with the goodness of God, His faithfulness, His heart of reconciliation and how He had allowed us another chance to glorify His name in this marriage,” says Jackie.

“I don’t love her because her legs are long like they were in 1965. I don’t love her because she had thick beautiful hair,” says Ronnie. “I don’t love her for any other reason other than the fact that that’s God’s gift to me, and I thank Him daily for allowing me to be able to spend these… however long with her. I thank Him for allowing me to be a part of her life. “

“There is nothing too hard for God. Everybody’s story won’t turn out like ours has, but I wish it could because God’s heart is reconciliation,” says Jackie. “I know that just as He was in Jesus Christ reconciling the world to Himself, He would like to be in you reconciling that other person to Himself and to you. But I want everybody to know that if you’re willing and obedient, you can eat the good of the land, even in your marriage.”