What If Your Struggles Are The Key To Growth?

Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Keeping It Real on Purpose and I'm your host, Edna White. This is our series that we've been going through talking to people about real talk, about real growth. And I have the amazing guest who actually is named Joshua Jones. What if pain you've been running from was actually a path to your purpose? In this episode, we're going to talk with him. Man whose journey will shake you, stir you up, and inspire you from the depths of addiction, incarceration, and hopelessness. Whatever it may be, you may be inspired by Joshua. So, he knows how to survive, and he knows how to transform. Welcome to the show. Thanks. And I appreciate the opportunity to come and share with all your peeps. Like I I thought for a moment there I was like, "Man, you in my back pocket. What's going on?" You incarceration. I was like, "Oh, I wasn't planning on that one." But that's a good one, too. Yeah. Yeah. So, so tell us your story from darkness to light. Yeah. This is great. You know, obviously darkness emerging into light from the mother's womb. You know, I read in the scriptures this concept that I've been under attack since I was born. Okay. And when I look back in hindsight, I see that I've been under attack since I was born. You know, my parents were divorced. I grew up in this uh cath catholicism identity. And you know, they got together and had me. They got together in marriage because I was coming and and about a that lasted all of about a year and then they were departed and I began to and I was just sharing with my brothers on men's weekly and the podcast about the father wound and so it's really sensitive to me right now. Yeah. Yeah, this idea of of I was so wounded. I I went through this experience. I about the age of five, six, seven, somewhere around there. I really started to actually engage with my dad, but my mother was very adamantly against him and still had her own wounds that she hadn't healed from. And hey, no judgment, we've all got wounds. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And that's part of this that's part of this darkness to light. So, in this episode, I really just want to share the it's not just a cathartic thing to be able to tell the truth about it, but it's a very powerful thing to be able to expose all of the truth surrounding. Good word. Love it. Good word. Expose. I love it. I love it. Love it. Go ahead. I heard all these people talking about walking the light. Walk in the light. And they're doing all this in the dark. And is it okay if I Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. All this in the dark. And I'm like, man, that's hypocritical. So they would give me this advice here or try this here. I'm like, nah, I'm cool, bro. I'm gonna go do my own thing, right? And so I did. And about So the first time, and I'm just going to dive right into it. First time I had sex was I was eight. Wow. Yeah. I mean, male, female. Now, little did I know that that sprung from trauma I had endured several years before. Yeah. Being abused and having homosexual encounters as a six-year-old. Right. Yeah, like disturbing all together. I got you. We're gonna go in. We're gonna It's time to stick the kids in daycare because, you know, we got jobs to do. We got lives to do. And so I'm off in daycare before before Now we're talking grade school here, right? Yeah. Before all this kicks off, I'm going into this room. I'm sit down on a couch, a pull out couch with another boy door closed. And this is in the garage, mind you. Not like some big daycare center. Not that it don't happen there. Yeah. And I was told you guys lay down and play with each other. Now, we might perceive that as something else. We didn't know any better. But anyway, playing toys or whatever. You know, that's what you're thinking. Yeah. Yeah. But we wound up having this experience there that was what we would class as a homosexual experience. And it was very traumatic, but it wasn't in the time. Right. In the time of trauma, it's it's not as bad. It's it's once you once you move past it and it's the baggage that I had carried with me that's what led to my identity shift into oh I have to be promiscuous oh I have to prove myself and this sexual capacity and oh yeah of course that was just the one step right now we're into double digits you know my first my first birthday present in double digits was a 12-pack of condoms thanks to right you know hopefully he's listening with no explanation though. 12-pack with no explanation. With no explanation what it's for, how to do it, what? Nothing. Right. Just nothing. Nothing. Dip into it. Just, hey man, cover it up if you're going to get in it. And I'm like, did you realize your nose? Cover what up. And bless his heart. I love my dad dearly. And my mom, but it was like this experience was really traumatic. It was very dark. We got into lots of things and and I want to be in time in terms of time. I want to keep this as succinct as possible. So yes, this took me down the road of of well anger, rage. You know, a lot of fury was built up inside of me. And part of it was because I'd be corrected by my dad in a way that was furious. And so that really turned my identity. And inside I'm I'm a real compassionate guy. I mean, even from a young child when I would see people getting injured or being bullied or something, I'd be the guy that would step up in the middle and take it to the face. You know what I'm saying? Right. I was that guy. That's Were you the guy that also if you saw a turtle on the side of the road, stop, get the turtle, move the turtle out the way. Were you that you that I was more of a swerver but yeah I wasn't uh you know I wasn't too much like my dad he didn't have his dad around so he had like he literally didn't have his dad so he had no example other than um you know his mother and and the male examples he had were horrible. So anyway I digress. I got to this point where I'm into high school and like I'm promiscuous to the max. I'm all into drugs all over the place. You know I'm selling drugs. I I'm doing good in school. I was smoking at school until I got into my last two years of high school. You usually do. And I was like, you do. I'm done. You know, I'm gonna go play my game. I'm gonna go enjoy myself. And so I did. And so I I found myself going down rabbit holes of darkness like, yes, virtual worlds and video games and of course tons and tons and tons of pornography, right? I think when I was 14, I was stuck in a place and this is just raw, but yeah. Yeah. And I was masturbating somewhere between 10 and 14 times a day. It was just it was constant. It was always there. It was like I was enshrouded with darkness. Yeah. And I saw no way out. So this took me So about 13 to 20 I lived as an atheist. You know, I said I thought enough of this I don't want nothing to do with it. Religion is BS. You get tired. Yeah. I'm tired of it. I don't even want to hear it. So I just walked away. And it was probably one of the best decisions I ever made because it framed up the step from darkness into light. Now I did walk all the way into the darkness there. Yeah. Started stripping, you know, I got out of the army. So I did my whole stint in the army as a as an atheist if you can imagine. Didn't work out well for anybody. But I had this experience. I I had been stripping when I got out. I was doing sales and marketing. I was I was taking an entrepreneurship journey. And so this was all around now 2000. 2000 comes in January. I had my little come to Jesus meeting like for real mine. Mine him and me not some other person. But it did take not that religious stuff but yeah my heart started to crack open that dark like there is some light available now. So I I went up to the altar call. I heard that message. It pulled on me. I came up. I said yeah I give my life to Christ. for the next 10 years I go and I got married after the fact which was great wonderful had two kids still addicted to drugs and alcohol still addicted to porn so and my my ex-wife knew all about this of course that that one step began a journey into light and I began to realize now I'm talking 25 years in hindsight at this point it's not one step nope it's a whole race and I'm still running it today So I'm like I walk all in the light, but most of what I do is all about radical truthtelling. All the work I do inside of consulting, inside of coaching, inside of facilitating these fellowship experiences that we do and have been doing for the last year and a half, that's all about radical truthtelling, right? And the the last step that I found that was so key was where I was at in that dark space. It was it was escape from judgment. Oh, that's good. Man's judgment. That's good. Man, they sit here and they don't like the way I speak. them. They don't like the way I look. The hell with them. I I just at this point I don't care. But then it ruled my life. Yeah. And so everything was trying to match up somebody else's expectation and of course not having a great example of a father. I didn't understand what it meant to have a relationship with a heavenly father who I can't even see. Yeah. So everything was perverted. And it took me going through a divorce, getting remarried, having ali I was alienated from my my first two children for 10 years, sis. 10 years. She they were they were told all kinds of lies about me. Mhm. Now, some of it was, you know, had some truth to it, but you know how the enemy do almost give you a little bit of truth and then pervert it. Yeah. Twist it. Yep. Manipulate you. And so I began to reflect. And so I went on this journey, this race for 22 years, got married again, had two more kids, and still 2023, January 1. 23 years later. Wow. I had another come to Jesus meeting. Yeah. But this time I was in the middle of my pity party. At that point I was drinking probably a six-pack a night. And we're not talking about no Bud Light Kors Light. We're talking about some 9 10% IPA. We ain't playing around over here. No. I mean I was blowing down blunts like nobody's business. Yeah. And I even though I had gotten away from all the harder stuff I had been exposed to, there were still things that were happening. So the way I reflected on it, it was like open heart surgery, right? Like something needs repaired. Okay, let's open it all up, right? And we would clean like this little piece and that little piece and then all right, let's close it back up. Mhm. And the infection would come back. Like I got to do it again. Yeah. Yeah. So you do it again. Open it all up. What did we miss? Okay, there's another one. Close it back up. infection came back this time worse. So I began to understand something in this journey and that's why I use that term exposure anymore, right? You know, it's like how much exposure are you willing to endure? Yeah. How much exposure was I willing to walk in? And it took me all the way back to the concept in the garden that you read about in Genesis. You know, that time where Adam went himself, you know, covered everything up, blamed his wife, you know, it's like all these things. Yep. That was me. That was me right there. And so I knew like I wanted to get back to the place where I could walk naked and unashamed. Yeah. With my father. And that was my entrance into light. We had this little conversation January 1, 2023. Everybody's running their fireworks here. I live next to a military post. So you can imagine if if you get around your area ex that by like 10 maybe 20. It's everywhere. And so I'm crying. I'm weeping. I'm crying into my beer. Wow. And at at 12:15 it was like I died. Like all of a sudden the inside it was just blank. M and over the next 15 minutes it's like the father came and installed some kind of new software in me. And so at 12:30 I kind of came to and all of a sudden I hear you're a liar, you're a hypocrite and I got a special place prepared in the lake for you if you don't change now. And I was like yeah cool. I was so shocked because I thought, you know, running this race so long and seeing the hypocrisy in others and I couldn't see it in my own self. But he broke through and he said, "Hey, listen. Let's just start telling the truth." Right? Whether you know, some truth is hard to hear, some truth is hard to tell. Oh, yeah. But the fact of the matter is, man, like if if I'm going to walk in the truth, I got to walk all of it in the truth. And so then phrases like crucifying the flesh and things I had heard before, they started to mean something different to me. So over the last three and and I will segue and say at that time I had gone on a 30-day fast. And I don't know if you're into fasting or anybody, you know, your listeners into fasting, don't jump into that junk like that. Don't go straight into no 30. I've been fasting for it's not something you can do just because everybody else does it or you heard to do it. It's not that. It's not exactly not at all. But it's a very useful tool if you can use it. It is. So I sat here see yourself quick and fast. Yeah. Real quick. And everybody else. So that that's the thing I didn't understand is I still had anger on the inside of me. I still had those wounds where I hadn't hadn't really parsed it out. So, I go on this 30-day fast. I'm telling God, I'm like, "Listen, man. This this either works or it doesn't, right? You either deliver me or you don't. Like, I don't understand. Like, if you're not going to deliver me, just take me home, right? I'm good. I'm done." So, I was drinking black coffee and water. I got down to like 145 pounds. So emaciated. What I found out physically, I was bent over. It was like the demons on my back were just crushing me because there was nothing left of me. And my children were afraid of me. My wife was like, I'm we're done, right? We were we would go for stints without talking. I had my mother here. She was afraid of me. She wanted to leave. She'd be staying in our room crying at night. I It was so bad. And I'm sitting there going, man, and here we've done amazing things. I've seen God raise the dead, right? I've seen miraculous healings. I've been preaching for 15, 20 years. That's why I'm not surprised with some of these preachers getting exposed right now because they need to. They have a the ones that are called certainly they're going to have to have the full hope and heart surgery before they can really step into the power. So I'm like, "Okay, I get it. Well, I end this fast." So I go from Thanksgiving to Christmas. I come out of that. I wound up having a brother that was in the Marines call me. He's sitting on his wife's about to leave him. He's sitting on his excuse me, sitting on the bed at the hotel room with his gun in his hand about ready to take his life. Wow. And in that moment, the father let me speak to him and the next day it was like darkness to light. And I said, "Oh, is that why I was fasting? Is that what it was about?" And of course, my kids and my my wife and my mother, they're like, "Man, you are just an angry Like, we don't want nothing to do with you." And I thought for sure she was going to leave me. Sure enough, in hindsight, I come to find out after we started talking in 2023 about it, looking back, she was she they were getting ready to leave. I would have been in this house solo and it would have been a horrible end of the witness. So, she endured. Praise God. And we come to the last two years now that we've been we've been just sitting in this place of absolute raw truth. Mhm. I don't know if you've ever heard the statement like, "Hurt me with the truth all you want. Just don't comfort me with a lie." No, I have not heard that one. That's a new one. Yeah. I'd much rather be hurt with the truth anymore. Now, I always liked the idea of being comforted with a lie because people, you know, prop you up. The ego feels good. It's like, okay, great. Then I don't have to reflect on that. I don't have to get honest about that. We can just put that one back on the shelf, right? And it wasn't good. It wasn't good for the journey. So this is more of an iterative type of development process the father took me on knowing that it wasn't just that one time in 2020. It wasn't just going through that divorce and the revelation that took place there. It wasn't just this 2022 right um waking up waking up to the fact that everything was going to burn to the ground again. Mhm. It was the fact that there was there was a process of falling and I had been falling backwards at times and this so this would trap me back in darkness, right? And because I it was a comfort zone for me. It was all very comfortable to operate in darkness because like I said under attack since birth, it took this radical level of truth. And so I got around some other men that were willing to pursue this level of radical truth in their lives and openly declare where they have fallen short and okay and in a way that they could actually feel the emotion that they've been stuffing down for so long. I'm sure it's the same with you ladies. It's much easier to stuff it down. It sure is. Not deal with it and pretend that it's okay. My queen today, she still does it from time to time. I'm just I'm just on the point of my journey where it's like I just can't do it. I have to express it. I have got to express it and it's okay. Like I keep telling her like and she did. She finally told me the truth because in after we went through this and from 2022 into 2023, it was a radical transformation from her perspective and that was a very much a darkness to light story. And so I asked her in that I think it was March March or April of 2023. And I asked her, I'm like, "Babe, where are we at?" Like I feel so different. This is amazing. Like great. I feel like we're in a good place. How you feeling? She like one out of 10. I'm one of these guys. I need data. So give me some data. Yeah. We're at like 9 9.5 and we made it up to like 9.865 or something like that, right? And like I feel in my heart I'm like you playing with me now. You playing. Don't cover me with no lies here. And this year, for the first time, she got really honest with me. And I said, "Okay, give me give me the number. Give me the number." And she said, "Well, we're we're a solid seven." I was like, "Okay, that hurt." But that was the truth. Yeah. For the first time in our 10 years of marriage. Wow. And yeah, so I I sat in this place of just wanting to not just walk it myself, but then begin to share it. So we launched out in several different fellowship experiences. You know, we've been running Go Christ since 20 2008. Go Christ. Can you imagine? He he literally the father told me in one of our our latest come to Jesus meeting was you burn all of that down. Burn all of it down. Yeah. Whatever's left on the foundation, we'll build up from there. Right. I said, okay. It was hard, but we did it. Correct. Then we started up Men's Weekly because we found that, you know, some men, they have a hard time getting honest around women. Yeah. Honesty is difficult. Honesty is very difficult, especially when they got that father wound sitting there. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Like didn't have the greatest father wounds and mama drama. Mama. Oh my. I love that. I always tell my I tell my kids, save the drama for your mama. I don't want none of that. It's true. Yeah. If you were to say anything and sum everything that that story that you just told us up for our audience, what would it be? The truth. Tell the truth. Yeah. And it takes that radical honesty. Like just sit with yourself in it, right? And still the voices. So you might have to practice something like breathing and meditation in order to calm that quiet that mind down. So, I don't know about everybody I deal with, they've got mind games going, myself included. Right. Absolutely. Everybody does. Took getting it quiet just enough. Uhhuh. To just see what is the fruit in my life. Sense. Where am I really walking at? And it might be painful, but feel that. Yeah. It might be hurtful. You might be ashamed. You might feel guilt. You might feel fear. But on the other side of that exposure, the darkness has no power at all. No. So, as long as we're falling forward on the journey and not falling backward, good news. Yeah, it's good news. His grace is sufficient. Oh, that's great. That's great. Well, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, everyone in the world globally, you've heard it straight from Joshua Jones here. Real talk, real growth. I'm so ex inspired by you and I know that my audience is. We thank you for dropping in on keeping it real on purpose. Thanks so much, Joshua. My pleasure, Edna.