Audio File
Transcript
My name is Jawuan Betton. I’m 15 years old.
My name is Abraham Richardson, I am 16 years old.
We interviewed.
We interviewed Minister Milton.
Minister Milton on July 30th, 2015.
Born and raised in Rankin. I grew up in Hopkins Village, in the projects, and it was like a big family. Everybody watched everybody. Everybody looked out for everybody, and we all got in trouble together. We lived in the high rise and the high rise was called “the new side” and the lower part of the projects was called “the old side” and we always had rivalries with the old side and the new side. We Played football. We played basketball. We played whiffle ball. I mean it was always sports.
It was my mother, single parent, she raised us. My older sister was… She was more like the person that kept us in check, and my younger brother learned everything from me.
Mentors… There’s a lot of mentors, people in the neighborhood you watch grow up, man. And I didn’t have a dad. So what it is is you took things from certain people that’s from your neighborhood, and you try to apply it to your life.
Right now what I’m doing is I’m trying to get this barbershop together. I’m building that because I built my very first one.
It was in Rankin. I built it and then went to Cincinnati for 10 years, did a barbershop there in Cincinnati, but now actually purchasing a piece of property now and said I’m putting my barbershop in and it’s a banquet hall too. That’s my goal right now is to get that in order.
Jesus, straight Jesus. Everybody else falls short, bro. You’ve changed my life totally. Totally. I’ve been healed. I’ve been filled with the spirit. It’s like, I’ll use it as a… like riding a bike. When you’re learning how to ride a bike, you struggle, you falling and going through, and it’s like when you actually receive Jesus, you learn how to ride without falling. You’re going to fall, you’re going to get scrapes, but it’s not a chore anymore. Saying it’s like, he gives me insight, I can see it and if I can hear him, he’ll steer me the right way, versus just keep walking through life with blindfolds on.
Struggles, I always have struggles. I have struggles every day. It’s just that, my struggles, I don’t let them overwhelm me and I just know that He’s going to fix them, or I will endure them because I know that the Lord that I serve, he said he will not give you more than what you can bear. And my, like my younger brother, he got killed two years ago. It was a heavy situation.
I was selling drugs, doing drugs. I mean just doing everything, man. And I said, Jesus, I kind of like this, so you have to help me take this away. And it was crazy because the people that I used to deal with never came back around. For another year, they just didn’t come my way. If you can’t change your friends? Then change your friends.
Where I come from, you ain’t supposed to make it, man. They put you in a box, come from the projects. They look at you like you’re not gonna ever be anything. Coming out of school. One of those guys that most likely not to succeed, they look at you like that. But the heart of a man is totally different. Don’t ever let nobody tell you what you can’t do. And you get a fire within you. And when people say what you can’t do, I use that as energy. Use it as fuel to push myself through all kind of obstacles. Because I had a baby at 18, I was in high school, my senior year. Had to grow up fast.
Who you with? What you’re doing? All that is serious. It’s your road of life. We all got our own road. And as we go, decision that we make, this is how good God is. God showed me him in the GPS. So you got a GPS and you make the wrong turn, what do it say? It says recalculating. I got to get you back onto the road that I want you to be on. And that’s how God is. When you make a wrong turn, he got to recalculate your whole life to get you back to where you should be. But that’s what God showed me in the GPS about my life I’d made wrong turns. He had to recalculate. And what it did is…I burnt up time in my life, months and years trying to get back to where he want me to be. The only thing that you can control in your life from now until you die is your decision. We on the road, and when you make a decision, it takes you left or takes you right. Period. So when you make good decisions consistently. It’ll take you in a better road for your life.