Send a missionary to Sierra Leone during its Civil War? It made no sense. But it created a wave of church planting.

To many observers, it appeared foolhardy to send such a fruitful worker to such a hopeless nation. A lot of church planters in the Christian Fellowship Ministries, following prevailing wisdom, looked to plant churches in resource-rich England and South Africa.

But Pastor Harold Warner didn’t flinch when he launched firebrand preacher Alvin Smith into Sierra Leone in 1989. He had heard from God. And nearly three decades later, the results are dumbfounding.

The original church in Freetown has exploded to 80 churches. The nation that once was classified as the second poorest in the world now has planted churches in Liberia, Guinea, Gambia, Senegal, Togo, Benin, Congo, Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast.

Pastor Desmond Bell, from Sierra Leone, in Marseille France.

They have even sent three missionaries to Europe.

“To take people, to take young men and women from one of the poorest countries in the world and (for God to) say, ‘I’m going to shape and I’m going to fashion them because they are going to accomplish my purpose not only in their own nation but also beyond the boundaries,’ is one of the greatest privileges of life,” says Warner in a 2018 conference video. “I just sit back and chuckle because this has to be God.”

Not even the African pastors could believe how God would use them when, as young men, they converted to Christ in a ramshackle school building with no lights where they listened intently to Pastor Smith preach his heart.

Pastor Harold Warner from the Door Church in Tucson

“Pastor Smith was instilling into our spirit that we were going to all the world to preach the gospel. In the minds of many of us, we were like, ‘This is an impossible dream,’” says Edward Saffa, who took over the headquarter church in Freetown. “All of us were from nothing — nothing.”

Sierra Leone was a diamond rich nation racked by government corruption and successive civil wars. The average life expectancy was into the 30s, and people ate only one meal a day. The worst kind of malaria wreaked havoc on the population, and the guerrillas chopped off limbs of civilians to sow terror.

That’s the milieu into which Alvin Smith, a retired US Air Force helicopter pilot, injected himself with his wife Renee.

“We owe something to Pastor Smith who left America. He came in the time during the war. That was a lot of sacrifice,” says Aruna Bangura, now pastoring in Marseille, France. “When people are too educated, they become logical when it comes to serving God. But for us, we were just explosive. We want to go to church everyday. Whenever it is time to go to church, we were running to go to church. We were coming from distance.

“I can still remember that old rugged, dirty building. All the windows were battered. We were using candles. But there was a life coming out of that building. That’s how God works. God likes to do things the way man cannot do it.”

The young men who attended Smith’s sermons often lacked adequate clothes, but they didn’t lack zeal. Or maybe it was the absence of material distractions that helped them to center all their attention on God.

They had nothing, so they had nothing to lose when they put their faith in God. Pastor Smith challenged the youth to get married, regardless of their financial situation. Some of the leaders today set up cardboard partitions in their parents’ living rooms to consummate their wedding. Read the rest of the story of improbable revival from Sierra Leone.

You can still prosper under pastoral abuse

For seven years, Juan Pablo Cardo was stymied in his ministerial call by another pastor in Buenos Aires who envied his charisma.

“He felt like I was a threat and didn’t let me do anything,” the Argentinian says in a Bible conference video. During those years of imposed inactivity, “God taught me patience and humility, just being there, sit down and deal with my pride and many things in my life.”

He didn’t bolt, and his perseverance paid off. Unexpectedly one day, his pastor asked if he want to launch a startup church on his own in Munro, a suburb of Buenos Aires. He offered no financial support. He would get Juan Pablo out of his hair.

To weigh and consider this monumental life-altering decision, it took Juan Pablo a full fraction of a nano-second to say yes.

Juan Pablo started a house church with 17 people. They began to tithe and he rented a small store front 9’ by 51’ — all at the time of Argentina’s worse economic crunch.

The work grew, and they rented a bigger building for 120 people on the main avenue in the Munro neighborhood.

Juan Pablo’s story is one of flourishing under shortsighted leadership. You have to keep your heart from becoming bitter, he says.

“It was a difficult time because it was seven years practically not having a pastor, not having someone to go to who could guide you,” says his wife, Silvina. “I asked God, ‘How long? Where are You?’ I wasn’t complaining but asking God for help. I saw that everyone else had a pastor they could share with. And I didn’t have that for seven years.” Read more about surviving pastoral abuse.

He didn’t believe in love, until he saw his pastor’s marriage

At all times, his home was filled with fighting.

“I was an angry person that destroyed everything in my life,” says Juan Pablo Cardo of Buenos Aires. “I never saw a pattern of people loving each other. My dad and my mom stayed together fighting a lot with each other. So I didn’t want to be at home.”

Juan Pablo found an outlet for his rage when he enrolled in a military academy at age 13.

Then he visited a church. For the first time in his life, he saw in the pastor, missionary Kim Pensinger, a model for Christian love. Kim and his wife, Josie, visibly demonstrated their love for one another. It seemed so foreign to him, so other-worldly, that he doubted what he was seeing.

“Their love is not real. This is a fake kind of thing. Maybe they kill each other at home,” he thought at the time.

But then he started to see that they really loved each other. And the people in church take care of each other. “I never saw that before. That started to break my thinking process. I wanted that.”

Juan Pablo quit his well-paid job to work at McDonald’s, just because he would have more opportunity to share the Gospel.

“I started witnessing to everybody. I met Silvina,” he says.. “She was my boss — and still today.” (Because they are now married.)

Silvina was smitten — not with Cupid’s arrows, but with the pulsating love of Christ she saw in young Juan Pablo. Read the rest of love and marriage in Argentina

Product of rape, Vernon Turner overcame seeing his mom shoot up heroin to join the NFL

When 11-year-old Vernon Turner caught Mom in the bathroom about to shoot up heroin one day after coming home from school, she calmly told him sit down and watch.

“I want you to see me do this because I don’t ever want you to do this,” she said, “because this is going to kill me.”

The stupefied boy responded: “If you know it’s gonna kill you, why do you keep doing it?”

As she tied the thin rubber band around her arm and inserted the syringe into her vein, she explained how she had been gang-raped at 18. She took heroin, she said, “to not remember, to take away the pain.”

As a teen, mom lit up a room with her smile. She was a track star, a flag girl and a baton twirler.

But her youthful innocence died one afternoon in Brooklyn on her way home when two men grabbed her, violently hauled her to a rooftop, where they covered her mouth and took turns on her with another man. They only spared her life because they heard someone coming and scattered quickly, Vernon explains in a 2016 online “letter to his younger self.”

Overcome by fear, shame and confusion, Mom never reported the rape. When a few weeks later she found out she was pregnant, she decided against abortion.

The baby boy — product of that murderous aggression — was Vernon.

“Mom loves you, Vernon. But you remind her,” she told him. “No matter what she does to forget about what those men did to her. There you are, in her own home, every day … reminding her.”

Mom slurred on about how she had turned to prostitution to feed her dope habit. Eventually, she had met an Italian New Yorker who took her in to his home on Staten Island and gave her four more children but mistreated her.

Vernon was stunned by these revelations. He had known about the drug use, but he hadn’t known about the other harsh realities.

Four years later, his mother was dying, and Vernon actually prayed that she would die — so he could get on with his life and salvage some semblance of a childhood.

Because mom was always “sick,” he had to cook dinner, braid hair and change the diapers. mom and dad always argued. All the time, she was either on drugs, out searching for her next fix or stuck in an unconscious lull between highs. When she looked at Vernon, it was as if she looked right through him, as if he were invisible.

So he bent down at his bedside and prayed that the nightmare could be over.

Then she died.

After a life of drugged-out and drugged-starved “sickness,” she caught a real sickness, pneumonia, which swiped away what was left of her life within three days. Read the rest of Vernon Turner Christian.

Great burgers and Bible verses. But behind the In-N-Out aura was pain, loss and struggle

In-N-Out is known for arguably the best fast-food hamburgers on planet Earth. And the Bible verses printed on the bottom of its fry trays and cups point their devoted customers toward heaven.

But behind the “Christian” company is a born-again president, Lynsi Snyder, who struggled through three divorces, marijuana and alcohol addiction.

She had a happy childhood and loved her dad, but when she turned 12 she realized dad’s “sickness” was drug addiction, a byproduct of painkillers prescribed after surgeries. When her parents divorced because of his infidelity, Lynsi’s world fell apart.

“It was really hard for me to see him fail and be weak because I knew how bad he wanted to be a good husband and a good father,” Lynsi recounts on an I Am Second video.

Then her dad, president of the burger chain, died.

She tried to fill the void with a quick marriage straight out of high school. When that ended in divorce, she hooked up with another guy. She was desperate to ward off loneliness.

“It wasn’t right. I knew that, that small still voice was telling me don’t do this and I did it and I paid the price with a divorce and jumped right into the arms of someone else.”

Cast as the outcast in her family, she decided to embrace the bad girl role and started smoking marijuana and drinking. It was a move, she was aware, that paralleled her dad’s demise, and it worried her enough to eventually change.

“I realized that I’m going to follow the footsteps of my father and I’m going to meet an early death if I do not get right with God and follow him because the enemy just wanted to wipe me out.”

When her live-in boyfriend also quit the drugs and booze, she figured they should get married. Two beautiful children resulted from that marriage, but it too did not survive after six years.

Finally happy with her fourth husband

“I couldn’t feel like a bigger failure at that point,” Lynsi says. “I just couldn’t recover who I was.”

Still lonely, she married a guy who only wanted her family fortune. He cheated on her and verbally and emotionally abused her.

“The first time I found out he cheated I thought I deserved it. I’m paying for it,” she says. “Never had I been talked to the way he talked to me. Treated me like trash. It was the worst time of my life.”

You could see all she wanted was love and appreciation but it just seemed like she was getting farther away every time.

“I started to believe the lies that I deserved that, that God is punishing me,” she says. “The things that could be said can cut you very very deeply and change who you believe you think you are.” Read the rest of Lynsi Snyder Christian.

Her parents’ divorce led her to depression and cosplay. It got worse until God intervened.

First, Melissa T got into anime to escape from the depression over her parents’ divorce. Then, she began role-playing and assumed the attributes of a gay person with a person she met at a cosplay convention. Dipping into a bisexual lifestyle came next with her role-playing partner.

“I slapped God across the face that night and told Him I didn’t need Him anymore,” Melissa said on a 2012 YouTube video. “I went out with this girl. I turned bisexual for her. It lasted a month. A month down the road, I was really depressed. I was dealing with everything else, and I ran away from home.”

When the police apprehended her, what followed was a painful interrogation. Returned to her dad, she lost her phone privileges, was prohibited from using the Internet and was banned from talking to her lesbian friend.

“I made a stupid decision to go against my morals,” she says. “In that time I was isolated, I slowly but surely returned back to my normal self. I was no longer this character. I just threw away his personality and stopped being him. I started going back to church.”

At first, she begrudged the church attendance her dad forced on her. But one day while she waited for her family to come out of Target, she was alone in the car and had a strange urge to pray.

“I was ashamed of what I did. I felt guilty for what I did. I turned away from God. So I felt that, ‘Why would God accept me after what I did?’”

The devil and the Spirit were battling for her soul, with the devil telling her she really had nothing to say. She relented and started talking about school and slowly made her way to the deeper issues.

“I was pouring out my heart to Him and telling Him how much I was hurting and what I was hurting about, and for the first time in my life — FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE — I admitted through my mouth that I wanted to be happy.

“For so long I was so comfortable in my sin. I was so comfortable in my depression. It was my comfort zone,” she says. “Because I experienced so much change in my life, I felt change was bad, that change was something that was gonna hurt me. So I didn’t want change.”

In her prayer, she realized she really wanted the change God would bring.

“I was pouring out to Him, and I told Him, ‘I don’t want to be like this anymore. I don’t want to be depressed. I don’t want to be crying every single night. I don’t want to feel like my family’s ashamed of me anymore. I want to feel accepted. I want to feel loved,’” she says. “I bawled and cried to God for two hours in the car.” Read the rest of From cosplay to bisexuality to God.

This changes everything in missionology

When Howon Chun showed up at Lighthouse Christian Academy in Santa Monica, he was a confirmed atheist.

“I thought religion is for those who are weak psychologically,” said the Korean foreign exchange student. “Christianity was just one of many religions, and I was not really interested at all. I thought Christians were unstable and just wasting their time going to church. I thought the church was corrupt and only wanted to get their money.”

His perspective changed after a year of hearing Bible class and then voluntarily attending a Bible conference in Tucson with his host dad (who happened to also be his principal and teacher).

He was surprised by the thousands of people whose joy was evident. He decided he should at least re-evaluate his atheism.

If this many people believe they are saved by Jesus, how can I ignore what they believe? he thought.

“I liked their energy. I wanted to have a purpose in life like them. I learned that Christians weren’t weird. They have a loving community. They weren’t corrupt.”

Howon wound up hanging around for three more years at Lighthouse. He just graduated, acing the SAT math with a perfect score, and enrolled in Cal Poly San Luis Obispo to study business. Part of his college choice based on accompanying his host dad, who is planting a church nearby Pismo Beach.

Howon’s story upends the traditional missionary model of sending workers into the foreign field. Here’s a vein of gold. The Christian Examiner reported that 300,000 Chinese students alone enrolled in American schools in 2016, and they prefer Christian schools, regardless of their government’s atheistic values.

There’s much discussion about how the surge in foreign students, who pay higher tuition than natives, has been a blessing to struggling private schools (public schools have strict limits on the amount of foreign students they can receive).

But there is precious little discussion about making a concerted effort to evangelize them. Read the rest about evangelizing parachute students.

Famous cardiologist convinced of God upon reading dietary law in Leviticus

Those same stipulations in Leviticus that make most Christians’ eyes glaze over are the very ones that convinced Dr. Lawrence Czer that God was real — specifically the dietary restrictions that must have seemed arbitrary and pointless in the unscientific ancient world.

“As I began to read the Bible, especially the books of Moses and specifically in Leviticus, I was noticing that God was telling the people of Israel to basically trim the fat off the meat that they were offering Him and to offer the fat to Him,” Dr. Czer said. “And I thought, ‘Wow, God’s a cardiologist.’ They’re eating really healthy meat because they trim off all the fat, and God really knows what He’s doing here.”

Dr. Czer is an internationally recognized cardiologist. He is the medical director of the Heart Transplant Program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was a pioneering researcher in the use of stem cell treatment as an alternative to invasive surgery.

For him, another convincing dietary restriction was the prohibition of eating blood, a “very, very safe practice because a lot of bacteria and viruses can be in the blood and you certainly don’t want to eat uncooked meat or poorly cooked meat,” Czer continues. “He was saying to drain all the blood out of the animal and to cook it well.

“So I thought, ‘Well, He’s very health conscious too! He knows what He’s talking about. He’ll prevent transmission of infectious diseases. It’ll keep the priest healthy; he won’t eat too much fat. And you know, they’ll have a long life.”

So while atheists who revere science examine Leviticus for laws that appear nonsensical, Dr. Czer discovered that God knew about science before even science did and His dietary requiements made perfect sense.

“I thought, ‘This is really neat. It’s not just a whimsical or arbitrary set of rules. He’s asking the priest to do this in faith not knowing the reason.’ But obviously He knew the reasons. We kind of know the reasons now. Looking in retrospect, God was just looking out for his people. I thought, ‘These are rules for good reason, not just arbitrary rules, and He knows what He’s doing.’” Read the rest of Famed cardiologist convinced of God upon reading dietary law of Leviticus.

Nagma, Bollywood star, comes to Christ

Her mom was Muslim and her dad was Hindu, but Nagma Arvind Morarji was born on Christmas Day so she identified with Jesus from an early age.

“Because I was born on Christmas, I always felt I was the chosen one and the world celebrated my birthday,” she said lightheartedly in an interview with Daystar’s Joni Lamb. “I was very intrigued with Jesus’ personality. I went to a convent school, so mass was compulsory. Somehow I felt He was my knight in shining armor.”

She catapulted to enormous success in Bollywood, India’s version of Hollywood, starring in such classics as Gharana Mogudu, Kadhalan and Baashha. She speaks nine languages and tried to make films in all her languages.

In the last few years, Nagma has become more politically active, fighting against sectarianism – violent clashes between Hindus and Muslims as well as persecution against Christians and other minorities. She has worked for 10 years on behalf of the Congress Party because of her admiration for Rajiv Gandhi.

“We were brought up to respect all religions. Communal riots pained me,” she told rediff.com. “I wanted to do something.”

Nagma is also using her influence to fight female foeticide (abortion of female babies) that stems from a societal preference for sons.

“Demographically, we are going into a very critical situation because people are killing the girl child,” she says.

Born to a father who hailed from royalty and a mother from a family of freedom fighters, Nagma was encouraged to get into movie making by her step-dad, who worked in the film industry. In 1990, she debuted in Baghi: A Rebel for Love, which became Hindi cinema’s seventh highest-grossing film.

Even from childhood, she felt Jesus’ presence in her life. “I always felt He was my friend, philosopher and guide — everything,” she says. “It was a really close bond, but not until I got saved did I realize what my relationship with Him really was.” Read the rest of the article: Nagma Christian in Bollywood.

Liz Vice nearly died of kidney failure

By Hailey Johnson —

Since the 60’s, Portland has become home to a menagerie of zany indie (secular) rock bands, such as Blind Pilot, Sleater-Kinney (led by Portlandia’s Carrie Brownstein), and more.

But one artist has emerged from this conformity cloud to mesmerize audiences with another sound — Christian music.

Meet Liz Vice, the black Christian R&B singer converting Oregonians into provisional Christians with her luscious vocals.

A native of the Beaver State, Vice — along with her five siblings — was raised in Portland by a single mother.

During her formative years, she never envisioned herself as a singer but instead spent her days fantasizing about becoming a filmmaker.

At 15, however, her inspirations came to a clamorous halt, as she was diagnosed with a severe autoimmune kidney disease that soon led to kidney failure.

For the next seven years, Vice faced dialysis appointments, hospital infections, heart failure and her own mortality.

“Instead of praying that I’d be healed,” Vice admits, “I was just so tired that I would pray for death every day. But every day I woke up, I decided to live that day to the fullest.”

After enduring all this, in 2005, Vice was favored with a kidney transplant, allowing her dreams to finally pick up where they left off. Read the rest about Liz Vice gospel singer.

Muslim teen found Jesus in America, ran away from oppressive home

Rifqa Bary convulsed America when she appeared on national television in tears, saying her parents would kill her for leaving Islam and converting to Christianity.

“This is not just some threat, this is reality, this is truth,” she sobbed. Rifqa had run away from home at age 16 and was taken in temporarily by an Orlando, Florida, pastor, whom she contacted through Facebook. Eventually, she was turned over the Child Protective Services.

The Sri Lankan-born Fathima Rifqa Bary came to America with her family to seek treatment for her eye, blinded by her brother. The family took up residence in Columbus, Ohio, and Rifqa attended school and participated in sports.

While she prospered academically and socially, she suffered under the stringent, oppressive brand of Islam practiced by her parents, she said.

“It meant that I learned how to read the Quran before I could even speak,” she recalled. “It meant that I learned how to pray five times a day. It meant that I had to fast 30 days starting at age six or seven, no water.”

Her nature was happy-go-lucky. She earned straight A’s, participated in cheerleading and track in high school and thoroughly embraced American culture. Her dad did not.

“I remember being joyful and happy and if I were too happy I would remember my father just beating me to the point where I went flying across the room,” Rafqi said. Islam “was so empty and I felt like I was caged and suffocating in rules and I wanted out.”

Secretly, she attended church with a friend from middle school and even dared to get baptized.

“I went and I had a life changing encounter where I experienced the love of God that captured my spirit and left me changed,” she testified.

She surrendered to Jesus as her Lord and Savior and was born again!

Eventually, her parents discovered her closely guarded secret. They found her Bible and realized she had been reading it secretly in the bathroom. Apostasy is considered a disgrace to Muslims, and the Koran stipulates death as the penalty. Her father grew angrier and angrier demanding she renounce her newfound faith, she recounted.

“He gave me an ultimatum and it was — kind of in his sick way having mercy on me — to return to my old ways,” she said. Read the rest about Rifqa Bary converts to Christianity.

Padina found God in Islamic Iran when her mom had MS

Growing up in Iran, Padina memorized the Quran before she started school. She faithfully recited her prayers every day.

“I hated Christians and I became very happy when I found out that they were being persecuted. They always told us that if they killed a Christian, we had a one way ticket to heaven,” she told Hormoz Shariat, president of Iran Alive Ministries.

She was fastidious about applying the Quran to her life. If she forgot the ceremonial washing before prayer, she would stop mid-prayer, go back and wash correctly and start all over again.

“I was a very strong Islamic believer,” she affirmed.

But all her religious piety was in vain. She grew depressed to the point of wanting to commit suicide.

“I felt so distant from Allah,” she confided to Hormoz.

Meanwhile, her mother, afflicted by multiple sclerosis, grew deathly ill.

Padina confided to her mother about her suicidal tendencies. Instead of discouraging her, she shocked Padina by asking her to kill her also — a double suicide!

“I will do this for you, and we will both die,” she told her.

But then one day, mom in her deathbed tuned in to the satellite broadcast of Hormoz Shariat, who has been called the “Billy Graham of Iran.”

“If you are hopeless, if you are oppressed, if you are planning to commit suicide, the Lord says, ‘Stop.’ He has a hope and a future for you,” Hormoz said on the broadcast. “If you’re planning to kill yourself, stop and call me right now.”

Padina’s mother was so desperate that she didn’t care that Islam punishes with death those who convert to Christianity. She didn’t care that the Koran dooms all “apostates” to hell. She didn’t care, so she dialed.

After conversing for half an hour with Hormoz, she repented of her sins and received Jesus into her heart with the prayer of faith.

Meanwhile, her daughter was watching from the kitchen with alarm. Read the rest of how Christianity revival in Iran.

Sex robots will only further degrade our society

If you worry about the broad esplanade of pornography on the Internet, you’d better don your battle gear for the next chapter of the sexual revolution about to hit America.

Sex robots — which are becoming surprisingly more realistic than the inflatable dolls of yesteryear — will unravel the fabric of society more than ever before, according to observers both Christian and non-Christian.

Jewish ethicist Barak Lurie believes sex robots will be a greater threat to young people than iPhones or video games.

“You and I will have friends — mostly male — who are living with sex robots. And they will appear to be as lifelike as you can imagine, and they will have ‘relationships’ with these sex robots because they will be as beautiful as they want them to be, they will be as sexy as they want them to be, and as submissive as they want them to be,” Lurie says.

Robots were supposed to do our household chores. Not this.

Arguably, smartphones and pervasive pornography have significantly unhinged male social skills and upended traditional courtship. Why “work” at impressing women when you have an endless, easy supply of them over the Internet, Lurie says.

He says sex robots will degrade the social fabric even further. “One of the greatest impetuses for men to produce and to grow and to be productive members of society is, yeah, sex,” Lurie says. “When you take that impetus away — that main impetus that we have to achieve, to try new things, to explore and conquer — then he’s just going to stay in momma’s basement.”

James Young explored the theme on BBC.

Sex robots “will be worse (than porn) because they will create the illusion of a relationship, the illusion of actually tactile, skin to skin contact — which is very important for men,” Lurie warns. “It will give them the illusion that they are not just playing with themselves… that they’re losers.”

Sex robots — alternatively called sex dolls — will appeal because they don’t say no to a man, because they can’t accuse a man of rape or harassment and because they require no winsomeness to woo female emotions, Lurie says.

James Young is a BBC presenter who loves technology because robotics replaced two limbs he lost in a train accident. But in his recent documentary, “The Future of Sex | Sex Robots and Us,” he asks a disturbing question: “Could there be a darker side to AI (Artificial Intelligence)?”

“What effects might having sex with a robot have on men who use them?” he asks. “Could they create negative behaviors in men towards real women?”

Those questions haunt Noel Sharkey, a computer scientist and professor at the University of Sheffield, co-founder and co-director of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics. The burgeoning sex robot industry unsettles him.

“It creates an attitude of too easy sex because it’s always available,” Sharkey notes. “Although I love AI, I struggle that we must try to maintain a human culture, what is meaningful to us. We’re doing all these things with machines because we can and not really thinking about the societal impact and that this could completely change humanity and take meaning out of our lives and turn us into zombies. Read the rest of Christian perspective on sex robots.

Remi Adeleke, movie star, Navy SEAL and trafficker

Before Remi Adeleke was a famous actor, he was a Navy SEAL. And before he was a Navy SEAL, he was a drug dealer in the Bronx.

God brought about an incredible transformation in the life of the “Transformers” star.

Remi’s life spiraled downward after his father died in 1987. He had immigrated to New York from Nigeria with his family when he was five. Without a father’s love and guidance, he was left to himself. He liked movies, but the message to black men was mostly negative.

“It said you’re a young African American young male you need to be a hustler, or you need to be a thug or a player,” he says on an “I am Second” video.

Accordingly, he fell into stealing, running scams and dealing drugs as a young person in the Bronx.

But if movies hastened his journey into the “valley of the shadow of death,” movies also brought him through. When he watched “Bad Boys,” he saw black men who were heroes, not thugs. He began to re-imagine his self-image.

Then he watched “The Rock” by Michael Bay about Navy SEALs that lived heroic lives, running, gunning and saving the day.

“I was just blown away at this portrayal of men who were coming out of the water and going into this place to go sacrifice themselves and save others,” he says. “It really resonated and I thought if I was to ever turn my life around, that’s what I would do.”

A drug deal that went bad provided the spark to turn his life around. At age 19, he joined the military with the goal of becoming a Navy SEAL. There was one snag to his freshly forged ambition: he didn’t know how to swim.

He worked his bum off through boot camp, learned to swim, and qualified for SEAL training.

“When I wanted something, I would literally run through walls to get it,” he says.

He had reinvented himself, and he loved Remi 2.0.

“There’s not many jobs where you can get paid to jump out of planes and go after bad guys and protect those who couldn’t protect themselves — essentially be that guy who stood in the face of bullies and said not on my watch.”

During cold weather survival training in Alaska in 2008, he found a measure of solitude that caused him to think about his journey. Read the rest of Remi Adeleke Christian.

While in the NFL, he took cocaine. Today, Miles McPherson is a pastor

Miles McPherson wanted to see how they made crack cocaine, so he went to a crack house with a buddy.

There the NFL Chargers football player saw a skeleton of a man, dallying with death because of his addiction. McPherson despised him. “Man, look at that pitiful guy. Drugs is killing him.”

Then the God he didn’t even know spoke to McPherson: What about you? He was in your seat not that long ago.

That was McPherson’s first wake-up call. “I asked myself, ‘What am I doing? I’m in the NFL. I’m living my dream. And I’m destroying it.’”

Today, McPherson is the senior pastor of the Rock Church, a megachurch in San Diego with 15,000 attending weekly. The church focuses on reaching the lost through 150 specialized ministries.

McPherson was born to a nurse and a cop in Long Island. He was confident in his playing ability, even though he attended a Division 3 university he predicted he would make the NFL.

A coach mocked his aspirations. “He told other players behind my back that I was too small, too slow, too short. But that just motivated me to keep working.”

On his first year at the University of New Haven, the team had its first winning season, going 6-3. During his second year, the team was undefeated. In his third year, he was named “All American.” In his fourth year, the Rams recruited him.

“I didn’t know God, but I just knew in my heart that I was going to play in the NFL and that my life was going to mean something,” he says.

Almost as soon as he got picked by the Rams in 1982, fellow players introduced him to cocaine.

“It was one of the peer pressure things, fitting in,” McPherson says. “I was a rookie, and there’s about six guys in the room. I didn’t know what we were going in for, and they just pulled out cocaine. I said, ‘Oh man.’ But I saw everybody else doing it, so I thought, ‘This can’t be that bad.’ I knew it was wrong. I knew it was dangerous, but I lived on the edge.”

The first try led to addiction. Soon, he couldn’t stop taking cocaine. It became a futile, inexorable search for fulfillment through partying.

After one season, he was traded to the then-San Diego Chargers.

Then a fellow player shared the gospel with him. After a night of partying in 1984, he made the decision to call it quits to drugs. He retired from football in 1985.

“I said, ‘I’m done. I’m gonna give God the commitment I’ve given football, the commitment I’ve given drugs, the commitment I’ve given fun. I’m going to give God that commitment.” Read the rest Miles McPherson pastor of Rock Church