17 Oct
2026
Around the time I turned eighteen, I had almost given up on church. I still believed in God, but life had gotten so hard that He seemed to be there less and less. Then I met a woman who would not let me stay in that place. She was a pastor, she was my girlfriend's grandmother, and her words are still with me today.
I had just gotten out of a homeless shelter. My mother had changed the locks on her house, so for a while I slept in a friend's car at night. Then someone helped me get a job right away, and a friend helped me find a room to rent. I was working during the day and trying to hold everything together.
I was also seeing a girl from South Plantation. That is how I met her grandmother. She was a pastor, and once she found out what I was going through, she started looking out for me.
Every time she saw me, she preached to me and prayed for me. She became attached to me as if I were her own child. I could hardly spend a day with her granddaughter when she was around, because she would take me aside and pour wisdom into me on so many levels.
I told her the truth: that when I was younger I went to church every Saturday and Sunday and prayed every day, but as my life got harder, God seemed to be there less. She didn't let that slide. These were her words to me:
"You’re saying what the adversary wants you to think and say to me right now," she told me. "But you should have kept going to church, to show the adversary that he has no chance of changing you into such a bad boy. So you should not have given up."
Nobody had talked to me like that in a long time. She wasn't scolding me. She was fighting for me.
She kept preaching to me, telling me never to give up, "because the harder something is, the better the outcome is in the end." She talked to me about the anger inside me and where it could lead if I didn't deal with it. She told me I needed to discover the value of life, and that trials keep a person strong.
She also told me I was capable of change, as long as I wanted it, and that I should take my life experiences as lessons. She even shared a well-known saying from Maya Angelou with me, about how people remember the way you made them feel long after they forget what you said.
When I look back at everything she told me, I sum it up the way I did in my book: "if God brought me to it, he’d bring me through it."
That relationship with her granddaughter didn't last. But her words did. Months later I was in a jail cell over the holidays, a few weeks before my brain surgery, thinking about death and about my life. In that cell I apologized to God for cursing at Him, and I came to understand that trials are "all just tests."
If you are thinking about suicide, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, U.S.).
And in my prayer that night, I thanked God for bringing her into my life, "with her words to me about being an understanding and knowledgeable young man who is able to succeed." She had planted something, and it came up when I needed it most.
You may not have a pastor taking you aside every time you walk in the door. But her lessons work for anyone in a hard season:
She didn't have to care about a young man from the streets who was dating her granddaughter. She chose to. She prayed for me, she corrected me, and she told me the truth with love. That is what changed me.
I write more about faith and the people who carried me in my memoir Neglected But Undefeated, on my Books page. And one line I still live by is on my Quotes page: "Faith doesn’t get you around problems in life and relationships, it gets you through it." If someone poured into you when you were ready to give up, let them know today that it worked.
Account
Cart