Rodeo Cowboy’s Fear, Wild Living Conquered by God’s Love

As a professional bareback bull rider, Todd Pierce had “lots of close calls with life and death situations.” However, his biggest fear lurked within.

Find out how Todd overcame a career-ending injury, his deepest fears, and how God lead him to use his rodeo experience to share the love of Jesus Christ on this episode of GPS: God. People. Stories. 

Connect with us through email at gps@billygraham.org or on Facebook at Billy Graham Radio. 

This episode originally aired September 21, 2016. 

Transcript

MUSIC STARTS

Todd Pierce:
00:00:00 Being a cowboy, in general, I think you almost get used to the reality that you might die, doing what you’re going to do. 

Jim Kirkland: But that’s not what scares Todd Pierce. 

Todd: 
00:00:10 The only thing I’ve ever really been afraid of, throughout my entire rodeo career and my Christian walk, is I’ve only been afraid of failing. I’ve had lots of close calls with life-and-death type of situations, but that’s probably the biggest fear that God has helped me overcome, has been just the fear of failing.

Jim: Todd Pierce is a retired bull rider and founder of Riding High Ministries. He shares the love of Jesus both with rodeo professionals and with the fans who attend rodeos. Throughout his rodeo career, Todd became numb to physical fears, but an inner fear continued to lurk. Find out how he overcame it on this episode of GPS: God. People. Stories. I’m Jim Kirkland.

Todd has learned that there’s a change that happens in our lives when we allow Jesus Christ to shape our perspective. Billy Graham agreed with that.

Billy Graham: 
00:01:04 A true Christian never plays it safe. The effective Christians throughout all history have been men and women of great personal courage and discipline.

Jim: You’ll hear more from Billy Graham about being a courageous Christian a little later in this episode. If you’d like to know more about having courage in Jesus Christ, you can find out right now, or any time, when visit our website. It’s FindPeaceWithGod.net. There’s a button there that says “Begin a Relationship with Jesus Christ”—click that. That’s at FindPeaceWithGod.net.

Intro: GPS: God. People. Stories.

MUSIC TRANSITION

Jim: Todd Pierce and his wife, Leslie, have three sons and live in Idaho. They founded Riding High Ministries in 2001. Here’s what led them to start the ministry.

Todd:
00:01:56 Riding High Ministries started right at the end of my professional rodeo career. I was actually a professional bareback rider. And I was out with an injury, and I had grown in my faith as an athlete to the point where, as I looked back on my diaries and stuff, that all my journals would talk about less and less the competition side of things and more and more about the people I would meet along the way, and how I could just see that without me even knowing it, you know, the Lord was preparing me for my postrodeo career and what that would look like.

Jim: Before you hear what that does ‘look like,’ it might be good to hear what Todd’s life was like before he surrendered it to Jesus Christ.

Todd:
00:02:37 I was a drunk. I was violent. I was just a carouser.

Jim: That was when Todd was in high school. He and Leslie were dating. He was a senior and she was a sophomore.

Todd:
00:02:49 And I went off to college and was living even more of a self-destructive lifestyle and a lifestyle that was very damaging to my and Leslie’s relationship. And a guy from Campus Crusade—I guess it’s called CRU now—sat down at a table with me and it really was just as simple as this: He just looked me in the eyes, and he said, “Did you know that God loves you and He’s got a plan for your life?” [emotional] I still can’t even talk about that. That’s so weird. [emotional].

Jim: Todd’s emotional about that encounter now, and he was emotional about it back then. 

Todd:
00:03:19 I excused myself from the table and got out of there as fast as I could. I truly had just been presented with the truth, that no matter what I did for the next couple weeks, I could not get that out of my head. And I actually went back and found him and told him that he ruined my life. [soft chuckle] I said, “I was happy, you know. I was maybe destroying myself; I was maybe hurting everyone around me, but I didn’t know it, and now I don’t even know what to do with this. I do believe that there is a God and I do believe that He loves me, and He has a plan for me, and so what am I supposed to do?” So, I gave my life to Jesus that day.

Jim: After he made that decision, Todd says his first order of business was to tell Leslie about it … and to ask her to forgive him for the way he’d been treating her.

Todd:
00:04:05 And so, essentially just spilling my guts as to what I’d done to violate her and her trust. So I remember right where we were sitting in my parents’ house when I told her. But it was just one of those defining moments, because I thought by telling her that I’m going to follow Jesus, I’m going to lose my girlfriend over it; I’m losing everything over this deal, but I’ve got to find out what God’s plan is for my life. And so, I was obviously very thankful for the fact that she was super gracious and she told me she forgave me, and that became a huge part of her story.

Jim: Leslie grew up in a Mormon home, but she had become disillusioned with the Mormon church. She’s also joining us on this episode of GPS to share her insight on the impact Jesus Christ had on their relationship and her own personal life.

Leslie Pierce: 
00:04:54 And then I kind of made choices of who I was going to be at that point and followed suit into, you know, the party crowd. And whatever Todd did, I just kind of went with him on it just because I liked him so much and just wanted to be with him all the time. 

Jim: It took about a year from the time that Todd accepted Christ as his Savior until Leslie made the same decision. 

Leslie: 
00:05:17 But it was through the change that I saw in him that actually led me to Christ because this man before me who didn’t treat me with respect and didn’t treat me with honor began to do that. And I was just like, whatever has happened in you, I want to know what it is because I had never seen anything like that before. It took about a year, but it was a process of the Lord really showing me who He was and what it meant to have a relationship with Jesus. And how when you do that how He begins to change your life.

Jim: After Leslie surrendered her life to Jesus, she realized that her and Todd’s shared faith was drawing them closer and closer together. They got married in 1993. Todd had become a professional bull rider until the injury that sidelined him.



Todd: 
00:06:07 After I was out for a few months, got invited to come speak at a professional bull riding event. And long story short, I realized that my whole professional athletic career was about preparing me and Leslie, as a family, really, to be able to see into the lives of these men that are riding bulls for a living, and understand where they’re at, and be able to speak into it, and give them truth, and love them along the way. And we’ve just seen these men use their careers as a platform to reach others with the Gospel.

Jim: Professional bull riders are big risk-takers. Todd says that’s evident when one of them makes the decision to follow Christ.

Todd:
00:06:46 They’re not spectators. They don’t want to just sit back and watch, they want to actively get involved in what God’s doing, and realize that this is a wild adventure that God’s calling them on in relationship with Him.

Jim: While Todd ministers to the riders, Leslie ministers to their wives.

Leslie:
00:07:03 Because sometimes you kind of feel like you’re kind of not a part of what your husband’s doing, and so bridging that gap, I think, is vital to the health of their marriage, and even to the health of their family.

Jim: Riding High Ministries shares the love of Jesus Christ with many more people than just cowboys and their wives. They also share the message of Christ with the fans who come out to watch a rodeo.

Todd:
00:07:27 We also do different outreach events through a presentation where I take a horse that’s not broke and not tamed and over the course of an hour will work with that horse and teach it how my love for it will help it kill its fear. And its fear and its instinct is to do things on its own and avoid me, but my plan for it is going to exceed anything that it could have ever hoped for or asked for, but it’s going to have to learn to look to me and trust me. And it becomes a pretty vivid expression of what the Gospel looks like. It’s a parable.

Jim: And it’s a parable that Todd says has had a tremendous impact on people’s faith.

Todd:
00:08:04 We just did an event yesterday, actually, and had a gentleman come up to Leslie that was well into his maybe 80s and said that “for 60 years of following Jesus, I’ve never seen what I just saw and understood things the way, what I just saw, and that the connection that Jesus purchased for us with the Father and the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives isn’t just to lead us around and make us obedient people. It’s to completely fill our lives to where we’re now a new creation that’s capable of doing things that we never would’ve dreamt of.”

MUSIC TRANSITION

Jim: Living your life totally surrendered to Jesus Christ is not boring. Because following God wherever He leads you is going to be an adventure and at times, even scary, but it’s also a life of unparalleled peace. The peace that comes from knowing that no matter what happens, God is always in control and He loves you more than you can begin to imagine. Would you like to know more about living life with Jesus Christ? We can help you with that at our website. It’s FindPeaceWithGod.net. Once you’re there, click “Begin a Relationship With Jesus.” That’s FindPeaceWithGod.net.

In just a minute, Todd Pierce talks about another aspect of Riding High Ministries—their outreach to prisoners.

Voice-over: You’re listening to GPS: God. People. Stories., a podcast production of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

MUSIC STARTS

Billy Graham:
00:09:49 Christ never allowed anyone to be a bystander or a spectator.

Voice-over: Billy Graham …

Billy Graham:
00:09:54 A true Christian never plays it safe. He never sits on the fence. He commits himself. The effective Christians throughout all history have been men and women of great personal courage and discipline. There must be mental discipline. The Bible says plainly that our mental powers are to be brought under the control of Christ. “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ,” says the Scripture. We must also discipline our emotions and our instincts—anger, greed, ambition, pride, sex, and many others. When Christ comes into the heart, He does not destroy these impulses and leave us as lumps of pious putty. He takes the things within us and transforms them into powers of majestic holiness and usefulness. Often it is difficult for us to adjust ourselves to so many new situations that face us every day. This is why we so desperately need the control of Christ and Christian self-discipline.

Jim: Learn more about what it means for Jesus Christ to mold your heart and give you courage by visiting our website: FindPeaceWithGod.net. Now once you’re there, click the button that says, “Grow in Your Christian Faith.” That’s FindPeaceWithGod.net.

As you’ve listened to Todd Pierce tell his story on this episode of GPS, it’s clear that he cares for the people in the rodeo community. And, there’s another group of people that he and his family care deeply about—prison inmates.

Todd:
00:11:24 We bring a horse actually right into the prison yards and the inmates, obviously, have two choices: You can stay in your cell or you can come out and watch this presentation, which, you can imagine, is quite a draw. And so for these men who have been stuck in prison, it’s maybe even that much more graphic, in that they’re in a pen, they’ve got nowhere to go, just like the horse. You’ve been put in a place where you can continue to fight and run and resist and ignore or you can really look to God, ask Him, “What was Jesus’ plan for me? And how is it that I can kill all this fear that’s been driving my life?” 

Jim: Freedom from fear in Jesus Christ—that’s a theme that runs through Riding High Ministries no matter where they share the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We’d like to thank Riding High Ministries’ president Todd Pierce, and his wife, Leslie, for being our guests on this episode of GPS: God. People. Stories. And we also want to thank you for listening. If you know someone who might get encouragement from Todd’s story, please share this episode with them, let them know about it. And you can encourage us by leaving us a comment on YouTube or Spotify.

I’m Jim Kirkland, and this is GPS: God. People. Stories. It’s an outreach of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association—Always Good News.

CLOSING MUSIC

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