Pastor Rick Buchholz learned to steal from his escaped con step dad

Caught for the third time by the cops at age 19, Rick Buchholz knew he was going to prison but pleaded desperately to God for reprieve even as he did pushups to prepare to defend himself against the inevitable prison violence.

“I’m thinking, ‘I can’t go to prison’,” Rick says on a Virginia Beach Potter’s House podcast. “I remember saying, ‘God, you’ve got to help me.’ I felt the love of God. Something came down and gave me goosebumps.”

Rick got off course when his father abandoned the home when he was only 11. Rick was the youngest of six kids.

”My dad wound up getting into an affair. That really spun out our family. I was really hurt,” he recalled. “I remember looking out the window as my dad left, somehow I felt like it was my fault. I was devastated to see my dad walk away in the ark like that. I never really recovered from that.”

At a cousin’s house, Rick got snagged by pornography. The cousin had turned the garage into a pool room with pinups covering the walls and adult magazines piled everywhere.

“That wasn’t a very good place for an ll-year-old kid to spend all day,” Rick says. “That really messed with my head. My mind became messed up and perverted from a very young age.”

At the same time, Rick began stealing. He broke into a neighbor’s house, stole a jar of coins, which he buried in his yard and would use to buy from the ice cream truck that passed through the neighborhood.

His mother hooked up with an escaped convict who taught him to shoplift with brazen audacity. “He taught me everything I knew,” Ricky says. “It wasn’t so much for the money. It really was just for the thrill.”

Being encouraged to continue stealing, Rick started getting arrested for stealing. He fell in love with a high school girl, whose dad was a cop, a fact that prompted him to try to clean up his act. When she broke up with him, he despaired, filled with rage and hopelessness, and proceeded to driver his car recklessly through town. The police chased him, but he didn’t care.

Meanwhile, he heard here and there bits and pieces of Jesus. He saw “The Cross and the Switchblade” and became infatuated with the testimony of gang members getting saved. He even went to church once and accepted Jesus.

But he didn’t stop stealing and didn’t follow up with salvation. One time, he had stolen some guns, which he tried to sell. The prospective buyers turned out to be undercover cops. That was his third offense; he was 19 years old; there was no way he could avoid prison.

Miraculously, Rick walked free from the courthouse. “You would have thought I would have walked out of there and would’ve gone looking for a church,” he says. “But that didn’t happen.”… Read the rest: Rick Buchholz Pastor

Scootie Wop lost his way when his dad left

High on Xanax, Scootie Wop, now a Christian rapper, swerved his vehicle into a divider after he fell asleep at the wheel, then crashed into a telephone pole.

“You need to go to church and do something,” his mom told him after he drove home. Somehow, he was able to drive the totaled car home after the horrific accident.

Emmanuel “Scootie” Lofton’s father was a pastor and former Marine. Scootie had an idyllic childhood until his father abandoned the family and left the ministry. That forced his mom, along with Scootie and his siblings, to live out of a 95 Mercedes Benz in South Carolina, according to Rapzilla.

“I felt like I lost a piece of myself. Everything switched. I got exposed to drugs and gang culture and fighting with different people,” he says on HolyCulture.net. “I got put into a gang in the fifth grade, so I hung around a lot of older kids. I started smoking in sixth grade and selling stuff in the seventh grade.”

That’s when 12-year-old Emmanuel started experimenting with drugs and gangbanging.

“My mom was praying for me every morning, every night,” he says. “She was always cooking something in the pot, making the house smell good. I got my love from God from her.”

Emmanuel tried to straighten up by playing football, basketball, track and even kickboxing. Eventually, he focused on football, but a broken leg – fractured in six places – right before college destroyed the dream. The months of recovery saw him drop sports and college.

He tried his hand at secular music and hit… Read the rest: Christian rapper Scootie Wop

Josh Broome: porn actor turns church-goer

Josh Broome didn’t even know her name.

Working as a waiter at a steakhouse in LA, Josh wanted to become a star but the attractive ladies at his table offered him a different kind of acting: “adult” movies.

“I showed up (at the studio) and I was terrified and everyone’s like, ‘Don’t worry about it. Just take this pill, you’ll be able to perform.’ I didn’t have a conversation with the girl. I didn’t know her name. We never even made eye contact. I felt dirty.

“That changed the rest of my life.”

And so the small-town kid fell into the swamp of Hollywood. Josh Broome didn’t have a relationship with his father, so when he started modeling at age 15, he thrived on the praise, the positive reinforcement.

“If I am successful in any type of genre of a film or theater, I would be loved,” he thought at the time. So with $50, he moved to Golden State, California, home to the film industry, maker of stars. His plan, of course, was to do something legitimate.

But as the months dragged into years, when the “provocatively dressed” girls showed up and made him the proposal, he quickly agreed. It seemed cool, and he needed the cash.

The first film was disillusioning.

“It didn’t feel real. I didn’t feel like it truly happened,” he says. “Then some of my friends saw. I was embarrassed, even though they were like, ‘Dude, that’s so cool’”

But if his friends stumbled onto and watched his video, Josh realized that his mom would eventually find out. What would she think?

“I was thinking about embarrassing my mom,” he admits.

At the same time, he rehearsed his rationalization. “I already did one. So, what’s the difference, if I do another one.”

“Then all of a sudden you know I’ve done a few and I’ve made three or four thousand dollars in less than a month,” he adds. “All of a sudden I was doing 20 a month.”

Of course, Mom found out.

“I still didn’t stop. I became this person I didn’t even know,” Josh says. “The more I was willing to care less about myself, the more I was willing to do these movies.”

Josh became a “star,” performing in thousands of films in five years.

“I’m, crying myself to sleep every night,” he remembers. “Every time I worked, I would literally shower, and I couldn’t get clean enough because I couldn’t wash off the hurt.”

The breaking point came from a bank teller. “Josh, is there anything else I can do for you?” the teller asked.

It was the first time he had heard his own name in such a long time.

“I just lost it and I went home and I looked myself in the mirror and I was like, ‘What have I done? What have I done with my life? I haven’t been home in two Christmases. I wasn’t taking care of my mom. I wasn’t taking care of my brother.”

He called his director and quit.

“I ran, I ran for my life. I moved to North Carolina,” he says. “Every night, I would have dreams of the things I did. Even though I wasn’t doing anything anymore, my sin was just tucked away. It wasn’t dealt with.

“The last thing I wanted to do was face what I did, and I had ruined my relationship with my family.”

His mom offered him unconditional love.

“But I knew I embarrassed her,” he confesses.

Next, Josh met Hope. She was pretty and liked Josh.

He worried that his skeletons were too horrifying. Once she found it, she would reject him, he feared. Read the rest: Porn actor becomes church-goer

Voices in her head told her to take her life

Lorena Saylor would get in her car and wind up at some random place, having no idea how she got there.

Depression had taken over her life.

“I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to go outside. I didn’t want to get dressed. I just basically wanted to be alone,” Lorena says on a CBN video. “There was times I wanted to commit suicide.”

Lorena’s problems started with sexual abuse in her childhood home in Kentucky. Although she was the victim, she was punished. “I was the one that got spanked for it,” she says.

Migraines set in at the same time. She couldn’t concentrate in school and was diagnosed with dyslexia. She also suffered from anxiety and low self-esteem.

Lorena married at age 25, but her problems persisted. Her husband was enlisted in the Air Force and would frequently be sent for lengthy deployments, leaving her and the two children alone for long periods of time.

“This voice would say, ‘Ram your car into this tree. Your family would be so much better off if you’re just gone.’”

She was raised in church, but “the back-stabbing of people talking about people, just the things I had heard and seen within the church, I didn’t want anything to do with it,” she says.

At age 33, Lorena suffered a back and hip injury at work. Unfortunately, her prescription pain medication turned into an addiction. “My body just craved more and more,” she says. “I become a functioning addict.”

She felt unloved. She wanted to be alone but despaired of the loneliness. Whenever she drove, she got lost in her thoughts and direction. The voices would tell her to commit suicide.

“I wanted to die,” she says. “Many times I put pills in my hands ready to take them. This voice would say, ‘Just take it. Your family would be so much better off.’”

But another voice… Read the rest: voices in her head.

Dr. Kizzmekia S. Corbett brings faith to science

At one time, Dr. Kizzmekia S. Corbett didn’t know that there was an academic degree called a PhD. Now, the outspoken Christian is leading a National Institutes of Health team developing a Covid vaccine.

“I would have never thought that I would be in this moment right now,” the viral immunologist says on Black Enterprise. She wonders if she is living in an alternate universe, one in which God is shaking the table.

Kizzmekia grew up in North Carolina and somehow caught the eye of her high school chemistry teacher who hooked her up with summer internships in a lab at the University of North Carolina after the 10th and 11th grades.

“I was in the middle of a laboratory with this world-renowned organic chemist, his name is James Morkin. And he paired me with a black grad student, Albert Russell,” said Corbett. “Beyond the love for science and the scientific process, I learned that being him was possible.”

Mentors helped her climb the heights of science, along with her Christian faith, she says.

“I am Christian. I’m black. I am Southern, I’m an empath,” she says. “I’m feisty, sassy, and fashionable. That’s kind of how I describe myself. I would say that my role as a scientist is really about my passion and purpose for the world and for giving back to the world.”

Researching on the cutting edge of science to counter the world’s deadliest disease in 100 years allows Kizzmekia to combine her faith and intellect to serve others.

“My team is responding to the world’s most devastating global pandemic in the last hundred years,” she says. “There’s something to be said about knowing who you are.”

Outgoing president Trump visited her lab and became aware of her service to the country. Read the rest: women of color in science.

With so much division in America, this urban missionary bridges the divide

Jonathan Tremain “JT” Thomas is a chaos chaser.

He showed up in Ferguson, Missouri after Michael Brown’s death at the hands of police in 2014 to fight for equal treatment for people of color — but also to help quell the rising violence of protests that were being hijacked by non-local agitators.

This year, he showed in Minneapolis after George Floyd died when a white police officer kneeled on his neck. He participated in prayer, counseling and services on the very street corner where Floyd lost his life.

“In church circles, there’s been this desire for awakening,” JT says on Slate. “Oh my goodness, it looks like awakening has come to America in the form of chaos.”

This is JT’s full-time job, and his organization, the pun-derived nonprofit “Civil Righteousness” — has been part of the healing balm applied to a nation convulsed by months of protests, vandalism, riots, looting and anarchy. Christian race-relations expert Dante Stewart calls them “the next generation of the racial reconciliation movement.”

He likes to talk to hot-headed young activists, to white conservative evangelicals and angry black liberal progressives in their 50s and 60s and get them thinking outside of their bubbles. “Jesus came for all,” he says. “There are serious issues in policing that need to be addressed, but also the police officers are human.”

With Methodist circuit-rider great grandparents and a grandmother who was sister of soul legend/ civil rights activist Nina Simone, JT says he’s had a confluence of influences to uniquely prepare him for his current ministry.

Raised in a predominately black Baptist church in North Carolina, he launched on the path to become a missionary in college but zeroed in on urban needs in America. He worked in Tennessee and Indiana but struggled to raise support, so he started a video production company and accepted a teaching pastorate in a nondenominational church in St. Louis.

Then Ferguson erupted in unrest that quickly spread across the nation. In a dream vision, JT saw himself type an email titled “Meet me in Ferguson” and took it to mean that he should travel there in the name of the Lord.

He joined prayer groups and observed mounting street protests. He confirmed that agitators from St. Louis were the ones stoking the flames of outrage and sparking violence. After two months of trying to inject God into the equation, he moved his family and set up permanent residence in Ferguson.

When white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine black Christians at church in Charleston, South Carolina, JT unobtrusively introduced himself on the scene to conduct prayer services and distributed food to the homeless.

After James Alex Fields Jr. slammed his car into Heather Heyer, killing her, and injured 19 others at a white supremacist rally in Virginia in 2017, JT conducted trainings for local churches on “how to be peacemakers and mediators.”

By then, Civil Righteousness had grown into a network of like-minded Christians who are ready to mobilize like a SWAT team. “We live a lifestyle of readiness,” JT says.

Naturally, they deployed to Minneapolis.

The protests sparked by George Floyd have been different than any previous. They have become more widespread and more supported by politicians and media. They also have been more dominated by Marxists and Antifa. Leaders of BLM have openly declared the Marxist alignment. Antifas engaged in organized anti-police mobilizations, ambushing cops and using lasers to blind them. Read the rest: Civil Righteousness brings Jesus to race riots.

Steph Curry’s wife urges women to dress modestly, put husband before kids

When Ayesha Curry tweeted that women should dress modestly, a maelstrom of criticism rained down on her from people who felt she was “shaming” women.

”Its okay for Ayesha Curry to have a preference for how she dresses,” retorted Brandon Patterson a day later in December 2015. “It’s not okay for her to shame other women who don’t share it as classless.”

When it comes to strong faith, Ayesha Curry, wife to NBA sensation Stephen Curry, is a very passionate Christian. She also is the author of the best selling cookbook The Seasoned Life: Food, Family, Faith, and the Joy of Eating Well. She began her career by posting videos of herself cooking on YouTube, which have also featured Steph Curry.

Ayesha invented a meal kit called “Homemade” which delivers family inspired ingredients and recipes that she handpicked herself. The meals are available in the San Francisco Bay area through Whole Foods or can be ordered in 48 states for $75 per week.

Ayesha also thinks about the community. She is an active brand ambassador for team FNV and No Kid Hungry, which are organizations built to end worldwide child hunger.

Her love for cooking and giving back to the community brings out her happy side. But her opinion on apparel brings out controversy.

“Everyone’s into barely wearing clothes these days huh?” tweeted Ayesha on the fifth of December in 2015,” Not my style. I like to keep the good stuff covered up for the one who matters.”

A backlash came immediately.

”Sounds as if Ayesha Curry thinks her body/other women’s bodies are like consumer goods marketed exclusively for use by men, or something,” tweeted Félicicette La Critique Ayesha.

“@ayeshacurry you’re tearing women down by saying that certain types of dresses make them not ‘classy,’” tweeted Paige.

Some people defended Ayesha.

“Twitter feminists: your body, your rules! Ayesha Curry: I prefer to be covered up. Twitter feminists: No, you can’t do that,” tweeted Kingdakkar.

Ayesha responded, “Regardless of if you like my “style of clothes” or not (which I don’t care) please do not tear women down and degrade them… Not cool peeps” Read the rest of Ayesha Curry modesty controversy.

Bitty & Beau’s: a coffee house that employs special needs people

They starred on Broadway, but their most celebrated roles came later as parents of two Down Syndrome kids, for whom they opened a coffee house.

Amy and Ben Wright — deacons at the Wilmington, NC, First Baptist Church — launched Bitty & Beau’s Coffee specifically to employ people like their children, workers with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD).

The Wrights have become a national sensation, winning CNN’s Heroes of the Year, after being featured on national news. But their trajectory towards canonization was marked by emotional turmoil and disgrace.

“There was just an enormous amount of grief — it was like I was grieving the son I thought I was going to have,” Amy told Baptist News about the turmoil of disappointment before Beau’s birth. “When we learned about Beau’s diagnosis I felt so sad and overwhelmed.

“We are so embarrassed about that now,” she added to the Wilmington Star News. “But if we had had more exposure to people with Down Syndrome back then maybe we would have felt differently.”

She came to love her Down Syndrome boy.

“I feel that was the moment I was drawn closer to God,” Amy said.

It wasn’t long before Amy saw that her special needs son was not a burden but a blessing. She saw his effervescent joy, and she discovered his giftings. People with Down’s Syndrome are in no way inferior or less worthy of life than others — and God has given them special qualities that others don’t have.

Six years later, Jane Adeline — called “Bitty” — was born also with Down Syndrome. Having two children with Down Syndrome is extremely rare.

“When you become a parent of a child with special needs, you are instantly thrust into becoming an advocate,” Amy said in CNN. “Trying to make people see the beauty in their lives that we see. My children are not broken.”

Eventually, Amy and Ben decided they would do something to help other people with IDD, 70 percent of which are unemployed. In February of 2016, they opened a coffee shop, which they named after their kids, and hired a crew of 40 with IDD ranging from autism to cerebral palsy.

To see Bitty & Beau’s employees making java or ringing up customers, to see them singing and laughing with clients in their new 5,000-square-foot facility, brings a sensation of faith restored in humanity. It packs a joy-filled jolt that’s better than caffeine. Read more about Bitty & Beau’s Christian coffee house for special needs employees.

Lonely at Christmas?

On the night before Christmas, he was kicked out of his house.

After years of “loose living and immorality,” Elliott Osowitt was driven out by a wife who had run out of patience. Downcast and despondent, he decided to go to a nearby motel and kill himself with a gun.

Osowitt worked as a tour guide for “Heathen Tours,” a touring company that catered to tourists from England seeking sinful pleasures in America. It seems Osowitt indulged in too many of those allurements himself.

After Osowitt check into his room, he found a Gideon’s Bible next to his bed opened to John 14:27: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”

The power of God’s Word and the Spirit of the living God moved on his heart. Tearfully, he repented of his sins and asked Jesus to be his Lord and Savior.

And that is how the Prince of Peace, whose birth the reformed Jew had never celebrated, came to Osowitt at Christmas in 1996.

He actually spent three days at the motel reading that Bible. He attended church with his wife, Polly, the following Sunday and quit working for the touring company. Osowitt began a new career with a Christian touring company instead.

On Christmas Eve, the Bible “caused me to stop. It caused me to cry. When I read it was Jesus, I had a hard time with it,” Osowitt told USA Today. “It literally began a process of healing that eventually led to the reconciliation… Read the rest of the story.