To give you an understanding of how I believe that the promise of education gave my life a better chance and my college experience has empowered me to be the best version of myself, I must first tell you something about my past life which has given me the opportunity to live with promise and that is a direct result of my testimony. When I was a young adult of 15 years and 6 months, I was faced with the choice to be a man or die from the pain, shame, and guilt of going to prison. I was facing three years in juvenile prison for the awful crimes of murder in the first degree and armed robbery.I was in the ninth grade at this time, and I was into the drugs of the 1970s and influenced by the political messages of musicians like Marvin Gaye, the O'Jays, Undisputed Truth, Harold Melvin, and the Blue Notes, Bloodstone, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the whole "Funk Movement" with George Clinton. I found myself wanting to fit into the "social intellectual crowd" so badly that I had to make a statement with my life. I started carrying a gun with me everywhere, even to school, which led me to doing all kind of crimes.One of the things that seemed to have happened while I looked for my social identity for the next twenty-three years while going in and out of jail and prison was that I lived the outcome of my life through the beats of the streets and the crime trends that were everywhere. This set the stage of crime for my life journey. I remember I started living for the any-moment criminal excitement and reacting to the people around me in very negative ways. Very quickly, I became a pawn in the lifestyles of a criminal, drug abuser, pimp, and killer, so contrary to the lifestyle of my religious and family upbringing that would eventually set me free. I spent the next three years in juvenile prison trying to figure out what went wrong and how I ended up in a God-forsaken juvenile prison. I can now look back and I do realize that I went deeper into an emotional and mental abyss, which took my thinking deeper into irresponsibility (criminal thinking). For the next twenty-three years, I would experience drug abuse and misuse and go in and out of jail and prison. Those are years that I will never get back, no matter how much I would like to, so I have to use the experience to grow from my past choices and decisions. I spent these days thinking about what it would have been like if things had been different and if I had only listened to my parents who cared so deeply for me. Not even the loss of my family trust could stop the madness that crime, drugs, guns, and the streets created in my life at that time. I have made some bad choices concerning my life as a young man, which I had to pay a great price for. I have been shot nine times from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet. I have watched friends die and get hurt from drug abuse, gunfire, and crime during that part of my life, which was tremendously painful for me. I spent a lot of my life in a jail cell, suffering from the consequences of my foolishness and lack of personal responsibility. I have been through it all, from prison to guns, and to my own near-death experiences. In 1995, after eighteen years of going in and out of jails and treatment facilities, I came to the realization that I was tired of wasting my life on jail, drugs, vices, resentments, and laziness.Read More......