Neo Nazi wooed out of hate by black Christian lady

An African American drove Michael Kent into a neo Nazi hate group, and another one pulled him out.

“I hurt a lot of people,” he says tearfully in an “I Am Second Conversations” video. “I hurt a lot of kids when I was a kid. Their parents were coming after me.”

Michael’s sojourn into racism began when he was 12 years old and struck up a budding friendship with a black boy in Erie, PA.

“I got me a black friend. No animosity or nothing. We were as thick as thieves. We got along great,” Michael recalls. One day he was invited to his house.

“I don’t want that blue-eyed devil in my house,” his mother declared.

His friend was never allowed to talk to him after that. “My first encounter with racism was that day,” he says.

“It was over,” Michael recalls. “You guys don’t like accepting me no matter what. I was discriminated against, and it was like, ‘Why?’”

By the time he was 15, he started cooking up methamphetamines and getting involved with neo Nazis, even working closely with the higher-ups. He began passing out hate pamphlets and participating in marches on the state capitol.

Later, when he had a child himself, he understood why other parents had tried to protect their kids.

“These people I freaking hurt and I destroyed their lives, they were just trying to protect their kid,” he says. “I cried like a little baby the day my son was born because I know that if anybody hurt my kid, I’d kill them. That’s when I knew I had to walk away.”

What really helped him get out of the neo Nazis was a female African American probation officer, who visited his house in Pinal County, Arizona, unaccompanied. Because of his violent involvement with the skinheads, all of his previous probation officers — white officers — took pains to show up with a wingman.

“Not even people of my own race showed up at my house alone,” Michael says. “I gained a lot of respect for her that day.”

Tiffany Whittier’s job was to check for parole violations after his release in 2006 for drugs and weapons charges.

But Tiffany, a committed Christian, went beyond the call of duty and reached out to Michael with some heart-to-heart life coaching. She urged him to tear down the Hitler paraphernalia decorating his walls. He complied with everything, worked his job and paid his fines. He got swastika tattoos covered up.

Inside, his heart was melted by the kindness of Tiffany.

“Why did you believe in me?” he asked her. (“I Am Second Conversations” adds a twist to the usual testimonial videos of a person seated in a white chair. In these, two people talk face to face in two white chairs.)

“Why did you want to help me to change? You put forth more of an effort than anybody I’ve had in my life. Why? Not even people of my own race wanted to help me.” Read the rest: Neo Nazi renounces hate thanks to black Christian 

FMX daredevil overcame fear with faith

When he made the switch from racing to daredevil trick riding, Ronnie Faisst got sponsors, pay, notoriety… and a drug habit.

“You can’t become a top professional racer if you’re a partier. Tight diets and training everyday — that’s the background I came from. Didn’t do any drugs, didn’t drink, didn’t want to,” Ronnie says on This is Me video.

“But then when you got into freestyle, all you really needed was to be willing to take some risk. So we found you could party and still do this. We all got caught up in girls, drugs, alcohol, late nights.”

For 10 years, Ronnie soared at the top the emerging Freestyle Motocross, or FMX, pioneering tricks and competing on tour. But while his motorbike flew, his soul was sinking into the depths of sin.

Ironically the thrills-seeker who thrived off of the adrenaline rush found Jesus in a very ho-hum way, watching a televangelist explain the gospel. What drove him to the arms of Jesus? His greatest obstacle in freestyle: fear.

“If you’re a free-style riders, there’s gonna be tricks that scare you a little bit. You have to push through that fear to learn the trick. Right at that time, the back flip came out which to land one you might crash five,” Ronnie says.

“This dude speaking on T.V. was talking about faith, and it spoke to me because he was speaking about fear. I experienced fear everyday,” he says. “I thought, ‘This dude has such a cool view on life. I’ve never really looked at it that way.’ I got saved in my bedroom just watching this program. It makes you feel good. God’s on your side. God starts blessing you.”

Ronnie, from Murrieta, California who now lives in Kansas, is an X Games regular since 2000, winning Moto X bronze medal four times. The 42-year-old was featured in the original Crusty Demons daredevil videos.

He was living his dream, getting paid to ride his motorcycle and perform tricks and compete — and God was on his side.

Initially he didn’t realize there was much more to the Christian life.

“I had a friend give me a Bible for Christmas. Things were just jumping off the page at me,” Ronnie remembers. His life didn’t line up with the demand of the Bible. Read the rest: dirt bike daredevil Ronnie Faisst comes to Jesus.

The Rock now looks to the THE ROCK

Before he became Hollywood’s most bankable movie star, Dwayne Johnson got smacked-down by life — arrests, evictions, family suicide attempts, football failure, divorce — and the concurrent depression drove him to God.

“I have my own special relationship with God, you know, and I certainly, I feel very blessed. I count my blessings, every day,” the retired WWF wrestler told the Gospel Herald.

The monikored “Rock” has learned to rely on the Real Rock.

Both his dad and maternal grandfather were wrestlers. Dwayne Johnson grew up in Hawaii, son to a black Canadian father, Rocky Johnson, and a Samoan mother. There was instability in his home, and he was getting arrested over and over — for fighting, theft, and check forgery. Then his mom got evicted, and mom and son were forced to leave Hawaii.

The rude awakening injected in him a measure of sobriety. He decided to turn his life around and turned to football. Working hard, he earned a scholarship as a defensive tackle at the University of Miami. He eventually graduated with a degree in criminology, but his dream was NFL stardom.

After going undrafted, he moved to Canada and tried out for the Calgary Stampeders and slept on a stained mattress he found in the trash outside a sex motel. He subsisted on Ramen noodles for two months into the season.

“The first ‘rock bottom’ that I hit was out of college where I worked for 10 years from the time I started playing football at 14 years old to the time I was 23…and did not get drafted,” he told the Tribune News Service. “I played in the CFL (Canadian Football League) for approximately 200 bucks a week Canadian. I got cut from the team a couple of months later, and I had to close that chapter in my life.

Having to face the death of a dream, with $7 left in his pocket, he returned to his father’s house in Tampa, Florida.

“It’s a tough experience when you have to move back in with your parents. And at that time, my parents — we never lived in a home, they had a little small apartment in Tampa, Fla., and I had to move in with them. And then you go through the challenges of that. You hit depression.”

Against the wishes of his dad, who struggled to provide for the family as a journeyman wrestler, Dwayne launched a career as a professional wrestler. Unlike his dad, he was a blockbuster success as a trash talker with an ebullient personality. The audiences of the late 1990s and early 2000s loved him, and “The Rock” raked in huge ratings, earnings and championships for WWF.

After eight years, he turned to acting with a big splash in The Scorpion King in 2002. He followed up the initial modest success with a string of career-killing family movies. What was happening to the Herculean action movie hero?

My career was a little shaky – really shaky,” he told Rolling Stone.

A return to wrestling was an unthinkable admission of failure.

“What the ____ did I do with my career?” he wondered at the time.

In 2007, the always confident action man lost the confidence of his beloved wife, and the couple divorced. He submerged again into depression.

“Around 2008, 2009, I was going through a lot of personal ____ that was really _______ me up,” he told People magazine. “I was just struggling, man. Struggling to figure out what kind of dad am I gonna be. Realizing I’d done a piss-poor job of cultivating relationships, and a lot of my friends had fallen by the wayside. I was just scared.”

Out of the darkness, he found God’s light. Read the rest: Dwayne Johnson Christian.

Jake was a fake, and how transgenderism didn’t work for Laura

She changed her name to Jake and tried to forget she was born female.

“At first it was the greatest thing ever. I was on Cloud Nine,” says Laura Perry, who transitioned into a man through surgery and hormone treatments, then married a male who transitioned to female.

“I started to grow facial hair. I began to grow sideburns. My voice began to get lower. Even the body shape began to change a little bit. In 2009, I had a double mastectomy and chest reconstruction to look like a man,” she says on a 700 Club Interactive video. “I thought this was the epitome of everything I wanted.”

But years later, she began to realize that the path she had been encouraged to take hadn’t really helped her find the happiness she sought.

“Transgenderism will lead to depression because it’s not real,” Laura told Black Christian News Network 1. “It is a lie from the pit of Hell. You cannot change your gender. It’s just not biologically possible.”

After giving her life to God and turning back into a woman, she wrote a book “Transgendered to Transformed.

Her misguided venture down the path of transgenderism has its roots in her childhood.

Her mom was quiet and really connected with her quiet brother, while little Laura was rambunctious and athletic. She didn’t enjoy a great relationship with her mom. Laura concluded that boys were preferred over girls — and she fantasized about being a boy.

“Very early in life I believed the lie that I wasn’t loved as a girl,” she says. “Everything in life got put through this lens that I should’ve been a boy.”

At 8, she was molested by a friend’s brother, and this aroused precocious passions in her. She discovered porn and became hooked on it in middle school. She slept around trying to earn the affections of boys in high school, but ultimately they despised her.

In college, Laura continued sleeping around until she burned out. “There just wasn’t any satisfaction in it anymore,” she says.

That’s when she started remembering her childhood fantasy of wanting to be a boy.

She heard about a “transgender support group,” and from the first meeting she was encouraged by enthusiastic people that “coming out” as transgender was brave and the key to happiness. After two years of hormone treatments and surgeries to refashion her body into a male shape, she changed her name legally to Jake on her birth certificate and her driver’s license.

“I just wanted to be a man and completely forget that I had ever been born female,” she says. “I wanted to erase the existence of Laura.”

But she came to realize Jake was a fake.

“In all my times of rebellion, I knew that God was real,” she says. “After my surgery I realized that it hadn’t made me a man. I was legally a male, and I could look down at my license and it says I was male. But I was still the same person, just without breasts. It was devastating to me because I had really believed that I would become a man.”

As Jake

A few years later, her mom asked her make a website for her Bible study. Although Laura had no interest in the Bible, she decided to help her mom with the technical Internet details of website creation.

“As I began to read her notes, I was blown away. I had always seen the Bible as God’s rule book,” she says. “I had never seen the character or the heart of God. I began to see a loving and faithful God, not the angry, judgmental God that I’d always seen before.”

She began calling her mom daily. When a crisis struck, her mom encouraged her to trust the Lord. Her mom’s compassion and loving amiability was a stark contrast with the distant mom she knew in her childhood.

“She had been so radically transformed,” Laura remembers. “It was at that moment I knew the Gospel was true. I knew that Christ was alive. I knew there was a transforming power because I could see how my mom had been totally changed. That night I prayed and asked the Lord into my heart.”

At first, she pursued Christ as “a man of God.”

“I could not face being a female. There was so much pain attached because of what those guys had done and because of all the lies I’d believed all my life,” she says. “I felt like it was a shameful thing to be a female.”

After a month of crying out to Jesus night after night, she saw a vision of the Lord on one knee, his hand extended towards her.

The still small voice of the Lord spoke to her heart: Laura, do you trust Me?

Read the rest: Laura transitions back to the woman God made her.

‘You killed Christ’ taunt filled him horror of ‘Christians’

His Jewish mother was smuggled out of Nazi German by nuns, but tragically, she later died in a mental hospital.

“We could get mom out of Nazi Germany, but couldn’t quite get Germany out of mom,” says Dr. Jeffrey Seif.

Living in a Jewish community in Texas as a young person, Jeffrey got smacked with anti-semitism.

“One time around 12 or 13 years old, I’m walking down the street and these two girls yelled ‘Hey you dirty Jew, you killed Christ!” Jeffrey recounts. “I remember that vividly.”

So his first brush with what he thought were Christians provoked unmitigated horror in his heart.

As a young boy, Seif was sent to a Yeshiva– a very strict, religious Jewish school. It changed his mindset about following Judaism because, by nature, he was rebellious.

“I’m 16 now and as I’m laying on my bed my mother comes in and tells me to clean up my room and I gave her a hard time. She says ‘Well if you don’t like it you can leave!’ And so I left!” Jeffrey says.

He ran away from home, hitchhiked to California and ended up in San Francisco.

This is where he got his first positive exposure to Christians.

They were very nice, they were gracious, they’d give me a ride, they would want to give me a meal,” Jeffrey says. “I realized there were Christian people that were kind of cool.”

At school, Seif got high on drugs and received D’s and F’s in his classes.

“I wasn’t on anyone’s ‘most likely to succeed list,’” he recalls. “I was almost like road kill on the highway of life.”

Later in Pennsylvania as Jeffrey walked down the street, a man with hair down to his waist gave him a pamphlet and told him he wanted to talk to him about Jesus.

“Look man, I’m Jewish; I don’t believe in Jesus,” Seif responded curtly.

“Why not?” the man replied. Read the rest of Overcoming anti-semitism to come to Christ.

Framed man forgives corrupt cop, becomes friend after Jesus moves in his life

In prison, Jameel “Zuki” McGee vowed revenge on the cop who framed him unjustly.

“I made a goal for myself in prison to harm the officer whenever I got out,” Jameel says in an “I am second” video. “I was deeply hurt by everything that happened.”

But three things softened his simmering rage: He found out that he had become a father. Second, the corrupt cop got saved. Third, Jameel started reading his Bible in the cell.

Today, Jameel McGee, wrongly convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison, and former corrupt cop Andrew Collins are friends and brothers in Christ thanks to an unusual outpouring of grace and forgiveness.

Years after the fateful false accusation, years after being released from jail before schedule, Jameel happened to see the formerly crooked cop who stole years out of his life. Jameel was with his son and so was Andrew.

Jameel was quick to forgive. Evil was overturned by grace.

Andrew Collins had a rough home life. Growing up in Benton Harbor City, Michigan, he decided to become a cop because a police officer, summoned to his parent’s home, brought peace during one particularly acute domestic dispute. Little Andrew associated heroism with the cop.

“I remember thinking from that point on, that’s what I want to do with the rest of my life,” Andrew says.

He started police work with high ideals. But eventually, his sense of justice crumbled and the old evil upbringing began to exercise a bizarre control over his professional course.

Jameel McGee also grew up in tough circumstances.

“Mom used to kick the crap out of us,” says Jameel, the youngest of six. Dad left the picture early on. “Violence became a part of my nature.”

Their lives became intertwined in February of 2006 when Officer Andrew, on the narcotics beat for four months, acted on a tip and was looking for a crack dealer. The car matched the description, but the suspect did not.

Then Jameel walked out of the grocery store with milk and groceries. Because he nearly matched the description, Andrew moved in.

“Where’s the dope?” he barked at Jameel.

“What?” Jameel responded. “What dope?”

Andrew, who was plain clothes, pulled his badge. Jameel, who had been confused by the confrontation, suddenly realized that something had gone terribly wrong.

“This is for real,” he thought.

Cops are rewarded for arrests and convictions. Andrew decided that Jameel was his suspect and made the arrest. He wrote in his report that he found dope on him. That was a lie. Jameel was charged with possession with intent to distribute. Andrew fudged facts, knowing this would secure a conviction in court. He didn’t really think much about the possibility that he nabbed the wrong guy.

This is what Andrew had come to. The old ideals of heroism has succumbed to the dirty work of busting guys without regard for the means. Sadly, his conscience didn’t bother him.

Andrew’s life had descended into utter corruption, and there was no way out… until he got caught.

“Two years after I met Jameel, I got caught with crack, heroin and marijuana in my office,” Andrew says. “I got caught on a Tuesday. I thought about killing myself on Wednesday.

“I couldn’t see coming back from this.”

Fortunately, his wife was a Christian, and at her urging, Andrew went to see her pastor. He confessed everything. Read the rest of crooked cop and framed man.

Will Katy Perry turn back to God after court loss to Christian rapper?

In a court decision with implications for Christian Hip Hop at large, Flame won a plagiarism suit against pop star Katy Perry, who stole his beat from “Joyful Noise” and included it in her #1 song “Dark Horse,” according to a Los Angeles jury.

Damages are yet to be established by the court.

It was a victory for Flame, whose real name is Marcus Gray. But it is also a resounding validation for Christian Hip Hop (CHH), which gets criticized for being copycat, unoriginal, even corny. Perry extracted the Flame’s 2008 synth beat almost unaltered for her 2013 song, whose video was the first of a female artist to reach a billion views on YouTube.

The brazen daylight robbery of intellectual property proves once and for all that CHH is a source of creativity, not a knockoff.

Apparently it was Flame’s DJ at the time Cho’zyn Boy who sniffed out the fraud when he heard “Dark House.” He dissected the two songs and found that the only difference in the beat lines was Dark Horse sped up its tempo from 66 BPM to 76 BPM and dropped pitch down one decimal from Db to C, according to Rapzilla.

Perry and her lawyers argued that her song-writing crew never heard “Joyful Noise” and didn’t even know of Flame. They contended that beats can sound similar from one song to the next.

Flame’s lawyer hog-washed such claims, saying the music diva thought she could get away with highway robbery because Flame was a low-level musician – and Christian.

“They’re trying to shove Mr. Gray into some gospel music alleyway that no one ever visits,” argued Michael A Kahn, as reported by the Guardian. Flame’s video reached 2 million viewers and was too widely known for jurors to believe Perry.

But behind the court conflict, there’s an epic battle going on that transcends a significant payout for the Christian rapper, who turned down $1 million from secular producers that offered him a contract on the condition he tone down the Jesus talk.

Behind the settlement and intellectual property infringement, there is also a war for the precious, prodigal soul of Katy Perry. Read the rest Katy Perry’s Dark Horse compared to Flame’s Joyful Noise.