God's Last Hope — Religion or No Religion, He Remains Undeniable

I was still riding high off that experience when I got into the shower later that night. Still semi-high off the feeling of what had happened — the kind of high that has nothing to do with what you smoke and everything to do with what you just lived. And without planning it, without thinking about it, I started to pray. Quietly. But out loud. The way I had been told to do in church that day when the old school member with the one gold tooth told me to talk to God out loud so He could see I was trying to reach Him. The way Joel Osteen said to do it — find a quiet place where no one is around, so you know the only person you could be talking to is Him.

I thanked God for my talent. I gave Him all the glory for what happened during that freestyle because as far as I knew, I was just buying time, waiting to finally mess up. But He kept giving me the right words with barely enough time to process them. I was grateful. Deeply, painfully grateful. And gratitude has a way of melting into something else when you let it run long enough. It melted into repentance.

I started saying I was sorry. Not in the way they teach you in church — the scripted kind, the kind that sounds holy but costs you nothing. I started apologizing for real. For the things I had been doing while running the streets. For the sins I kept committing even though I knew — I knew — that something greater than me existed. I had already been told. I had already felt the tug. And still I went back. Still I ran.

✦ ✦ ✦

I was talking to God out loud in my parents’ shower, alone, water running down my face, and the joy of the conversation mixed with the guilt of the confession and created something I had never felt before. A pressure in my chest. A fullness. Like my heart was trying to say more than my mouth was willing to let out.

The apology was still flowing through me, and so was the gratitude.

The feeling of wanting to cry came over me again, like it was that day in church. And this time, since I was alone — since there was nobody to see me, nobody to judge me, nobody I had to perform strength for — I bowed my head and let it come.

But it did not come. In the same instant that I bowed my head to let the tears fall, the feeling went away. Just — vanished. Like a hand reached inside my chest and pulled the emotion out before it could land.

And before I could fully process the feeling disappearing — before my brain could even ask the question — something happened that I have spent years trying to understand.

I heard my own voice. Inside my head. But not like a thought. Not like the quiet voice you hear when you are thinking to yourself. This was loud. As loud as if I had spoken with my fingers in both ears — that echoing, resonant, unmistakable sound of your own voice bouncing around inside your skull. I heard myself ask:

“You want to cry?”

And my instant response — out loud, without hesitation, without thinking — was “Yeah.”

And that is when the waterworks started. I could not see my own face but I know it was ugly. I mean the kind of cry where your mouth is wide open and nothing is coming out at first. The kind where your body bends at the waist like someone punched you in the soul. I had to look hideous. Mouth wide open. Eyes shut. Bent over in a shower in Miami, crying silently at first and then not silently at all.

But then something shifted. The atmosphere in the shower changed. It went from an ugly cry to a powerful cry. From pain to — I do not even have the right word for it. Joy does not cover it. Relief does not cover it. It was like a screen lifted off the front of my life and for the first time I was seeing the world in its real resolution. A silence filled with something so full it roared.

I threw my fists in the air. Both of them. Clenched. Like I had just won something I had been fighting for my entire life. I have never won the Super Bowl. But in that moment, that is what it felt like. Victory. Pure, unexplainable, unearned victory.

And then the atmosphere shifted again.

I still felt amazing. But there was something else now. A presence. In front of me. There was not much room in my parents’ tub, but all of a sudden the energy of someone standing directly in front of me was undeniable. The presence was intense. My adrenaline spiked the way it does when you know a fight is about to happen — when you are face to face with someone and you know it is unavoidable. If you have ever stood across from an opponent and felt that electricity in your chest, that is the only thing I have ever experienced that comes close. But the emotion was not fear. It was not anger. It was raw joy, love, and power. I could feel the power radiating from this presence like heat from a furnace.

When I felt it, my body reacted before my mind could. I quickly folded my arms across my chest and raised my shoulders up to the sides of my neck. If you are from the streets — if you grew up in Miami the way I did — you know exactly what that posture is. That is the stance of a man who is not intimidated. That is the stance of a man who is telling whoever is standing in front of him: I see you, and I am not backing down.

I did it on instinct. My body responded to the presence the only way it knew how — the way the streets had trained it to respond to something powerful standing in front of me. I did not choose to do it. My survival instincts did it for me. And in that moment — standing in a shower in Miami with my arms crossed and my shoulders raised, facing something I could not see but could absolutely feel — I realized that the most powerful thing I had ever encountered in my life was not a man. It was not a weapon. It was not the streets.

It was Him.

I felt great. But the power confused me. I knew it was Him. Somewhere deep in my spirit, I knew. But I still had to ask. I still had to hear myself say it out loud.

“God, this You?”

I took a small, quick step backward when I said it. Not out of fear. Out of respect. The way you step back when something so big stands in front of you that your body makes room for it without being asked.

The joy that followed poured through me like a river breaking through a dam. I went right back to repenting. Thanking Him for my talent. Speaking words of gratitude for living — for the gift of experiencing life itself. Gratitude poured out of me. Joy literally lit my heart on fire. I have never in my life felt so good to be heard. I just wanted to keep talking. To stay in this moment forever. To live in this shower, in this presence, in this feeling, until the end of time.

But slowly — slowly — I could feel it starting to fade. The presence felt like it was returning to wherever it came from. I began to beg for it to stay. Please. Please do not go. But it continued to leave. Slowly, gently, like a tide pulling back from the shore. Until it was gone.

And in that moment, I realized my eyes were closed.

I opened them.

And everything looked fake.

The tiles. The showerhead. The curtain. The walls. Everything around me looked like a movie set. Like props. Like I had been pulled out of the real world and placed on a stage designed to look like a bathroom, but nothing was actually real. My eyes were seeing the same room they had seen a thousand times before. But something behind my eyes had changed. The lens was different. The resolution was different. Everything was the same and nothing was the same.

I turned off the water. Got out of the tub. And caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror.

I looked deeply confused.

I turned and looked back into the tub. I looked around inside it. As if the answer might still be standing in there. As if whatever had just happened might have left a footprint, a mark, a sign that I had not imagined the whole thing.

I walked out of that bathroom with more questions than I had ever carried in my life:

Why did I hear my own voice that loud?

Did I really hear it, or did I imagine it?

Why did I answer out loud?

Why did the ugly cry start the instant I said “yeah”?

Was that God in the shower with me?

Did all of that happen because of the weed?

These questions would run wild in my head for days. Some of them would take years to answer. Some of them I am still answering now, in these pages, with you.

But none of those questions — not a single one — could take away what I had just felt. Whatever happened in that shower, it was powerful. It was specific. It was personal. And it was real.

Something had stepped into that bathroom. Something that made my street instincts fold my arms across my chest. Something that radiated more power than anything I had ever encountered on the streets of Miami. And when it left, the world did not look the same.

To understand how I ended up in that shower — standing in my parents’ bathtub with my fists in the air, talking out loud to a presence I could not see — you have to go back with me. Back before the streets. Back before the dirt on my soul. Back to a three-year-old boy standing in a church, having water poured over his head by people who made a choice he did not make.

Let me take you there.

End of chapter one. 21 more chapters in the full book.