Hi everyone.
This is an exciting time for me. A few years back I was a Vietnam era homeless veteran living in the local skid row community. For those of you who are unfamiliar with a city's skid row community, allow me to bring you up to speed. The skid row community is a location where all the undesirables, who are considered cancer on the under belly of society lives. It is a place that is filled with death, disease, hopelessness, drugs, and despair. Surprisingly, it is also a place where many children of single mothers call home. This is the unspoken tragedy of skid row being a multi-million dollar business. Children are born there and many spend a great deal of their lives there.
I landed in the community in the summer of 2004 and it was the darkest and worse time of my life. Little did I know at the time of my wondering in the skid row-wilderness that the place would also turn out to be my miracle laboratory. For it was in this community that I began to create a new life for myself, along with a new mindset. It is said that it takes a homeless veteran anywhere from two to five years to completely break the cycle of homelessness and return to a life of sustainable independence/interdependence. The work I did on me and the strengthening of my faith and belief in myself, enabled me to leave that hell-hole eighteen months after I landed there with nothing but the clothes on my back and lint in my pocket.
Fast-forward to June 20010, and in less than three weeks I will walk across UCLA'S beautiful Royce Hall stage and receive my masters degree in education. Plus, I have the honor of giving the commencement speech for my graduating class. I am sharing this with all of you because I want those who think that its too late to make their dreams come true to read my short story. I am not a young man but that did not stop me from living from my desired end and doing the work to bring my new life into existence.
Now it is my purpose and mission in life to take my newly acquire skills, my resources network, and my empowering knowledge and help my brothers and sisters get for them what I want for myself. I am happy that I have a body of knowledge to share with others that highlights a set of principles that enabled me to go from being a little worm living in the ragged skid row community to being a master who now has the ability with a word from my mouth to transform others. This is a great moment. Only seventeen days to go.
Peace be upon everyone always and may Jah's prosperity flow to everyone
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