Experience from the Streets Has Him Reaching Others
EDUCATION
Michael grew up in Baltimore’s Park Heights. His father was a pastor and a truck driver. His mom stayed at home to raise him and his siblings. As a child his dream was to become a lawyer. The challenge was his school. Fights were an everyday occurrence; it felt more like a prison with crowded rooms and cage-like-bars over the windows and doors.
He can still recall when he told his first-grade teacher that he wanted to be a lawyer. Her response, “That will never happen.” The woman in charge of educating and inspiring him deflated his aspirations for a future. She lived in the same neighborhood as he did. Michael shares, “Maybe she couldn’t believe in his dreams because she had lost faith in her own dreams years ago.”
He says, “I was in an education system where kids were, so to speak, incarcerated by their zip codes.” Perhaps they both were affected by their community’s difficulties where mostly White families lived on one side and Black families lived on the other. On the sidewalks you would see homeless people, broken bottles, and even needles.
Although his experience with his teacher might seem small and insignificant, those few cruel words shut down his dreaming. He began to adopt an attitude of “why bother”. Before he became a teenager he began to help sell drugs for the first time, and at ten years old he saw his first murder. Dropping out of school was the norm in his neighborhood and graduating high school and going to college were the exception. There were no Black male professionals in his community. He says, “It is hard to become what you never see. It’s even harder when society tells you that you have no value.”
A SERIES OF LOSSES
To make matters worse, when Michael was twelve his father died when a blood clot from his leg traveled to his brain and burst causing a stroke that in turn caused a heart attack. Michael began hanging out on the streets with drug dealers and delivering drugs. He still went to church at his mother’s request but believed the true cause of his father’s death was God. He didn’t want anything to do with God.
A year after his dad’s death, his mom could tell Michael was struggling so she moved their family to Maryland to a predominately White neighborhood. “The suburbs felt like living in a foreign city,” shares Michael. Sports became the place he would put his pain. He excelled at basketball. “It gave me a deep sense of achievement and planted the idea that this was going to be my ticket – my passport to the world,” shares Michael.
He got a scholarship for college, but during his first semester he was involved in a car accident. He woke up in the hospital unable to feel his legs. His right leg had been entirely crushed – a shattered kneecap, broken tibia, broken fibula, three broken toes, and a snapped Achilles tendon. The doctor told him he would never play basketball again and may never walk again.
Despite a long recovery in the hospital, Michael did return to school for the spring semester. No longer an athlete, Michael struggled to find his identity. He spent most days drinking and smoking weed unable to cope with his new reality. He was put on academic probation and then the school decided to withdraw his scholarship. He was asked to leave the school and returned home feeling like a failure.
To earn money, Michael began selling drugs – cocaine and crack. He and his partner also had a chop shop for stolen cars. Despite the illegal activity, the end for him came after he got a traffic ticket. He had gotten pulled over for running a stop sign and driving without a license. A friend’s father received Michael’s traffic ticket in the mail (Michael had falsified his name).
Michael went to court to settle the matter and pay the ticket. When he got there, they had a warrant for his arrest. The feds had been watching them – not for narcotics but for using the names of recently deceased people to acquire credit cards. Michael ran away. The next day his mom asked him to turn himself in to the feds which he did. He was placed in solitary confinement. He faced up to thirty years in prison.
After six weeks waiting for his arraignment, he was taken into the judge’s chambers on a Sunday. The prosecutor, lawyer and the judge told Michael about a program called Give Me a Chance that they wanted him to be placed in. The judge asked, “Do you want to go to jail, or do you want to go to college?” Of course, Michael said, “I want to go to college.”
The judge encouraged Michael to use this opportunity to rebuild his life with help from God and others. He let Michael know his life had value. The charges against Michael were dropped. To this day, the only sign that Michael ever had a brush with the criminal justice system is the traffic ticket he received for driving without a license. He was nineteen and ready to a second chance.
A SECOND CHANCE
The Give Me a Chance program he would participate in was at Oral Roberts University (ORU). There were rules to follow in order to participate in the program and Michael resisted them from the start. Shortly, after arriving to school he started a little business on the side providing weed and selling TVs and clothes to students. He was smoking a lot more weed and drinking more often. He also refused to go to church, a part of his program. He was also required to attend the spring revival at ORU.
To make himself feel as numb as possible, he decided to get high before attending revival. He rolled and smoke five blunts and drank a fifth of vodka and a few beers then went to church. He and his friends were high and laughing and mocking those around him. Then someone got up and sang, How Great Thou Art. Michael began to cry and before he knew it he was sober. He felt peace and love. He jumped out of his seat and ran out of the room. He went back to his room trying to escape God’s presence, but unable to escape he spent the next thirty minutes in the presence of God and he knew it was Him.
He felt safe and God spoke to him, “You are called to preach, Michael. You are called to inspire. This is who you are. This is the purpose for your life.” Then he heard a knocking at his door, opened it and saw his Resident Assistant (RA). He asked if Michael was okay. Michael laughed and asked why would he say something like that? His RA said, “Mike, you’ve been in there for three days, dude.”
Mike looked completely different to his friends and that night shared his testimony. The next week his shared his story at a church in Florida. When he was done the alter was full of men and women who were in search of the same thing. Later that month, a man named Joseph Jennings invited Michael to a big youth rally in Los Angeles with thousands of gang members in attendance. This was the first time he ever opened a Bible and preached.
PRINCIPLES OF REFORM
After college, Michael was able to climb up the corporate ladder in the automotive industry. He was in the perfect bubble living in the Midwest insulated from all the unpleasant experiences that he’d become accustomed to growing up. He had mostly stopped talking about his past because he didn’t want anyone to know he was once in a dark place. Although he was spared a criminal record he felt he needed to confront the harmful systems that were a part of his trauma.
When he was offered a promotion at work he chose not to accept it. Instead, he left the company to start a social enterprise and a church. His boss thought he was crazy. Michael was concerned about issues of pressing importance: poverty, education inequity and inequality, racism, racial disparity and violence. He served on all types of boards, learned to advocate through public policy, built organizations, and partnered with a host of entities all for the sake of preaching, and public service.
He says, “The key to and genesis of a culture of possibility is to unlock individual purpose, to know that every individual has a God-given purpose, and decide as a society not to leave anyone trapped inside personal pain.”
Today Michael is the founder of LifePrep and currently serves as the chief engagement and fulfillment officer for TD Jakes Foundation. His story has changed many lives and is revitalizing communities.
