The Journey to Freedom Podcast
Journey to Freedom serves as an exclusive extension of the Living Boldly with Purpose podcast series—a platform that inspires powerful transformation and growth. Journey freedom is a podcast hosted by Brian E. Arnold. The Journey to Freedom is an our best life blueprint exclusively designed for black men where we create a foundational freedom plan. There are five pillars: Identity, Trust, Finances, Health and Faith.
The Journey to Freedom Podcast
Reconciling with Truth: How Understanding God's Purpose Freed Me from America's Myths
When six-year-old Nate Arnold watched Governor George Wallace block Black students from entering Alabama State University in 1963, he asked God a question that would shape his entire life's journey: "Why did you make me a Negro?" Growing up in the segregated South during the civil rights movement, Nate experienced firsthand the terror and trauma of American racism, including the aftermath of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing just one month after that pivotal moment.
This powerful conversation traces Nate's path from religious disillusionment to authentic faith. Disillusioned by Christianity's complacency toward racial injustice, Nate embarked on a quest for truth that led him away from the church and deep into studies of African history, Kemetic traditions, and the untold stories of American history. His research culminated in his controversial first book, "Genocide Files," a novel about dismantling white supremacy that was banned in federal prisons.
The turning point in Nate's spiritual journey came through personal experiences that demonstrated God's presence in remarkable ways. After the 2008 financial crisis devastated his successful real estate business, Nate experienced what he can only describe as divine intervention when facing foreclosure on his $2.3 million home. Through prayer, fasting, and faith, he witnessed the impossible: the bank reduced his mortgage to just $315,000—a miracle that became the foundation for his renewed trust in God.
Nate's testimony reveals the critical distinction between God and how Christianity is practiced in America. His "My Story, His Glory" book series now helps others navigate this same territory, emphasizing that our journey to freedom begins with separating truth from the myths America has created about race and history. For Black men struggling to thrive in a system that seems stacked against them, Nate offers practical wisdom gained through his own experience: focus deeply on developing expertise in one area, use time efficiently, and build from a foundation of truth and relationship with God.
This conversation challenges listeners to examine the historical myths that shape our understanding of America and to find freedom through embracing truth, even when it's uncomfortable. What myths might you need to unpack in your own journey toward authentic faith and freedom?
Coming back into it, I had to learn that there's a difference between God and Christianity where it's practiced in this country. Understanding that difference is what helped me to reconcile, both with God and with myself, the dissonance I experienced.
Speaker 2:Okay, welcome to another edition of the Journey to Freedom Podcast. I'm Dr B, I'm your host. That is the excitement today. One, because when you think of last names, there can only be so many last names in the world that are the best last name ever. So my last name has to be Arnold, and so does my guest, and so maybe we'll get to talk about where that came from at some point in our conversation. But you know, I was born here in Denver, Colorado. He was born out in Mobile.
Speaker 1:Alabama, alabama South.
Speaker 2:He was born out in Mobile, alabama, south, and so three weeks ago I went to, I took a, I did a what do you call it? A civil rights victory tour? I took 18 black men and we started out in Birmingham.
Speaker 2:And we learned all about Birmingham and you know we were at the 16th Street Church and we went on a tour and then we had a lady named Janice Kelty who was part of the children marchers that were part of that time and she got to talk about her experience there and then we went to as soon as we finished that night and the tour, we did a whole bunch of stuff about story with our group there and then we went over to Selma and then we went over to the bridge in Selma.
Speaker 2:Then we went over to Selma, we went to the AME church there and we walked from the bridge to the church to kind of get a feel for what that looks like. And then the next day, on Sunday, we decided to drive down to the Equal Justice Museum in Montgomery and then so I don't know if you've been to that one yet, but if you ever get the opportunity to that one yet, but if you ever get the opportunity, oh, my lord, I've been to the. You know the african american history museum in dc, uh, which is phenomenal, and you kind of start at the top and work your way down, uh. But there's just something different about the. You know brian stevenson and his lynching focus the african-american slave trade and segregation and mass incarceration and whoo, all those, all the things that you just kind of get yourself angry. But you know you're supposed to be there, you know that you need to find out who the shoulders of the Giants that were standing on, and so it was. It was awesome so we didn't make it down to Mobile.
Speaker 2:You know, someday, you know, I think I may make it down there. I don't know. I've only been to Alabama twice. Both were these tours. I felt like maybe you can test this Nate is. I felt like I was back in 1970. It's like, oh my God. I talked to a waiter there that was serving us and we were just talking about how tough it is and how many people don't come to the restaurant and that kind of stuff. I asked him how much he was making an hour. I said Mike, can you tell me how much you make an hour to work here at this restaurant? He said, and he was in his 30s, so it wasn't like he was a young kid doing it. He said he makes $2.15 an hour.
Speaker 1:I said it's $2.55.
Speaker 2:It's $25. He goes yes, I know, this is what they pay us $2. Then I make tips, but the tips aren't a lot because there's not a lot of customers coming in here. I'm thinking to myself that's like $90 for a 40-hour week. That is just oh my gosh. Then you think in a a month that's less than $400 a month. I know it costs the greatest in 25 cents in Alabama. Wow, how are you doing that, oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:And so you know I started thinking about. You know, hey, what is the journey to freedom all about and how do we help people? And you know, last year I was able to interview over 105 Black successful men. You know, last year I was able to interview over 105 black successful men. You know, this year we're about 45. I'm going to get to another 100. And hopefully over the next 10 years we'll get to 1,000.
Speaker 2:And just figure out what it is that we need to do to change our circumstances in some way. What's so neat is when I think about successfully including the people that I get to talk to, the different things that they've done, and opportunity has been the key. Everybody that has been successful has found some way to take advantage of opportunities that have been given to them and I think of so many people like this gentleman that's in Birmingham and what are his opportunities, what are the opportunities that he has and where he's at. And so I thank you for being on, nate, I thank you for spending the time with us. I know, for those of you watching, I've asked Nate to tell his story and then we're going to talk a little chop it up later with the, you know, with our pillars and his book and all the wonderful things that he's doing to maintain this successfulness. But I really just want to kind of start out with your story and who you are.
Speaker 1:Well, it's a pleasure to be here and I am so delighted just to have you on. I'd like to just open up with a word of prayer, though, if that's okay, absolutely, and to tell my journey. My father, our father and our God. We just thank you, lord, for this opportunity. I thank you for Dr B Lord for his vision. I thank you that we are able to connect right now. Pray that you will be in the midst of us and that all those who hear this will benefit and we ourselves will grow together. Lord, god, grow closer to you. We thank you, we praise you In Jesus' name. Amen, amen.
Speaker 1:I think I love your process, the questions you give me, and the reason I do is because it fits right into my story. The name of my book is a series and it's my story, his glory, and I chronicle my experiences from Mobile, from my birth, mobile, alabama, in late 1950. To my transportation here to my matriculation into the metropolitan DC area. I just start where my book starts, my first book. And I was brought up in a religious family. Our background was Baptist, southern Baptist. My mother was the daughter of a. She was a PK preacher's kid, and so we grew up. I grew up in a segregated South Brian. I grew up in the heart and you just mentioned it because you talked about your tour through Alabama.
Speaker 1:I grew up in the heart of a segregated South and in the midst of the civil rights movement. So it was very real to me of the civil rights movement. So it was very real to me. My religious experience was very real because of my immediate family. But then, because of the environment that I was in in Alabama, I thought we were the center of the universe. As a child, I was only like six or seven years old. A child, I was only like six or seven years old.
Speaker 1:But one incident really channeled my life's direction and that was August day in 1963. I was at home watching television I was not quite seven years old and Governor George Wallace many of you may not know who he was, but he was the governor of Alabama and he had been inaugurated earlier that year and his motto was segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. And in August of 1963, he stood in the doorway of Alabama State University and refused to allow two people that looked like me and Wallace was a man of authority. I didn't understand quite why the situation. Then, immediately from that, a commercial came on a commercial break and that commercial break showed a white woman with long flowing hair, twirling it from side to side. And as a six-year-old I looked at that and I saw the juxtaposition of American beauty, what America considered as beautiful, and I looked at what the disdain they had for people that looked like me. And so, brian, I asked God a simple seven-word question why did you make me a Negro? Why did you make me a Negro? And God has answered that question for me, as I have written these books.
Speaker 1:And so conflicted, as I was not understanding and not really able to articulate what I was feeling, because I had an unsavory mix of emotions I felt anger, I was shamed, I was intimidated, I was terrorized and a whole bunch of other stuff. I was intimidated, I was terrorized and a whole bunch of other stuff. And only a month later it's funny that you mentioned a month later we had the 16th Baptist Street bombing, wow. And so the terror that I felt, the trauma that I felt, just continued to grow and the questions that I felt. And so my life became a journey to help me understand, to help me understand exactly what was going on.
Speaker 1:Can you hear me? I can hear you. Great, I'm sorry. So you're good. So to help me understand what was going on in America and why it was going on, and so I began to study to figure out. I began to I actually went and majored in psychology later in school but my whole life began to revolve around the conflict that I saw in America and to find resolution to it, and so that's how I got started with writing. My very first book was called Genocide Files, and it was a fictional novel talking about the problem that we were having in this country and what I considered at that time a resolution to the abuse I saw happening to Black men, to African American men. You still there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm still here. I don't know if you had a question or oh, no, I was just listening, right, right. So I wrote a book in 1997 after I watched the Rodney King's beating and his subsequent exoneration of the police officer that had done that, and I wondered what would it take to stop police brutality in the African American community. And so I wrote this book called the Genocide Files. And the Genocide Files was a fictional novel and it talked about a group, a secret group that was called Triangle. Now, this was a fictional group, but it was black men and women on the continent of North America, south America and Africa, and they came together for the sole purpose of turning over the system of white supremacy in the country and in the world. And the group was called Triangle, and so my fictional hero was Matthew Peterson and Awanake Briscoe, and they were members. They didn't know each other, but they became members of this group.
Speaker 1:And so that was my first, and in order for me to do that book, I had to read, I guess, over 40, close to 45 books on African history, kemet history, kemetic history, american history that we are never taught in our schools, in our American schools, and I developed basically the premise of how it could be done, and the book received a lot of accolades. In fact I actually had someone that wanted to buy the rights to make a movie. It was also banned in the federal prison system because of the content, but it also used the teeth in certain universities on the West Coast, and so it was a book that kind of introduced me in a unique way to the African-American struggle in this country. Along the way I met some authors that had been involved in the struggle as well Anthony Browder, dr Ivan Van Sertema, who had written several similar works on pre-colonial Africans in the Western hemisphere.
Speaker 1:I met Dr Francis Welsing and was on a podium. So it was a very interesting, very beneficial experience for me to learn these things. I was not necessarily, I was not practicing Christianity at that time, and so I was doing these things apart from the church, but then later I actually came back to the church, to the Seventh-day Adventist church, and became an active elder in the church, and it was there that I picked up my writing tradition again, and that's where I began to write the books that I'm writing now, the series, my Story.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's cool. All right, so you're doing my story, His Glory, and I guess, from switching over, I mean, were you angry. I'm trying to think about identity now and the identity that you had. You write a book, like you know what's it called? The Genocide.
Speaker 1:The Genocide Files.
Speaker 2:right, like you know, the genocide files right, how do you write that book and not be angry with all the research you're doing and all the things, and how does that not affect your spirit and everything else, because you're really looking deep into how people have been mistreated, right?
Speaker 1:Oh, yes, definitely.
Speaker 1:Well, the initial reaction I had was, of course, that I had been lied to.
Speaker 1:Ok, and that's very offensive for me for a person to lie to me and then to do it repeatedly.
Speaker 1:So the learning, the learning that I was going through, made me turn away from really American culture, and from Christian culture as well, because a lot of the dissonance that I had was because of the way Christianity responded to how African Americans were treated in this country, and so it was a natural it's kind of like a natural step for me to throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak, and so trying to reconcile what I had learned as a child about a loving God a loving God that would tolerate such mistreatment of people that he made for me was something I could not digest, and Christianity was also a part of that situation, and so I had to, and that's one of the things that drove me away from the Christian faith, and so, coming back into it, I had to learn that there's a difference between God and Christianity, the way it's practiced in this country, and understanding that difference is what helped me to reconcile, both with God and with myself, the dissonance I experienced and to put in proper context, america as a country.
Speaker 2:Wow, wow, as I think through what that means in your identity, and so maybe kind of talk to me a little bit. Let's even go backwards before that, because I kind of want to know how you became the person that would write this book. So you were born in the South, he's up. When you were nine years old, right, and you said your grandfather was a. Baptist minister so he's in the thick of things. Was he in Mobile as well?
Speaker 1:Yes, we all grew up.
Speaker 2:How did you grow up? Because he's in the thick of. Hey, we are fighting for every inch of space, that rights that we can possibly get, and you're in the middle of this and you're watching this. How does being around your family and everything shape the identity that you need to write this?
Speaker 1:book Right. Well, my grandfather, by this time, was an invalid. He had had diabetes and so his leg was cut off and he was aging. But there was a lot of anger and distrust and actually fear in the South. A lot of people like we talked about the bombing, the 63 bombing, the racial brutality, the dogs and the police officers, the racial brutality, the dogs and the police officers. That created a lot of fear. It was basically American terrorism?
Speaker 2:Of course it was.
Speaker 1:And so we grew up, and one of the reasons why I think my mom actually left the South was to seek more opportunity, to seek a more amenable place to let her children grow up, and because, you know, alabama is, to this day, still Alabama, as you mentioned, the red state and not much has changed.
Speaker 1:Honestly, man, in Alabama and, for that matter, the South, we see that with the election of Donald Trump, the issue of racism has never really been dealt with in this country. The issue of white supremacy has never been dealt with by the majority population here. It it's affected African-Americans, black people, adversely as well, because we don't really understand the dynamics of it ourselves. We look at it as something on the surface, but it's not. It's not Brian, it is entrenched, it is part of our culture, it is a scaffolding that holds up Western culture, it is in everything that we do, it is in our school books, it is in our DNA, so to speak, because we have to understand these things in order to free ourselves from them, and we understand. We need to understand also how God looks at these things and what his plans are, because we can't do anything without him.
Speaker 2:So when I think about, like one of the pillars that we talk about for black men, being able to move forward and to know where we came from, so then we can move forward, uh, is is an issue of trust, and I think we struggle with trusting ourselves many times. I think we struggle with trusting each other. I think we trust we have a trouble trusting our not our moms, but the other women that are part of our life, and we have an issue trusting white society or beyond us. How did you reconcile being able after writing this book, or why the process of being able to trust, because you said this was even before your relationship with Christianity in a big way, how were you able to trust others, or did you not trust anybody and they had to prove themselves before you could?
Speaker 1:I looked at your five pillars and I'm gonna kind of use those to answer that question.
Speaker 2:All right, I love it.
Speaker 1:You asked about the pillars and I had my own pillar. Okay, okay, and I think it really begins with this one, and that is truth. Okay, christ told us that he wants to be worshipped. God wants to be worshipped in spirit and in truth. Ok, and we cannot do anything, or anything that we will do Apart from truth Will lead us down the wrong path. So first we have to discover what truth is. I'm not talking about my truth or your truth, that's not truth, okay, no, there's only one truth, and so we need to understand what that truth is, what God has shown us.
Speaker 1:The narrow path, the narrow way, because if you look at what happened in this country, in America and, for that matter, the world, they took us from our land, they took us from our homes, they stripped us of our names, of our identity, so we really don't even know who we are as a culture, as a people, so we don't know our cultural heritage, and subsequently we are sort of like bouncing back and forth.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I talk about in my book is that while we've been on these shores, we have been colored, we have been Negroes, we have been African-Americans, we have been Black, we we have been African Americans, we have been Black. We are still searching for our identity, you know. And so, unless we really understand truth, who we are in God's eyes, we'll always have issues with trust. We'll always have issues with trust. We'll always have issues with reconciliation with this country, because we are still unpacking the lies that they have been throwing at us, and the majority of African-Americans and for Americans that matter, brian believe in myths. We believe in things like manifest, destinyest Destiny, the Lost Cause of the South, and these things are inculcated into our very history books, and part of what I have had to do is to understand where the myths end and where the truth begins. And once you can reconcile that, you can begin to reconcile every other thing in your life.
Speaker 2:So at what point were you able to start reconciling that? Were you able to, you know, say, hey, I understand the truth. And now that I understand the truth, I can now begin to not only heal myself but be able to feed into others. Because when I think about being in purpose, I don't think you can be in purpose without serving others. Right, and you're an example of doing that as an elder in the church, when for you were you were, you had enough peace to be able to now begin to say I understand truth now.
Speaker 1:I understand these are myths. Now I can begin the healing process. That's a great question, brian, and it actually started when I began to trust God. That was the foundation for me, because I had turned my back on Christianity as a false religion. I had exposed myself to other religions New Age stuff, meditation, yoga. I looked at my friends who were in Islam and all of that. So I had explored other religions, and one thing that I noticed about all of those different things that I was studying they all had an antipathy toward the Bible and toward Christianity. So that kind of picked my interest.
Speaker 1:I remember reading a book called Meta-Nature. It was a book on ancient Egyptian mysticism, and some of the things that it said harkened me back to my younger days of understanding the Bible. And so, as I began to do more research and I began to pray, things in my life began, and my wife, by the way, and my mother were both praying for me, so prayer does work All right, and so things began to occur in my life. I was a successful businessman in real estate, making quite a bit of money, and then the great recession hit and everything dried up in real estate 2008. And so that forced me to begin to evaluate where I was in life At that point. I took another.
Speaker 1:I had a very similar experience. I had gone to church with my wife I hadn't planned on it and that same day I was supposed to be going to a Metta Nature meeting and they were going to have what was called a reading. And so I went to church that day and that was also, as I recall, it was a day in the summer and I remember the minister asking if anyone wanted to give their life to God, and I said you know what? This is? A bunch of foolishness. Really, this is what I'm saying. I'm there with my wife and I'm, like you know, I done been through this, I done been through this, I went through this.
Speaker 1:And then he said so at any rate, the whole congregation stood up. So I stood up and then he said now, if anybody wants to, you know, come up front and give their life to Christ. And I started praying. I said I asked God. I said God started talking to God and I said if you really want me to do this, you're going to have to. Let me know in no uncertain terms, let me know in no uncertain terms.
Speaker 1:And, brian, right at that instant somebody pushed me on. They didn't tap me on the arm, they hit me on the arm, okay. I opened my eyes and I looked around and there was nobody there. Nobody there, oh my gosh, nobody there. And so I went down and I gave and I stood up and, man, there was so many people crying because they knew my wife and my mother both went to that church and they knew that I was not thinking about church. You know what I'm saying. They would rarely see me and that was my turning back.
Speaker 1:And so, as I began to walk the walk of faith, god began to reveal things to me that just shored up my faith. Things began to happen to me that were just miracles, just miracles, and that was a large part of my growth. So for me, it was trust. One of the greatest things of trust building was my house that I live in now. We had built this house in. I bought the land in 2004, built my dream home, a $2 million house on the water in Fort Washington. When the market crashed, brian, business stopped. I went from making over a million dollars a year to making in 2009, I grossed $12,000.
Speaker 2:Oh, whoa, what business were you doing?
Speaker 1:that was Real estate. I was a real estate broker. I went from basically making 1% of my income from the couple of years prior and so my house went into foreclosure and at that point I began to just do what I could, you know, to stay afloat. I began to pray, go to church on a regular basis. I was doing that anyway, you know, paying returning tithes and all of that. And one day we got the foreclosure notice and we had gotten, I think up to that point, six foreclosure notices, but this was the one that was kind of. They wanted us to come to court. And so that week my mom one of my mom's friends from church, unbeknownst to me, came to my house and said we need to anoint your house. Okay, we anointed the house and we went over the whole three acres and I began to anoint the house during the process of stopping the foreclosure. So a couple of months went by and we finally would have our day in court.
Speaker 1:But that week my wife and I started fasting. We fasted for the whole week and that week we started fasting and I would normally anoint my house on Thursday and as we were fasting that week, we were going to go to court. On Friday I went out to anoint my house and I heard I was impressed by the Holy Spirit to anoint, to walk around my house seven times. This is my Jericho wall and you know, you wonder, man, am I hearing this? Is this the Holy Spirit talking to me or I'm just hearing this? But I was obedient. I anointed him out and walked around my house seven times anointing it and prayed.
Speaker 1:So the very next day we had to go to court, my wife and I. My wife took off she's a teacher and we went to court in French Orleans County. And when we got to the court, Brian, we were on time, but my attorney was late and Linda's attorney was late. So my wife and I went in and we talked to the judge, who actually was a retired judge, and he was very candid with us. He said that you know, we really don't have any authority to do anything. The bank is within their right to foreclose. The bank is within their right to foreclose. And he said but this will at least give you a chance to voice your opposition. And basically we're doing this because there's been such a backlog and such a groundswell of people losing their homes in this county that we had to do something and in my immediate neighborhood, of the 38 properties in my neighborhood, Bryan 24 had gone to foreclosure. Wow, Okay. So we were going to be, probably. We thought we'd be one in that same group.
Speaker 1:So we the attorney, my attorney we stepped out for a while and, you know, my wife and I, our attorney Brian, came in and we went into the judge's chamber. And then, while we were going to judge's chambers, the bank's attorney came in. She was young and she was completely green. We were her first case. Oh no, she had not even had a chance to unpack her bag from arriving at the train station. So none of this bode well for us.
Speaker 1:So we all sit down in the judge's chamber and we, you know, exchange hellos and all of that, and the judge calls the senior attorney for the bank on the phone, on the, on the on the phone, and puts her on the speaker. And so we again exchanged pleasantries and you know we prepared for the worst, my wife and I, an attorney, we looked at each other, we prepared for the worst. And so the attorney comes on and she's very pleasant on the speaker because she's a senior attorney and she's somewhere in the Midwest, I'm not sure exactly where she was at that point. So she says listen, Mr Arnold. She said you all have a beautiful house. Okay, so I thought she was setting us up for the fall. Brian, you know, yeah, you all have a beautiful home. And she says and we don't want to take your home, Okay. And I'm like, okay, right, I don't want you to take it either, In my mind's eye, because I used to work for the banks. Brian, okay, I'm saying right. And so she says Ms Arnold, how much do you think your home is worth?
Speaker 1:Now, I had been an appraiser, and I was an appraiser at that time, so I had a very good sense. But I also knew the market was completely upside down and so I didn't want to venture or guess, because I couldn't pay for it either way if it was, because I wasn't making the money. And so I asked if Brian and I could step out for a minute. So Brian and I stepped out. Uh, who was my attorney? My wife stayed in the, uh, in the in the room and Brian said Brian, what should we say man? Should we say a million dollars, 1.2, because it sure ain't worth the 2.3? He said. He said um, he said man. He said yeah, say maybe, say 1.2, a million, Maybe we can work with a million.
Speaker 1:So we went back into, we went back in Brian and I looked at Brian and he looked at me and I said we believe the house is worth about a million dollars and she immediately said, no, it's worth about a million dollars. And she immediately said no, it's not worth a million dollars. And I thought, okay, this is it, we've lost this, we've lost. She said I think your home is worth about 315 000. What? 315 000 line? I literally listen to what I'm saying. I literally fell back in the chair.
Speaker 1:$315,000 line I literally listen to what I'm saying. I literally fell back in the chair. Of course you did. I closed my eyes and I said look at God. So we went from owing $2.3 million to $315,000. Then she asked me and I was if you ever been in shock. You know what shock is. I was literally in shock. And she said to me she said is your interest rate okay? I couldn't say nothing, man. I couldn't even say nothing. All I could say was yes. So we walked away. She said well, we'll get you the paperwork showing the $315,000. And the only stipulation you have to do is make that payment for the next 12 months, isn't?
Speaker 2:that amazing Well, 315,. You're like $1,500. I don't even think it was $1,500,.
Speaker 1:Honestly, to be honest, oh my gosh. And so she said and truth to her word. We got the paperwork within about two weeks, we signed it and we made the payment For 12 months.
Speaker 2:Did it go back? Did you only go?
Speaker 1:315 from now on Only 315? No, it never goes back. No, no, 315, brother, that was it. So that was a major step for me in trusting God. Oh my, gosh.
Speaker 1:Because, god, because man, I'm going to tell you I talked to the. I had in the. In my run up to that time I had hired six different teams of attorneys and none of them had ever heard of anything like that. No, still haven't, still haven't, Still haven't, still haven't. So, yeah, we're still in our home and God has truly blessed us. So trust then became, I guess is the centerpiece for me of any relationship, and before we can have a relationship with anybody we've got to have that trust relationship with God, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh. Oh, so neat. One of the things that I would love to kind of unpack with you. When I think about becoming the person that God would have you be in order to do what he put you on this planet to do, and when I'm thinking about your books and the things that you're writing and his story, think about three things that I think give us fulfillment that God has allowed us to do. And the first thing is when we're learning something or we're creating something. I think we learn to create and spend our time there. And then the next thing would be, like love and relationships that you know allow us to connect with others that you're writing, do those three things, or how you see those three things appear in his story for us.
Speaker 1:A good point, paul tells us, the Bible tells us it is better to give than to receive, and that for most human beings is a very difficult thing to do because the way we are built and learning, but God practices that. It's been a beautiful thing for me, and so, in the process of writing my books and doing those things, to see people connect with what I've written and that in turn connects them to me and to God. That's a beautiful thing because my experience has not been isolated. Many of us in this country have sought things that are not fulfilling, and having done that, having experienced that, I can tell people you can make all the money in the world and you can still be unhappy, you can still be disconnected, because that was the case with me. I was spending so much time trying to make money to live the American dream until I understood how unfulfilling it was, and so being able to write and to help people to seek God is the highest thing that any one of us can do. It's the highest thing that any of us can do, and so that's been just a blessing to me to bring people out of the darkness into the light and share our experience of truth. Because if you look at what's going on in the country right now, man, they're trying to turn back the clock, not to 1950. They're trying to turn back the clock back to the antebellum, south bro.
Speaker 1:You know what I'm saying. I mean, if you really understand history, you look at Thomas Jefferson and the things that he believed and said and the things that he did, what this country was founded upon. Our journey to freedom begins with truth. We've got to unpack all of those lies and let people know no, this is what really happened. And we've got to do that in a way that people, especially we, can relate. You know, with Thomas Jefferson, we'd like to say Sally Hemings was his mistress. That's what the culture says. Sally Hemings was not his mistress, mistress, man, he raped her. He was 14 years old, he was 44. Okay, so once you begin to understand that we have to take back, we have to take back the narrative, we have to create the true narrative, we have to disseminate truth, it will make a lot of difference in our lives.
Speaker 2:I try to reconcile myself with this often lately is when I think about lack, fear. You know those words that I think are the precipice for a lot of the things that are happening, and I think of a God that I serve, that's a God of abundance and opportunity and plentifulness. I see so in our culture, in our community's eyes, that they're so fearful, like you said, about turning back the clock and going back to. I agree, I mean, I think that this is what they're trying to do. I don't know if it's possible for them to do it, because we've been educated.
Speaker 2:There's a whole lot of things that are way different than it was back when you pulled us out of Africa and the things that are going on, but it just seems like we spend so much time in fear. How do we not have this spirit of fear and lack? And you know, because I think that's where they're getting to right, because the whole DEI thing is about. Well, if we give you the jobs, then we don't have it.
Speaker 1:Right right.
Speaker 1:And I honestly, brian, think that's only a part of it, though, okay, I think that we also have to recognize that we are fighting an enemy yes, okay, and that enemy the Bible says in Ephesians 6, verses, I think, 10 through 18,. We're not fighting against flesh and blood, and so we have to understand there's also a greater conflict that we are part of, and actually, once we begin to understand that aspect of it too, we can understand that we have to really be on God's side. Now, on a very practical sense, europeans have always understood that by subjugating others, they can essentially live the life that they have desired, and Trump has pretty much said this. They can essentially live the life that they have desired, and Trump has pretty much said this. Okay, if you look at what he wrote, what is it? The five men that were arrested when he was in New York for raping a woman the Central Park Five we talked about in the Central Park Five. A woman to get the Central Park Five we talked about in the Central Park Five.
Speaker 1:And so we have to understand that this country was founded by a select group of men and they maintained white supremacy for themselves. Women could not vote, blacks could not vote. Native Americans could not vote. In fact, only the landed gentry could vote. So we've got to understand that this has all been predicated on greed and avarice, and so they've tried to keep the benefits that God has given us all for themselves, and to a large degree, they've done it very successfully, and so we need to understand that.
Speaker 1:And in fact, while we're on this topic, every time that blacks have created an environment where we thrive, they destroy it. You look at Tulsa, you look at Wilmington, you look at Rosewood, okay, and so there is no way to placate white supremacy? No, no, you can't, you can't, it just doesn't happen. So I think, again, we have to understand what God says, and that's what I talk about in my book, what God says about all of this, and he talks about it in Daniel and Revelation, and that's why I've titled my book my story, my second book, my Story, his Glory, decoding Daniel, revelation and America's Destiny, because we are part of America.
Speaker 2:And what so? What is that destiny that you're writing about that is going to you believe, is?
Speaker 1:happening. Well, based on our interpretation of Revelation, god is going to intervene, because only in that way will we receive justice, and it's not just going to be a justice for black people, it's going to be a justice for all people. If you look at the Civil War during Lincoln's time something that Abraham Lincoln, the president, said in his second inaugural address he talked about the cause of the war being slavery, and he talked about God's judgment for both the North and the South. The reason that the war was lasting so long and was so bloody was because God was enacting judgment upon this country, and in my book, I explain what that judgment looks like. Now, if you look at Revelation 14, it talks about three angels, and those three angels announced that one God is coming and that we are to leave, in the spiritual sense, babylon, and I elaborate on that in the book that I've written.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's cool. You know what? This has been a good conversation. I got so many things that are driving through my mind and I'm thinking as African-American men.
Speaker 1:And you can always have me on Brian again, don't worry.
Speaker 2:We are going to have another conversation, I promise you that who are trying to thrive and trying to get along and trying to have what America has promised and we feel that we've come short or we're not enough or that the cards are stacked against us. What do you tell those young men today that are saying I don't want to live anywhere else, but I just don't know how?
Speaker 1:to make it Right. That's a very good question and it's a very practical question, and what I have learned from my experience I have to go by my testimony is that one you have to be very careful about your associations and about your own weaknesses, and you have to be able to define those. You have to be able to listen to people, because a lot of times we are very subjective when it comes to ourselves. We want to do what we want to do when we want to do it, but in my case, I had a wife who was very practical, and so learning to listen to her also made me practical, if that makes sense. She was worried about how the bills got paid and I had to worry about them because she was worried about them, and so I began to just focus on where I was spending my time. I began to just focus on where I was spending my time, how I was utilizing my time.
Speaker 1:I'd like to tell folks an experience I had years ago. You know, time is valuable and I chose to use my time to become independent. I chose real estate, and one of the first things that happened to me was I became a real estate appraiser. I wasn't making much money, and but I went out on my own. I got a terrific story about that too, and so, in order to to utilize and to do appraisal, I had to give up watching football on Sunday Very practical for me, because Sunday was the day in which I would write up my appraisal reports. As much as I love football and the Washington football team they were called the Washington Redskins at the time I needed to take that time to write up those reports, and once I did, it became a habit, and so my time.
Speaker 1:I began to utilize my time in a much, much more efficient and effective way. So I found something that I enjoyed doing. I began to spend more time doing it, and that began to bring me in the kind of money that I needed to do, and from that I began to invest in real estate using the skill sets that I had developed, and subsequently that has been a blessing for me. So I think those are the practical steps. I had to learn first how to do what I was doing, and I had to take the time to learn it, become efficient at it and then stick with it. And I see one of the things that I see, brian, that really hurts people is they try to do five different things at one time. You can't do it man, you can't.
Speaker 1:You can't, you can't. I know people that want to be a notary public. They want to do a title, they want to do insurance, and I talk to people all the time doing different things. I'm like you got to focus, man. You got to focus on one thing, so none of it's going to make money for you, and that's what happens most of the time. So they don't utilize their time properly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, wow. One last question, and then I'm going to have you just kind of tell people how to get a hold of you. But when I think about the Black family and I think you know, as I'm doing stuff and researching, 50% of Black women that are over the age of 40 have never been married, and of that 50% of Black women that are over 40 that have never even married, 75% of them have at least one child. How do we bring back the family and the importance of it?
Speaker 1:Again, man, I think we have to first recognize that we are fighting an invisible enemy and that the things that we see in our world have been designed to be the way they are. You look at, I read a good article. There was a point where you had the men essentially working, one family, one income was allowable. It's not allowed. You can't make a living man anymore for one income and so you're driven for women to work outside of the home, and that's a larger part of where the economy is. And so these things we are looking at things that on a we can't fix things on the macro level, just on the micro level, if that makes sense. You know there are forces in our society that are really pulling us apart. You know what I'm saying?
Speaker 1:And again, those are the images that we see, the myths that are created. We look at the basketball players or the football players, and we see them making these great checks and all of that, but we never look at the fact that, even though they are making those great checks, most of them end up broke. The fact that, even though they are making those great checks, most of them end up broke. But yet the people who are writing the checks. They pass their wealth down from generation to generation. So there is a dissonance, a disconnect with that. We've got to learn. We've got to learn how this society works, and again, that's breaking down the myths and finding what is true, and that way we can build from that. But it all, but again, it all starts, and the only way you can do that is your relationship with God.
Speaker 2:Amen. Well, man, thank you for being part of this show today. Thank you for being vulnerable. You're telling your story. I think it can impact so many people. How do people get a hold of you or get to your books?
Speaker 1:These are my books. This is my first one, my story His Glory, and this is the newest one, my story His Glory, and this is the newest one.
Speaker 2:Okay, all right, gotcha.
Speaker 1:And they can go to my website, which is wwwhisglorypublishingcom. Hisglorypublishingcom. You can sign up for my free handouts and, of course, you can also purchase the books there. They'll take you to Amazon. You can purchase them there, and I will be looking forward to responding to all of the calls and emails that I get and continue to tell my story to God's glory, his glory.
Speaker 2:All right. So the book, His Story, my Glory.
Speaker 1:My Story, His Glory. My Story, His Glory. What was I thinking? My Story.
Speaker 2:His Glory is the name of the book, and I look forward to getting that book. I can't wait to read it. Please go to the website, Check out whatever it is, If there are any. You know people who are like. This was important to you that you got something out of our conversation today. Please go ahead and subscribe. There's many more to it. Share this episode with somebody that you know that it can impact, that it can help. It's been a privilege, Nate, to have you on the podcast today. I can't wait. We are not done, so we are going to have another conversation. Great, Look forward to it, Because there's just so much to unpack that I can't wait to have the conversation about. I want to find out how you went into business for yourself and all those wonderful things that are part of your story and his story. Amen.
Speaker 1:Thank you, brian, thank you, thank you, glad you had me on.
Speaker 2:We love you, if you allow us to, and we will look forward to talking to you on the next podcast. Have a wonderful, just amazing day.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Thank you, great to be here. Great to be here.