Watch Pat, Terry, and Gordon on your iPod as they bring you amazing stories and celebrity interviews.
Have you experienced the presence of God?
Ron DiCianni: Painting the Resurrection?
Become a CBN partner and receive The Transforming Word: Verses to Overcome Fear and Experience Peace, our special DVD/CD gift to you.
CBN Partners are making a difference sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Find out how.
CBN.com – My name is Jessie Hines, and I’m from the Outer Banks of North Carolina. It’s just a great place to live and grow up, and the waves get really, really fun. It’s beautiful.
I grew up surfing here, and I was doing the ESA [Eastern Surfing Association] contest. Whalebone Surf Shop was my first sponsor. They helped me enter the contest locally.
Noah Snyder actually dated my sister for a little while, and that’s how I started hanging out with him. He was like the best surfer coming up around here, so I just got to watch him surf. He would give me advice and stuff. As I got older we started traveling together. I got other sponsors and eventually then actually got to get paid for surfing.
I did do some modeling. It just kind of came about, and my first job was with Abercrombie [and Fitch]. Then the same photographer who shoots for them shoots for Polo, so I got to model for them as well. It all happened at the right time. It was pretty cool to experience that part of life too. It was totally, totally different than surfing or anything else.
When I was about 15 years old, we were actually driving back from surfing down south. There’s a bridge called Oregon Inlet Bridge, and it goes about 60 feet up in the air. My friend Matt Beacham was driving.
It was a freak thing. He fainted, we drifted into oncoming traffic, and we got hit. A car hit us and sent us spinning. The guardrail actually caught us, and you know it was just pretty amazing. It was obvious that God kept us from falling off the bridge ‘cause we would have died. There was no way we could have survived.
After I got in the wreck, it wasn’t right away but I knew I had to get right with God. I was so young. It was just like, “God, I know You saved me, but I don’t really understand You yet.”
It took a couple of years for me to realize that I can’t do things on my own. The way I was living, after that couple of years, wasn’t going good. I was like, “I need help.” That’s when I finally said, “Okay, God, I need you!”
For most surfers, the stereotype is that they party, drink, and do drugs, which a lot of them do. But it’s just the only thing I can do really is just make sure I get with God every day and say, “God, I need Your help.”
It’s hard if you don’t talk to Him or you don’t read the Bible. Just like if you don’t talk to your friend or your wife or your spouse or your parents. You’re gonna lose that close relationship with them. If I don’t do the same thing, if I don’t talk to God and let Him know what’s going on, then I don’t have that relationship.
God is the center of my life, and as long as I keep Him there, it’s not hard to resist those things that are out there. So as long as God is at the center then, He makes it easy for me.
A caring friend will be there to pray with you in your time of need.
