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MY DISCIPLESHIP
JOURNEY

IN 1999, I SPENT THE SPRING SEMESTER of my junior year of college interning for a TV and film production company and in the post-production office of a TV show that rhymes with “Schmawson’s Schmeek.” I was so hyped to go to Los Angeles, escape the bootleg Ithaca, New York, “spring” and be back in a real city (like Brooklyn) where I could get my party on for real. My mind danced with thoughts of seasoned food, good weed, and dope parties in real clubs (shoutout to “Club Semesters” in Ithaca for holding me down, but you weren’t enough). I was living in Los Angeles for the semester and had big dreams and aspirations, y’all! I was making seventy-five dollars a week, going to industry parties—and after meeting Nice & Smooth at the 1999 Soul Train Music awards you couldn’t tell me nothing! I was on track to graduate a semester early with a television and radio production degree and my goals were to network with enough industry big wigs to secure a job offer after graduation.

God changed my plans.

A family friend, who grew up in the same Brooklyn Baptist church that I did, lived and worked in Los Angeles, and I reached out to her as soon as I arrived with hopes that she could connect me with her industry friends. She was a successful film and television actress so I wasn’t sure if she would reach back, but she did, and not in the way that I’d hoped.

She reintroduced me to Jesus and saved my life.

Ariyan discipled me without me even knowing it. It started with her offering me rides to get groceries. (I didn’t have a car, and I can’t think of anything more Christlike than voluntarily driving through LA traffic.) The rides turned into lunches, and the lunches turned into her letting me tag along to industry events where I did my fair share of schmoozing. She was obviously very busy but made time for me. She introduced me to her industry friends and, if I asked, offered up advice about moving through the TV/film industry as a young Black woman. She told me that even though there was fierce competition for acting roles written for Black women, she prayed about the jobs that she would take and trusted God to direct her path. But most importantly, for that entire semester, I watched her sneakily model a Christlike life in front of me. Much of discipleship is caught not taught—and I was watching.

That spring, somehow, I got tickets to the Soul Train Music awards. Lauryn Hill took home four awards, and as we left the Shrine Auditorium the day seemed like it couldn’t get any better. But then it did. When I walked into the House of Blues afterparty and realized I was in the same room as Busta Rhymes and Whitney Houston, I nearly lost my mind! I set up shop at that open bar and commenced to dranking. Ariyan kept an eye on my underage ratchetry with no judgment. She just hit me with a lemme me know when you’re ready to go and stayed close while sipping a mocktail and talking to her industry buddies. She always said, “You can be a Christian in this business and still be a Christian in this business.” What I caught that night was that it was possible to be a Christian, have biblical convictions, and not be a weirdo. Ariyan had been on full merit scholarship for Alvin Ailey, Harkness Ballet, and Martha Graham but chose to share her gifts and talent as the director of the liturgical dance ministry at her local church. She chose to live as a woman set apart for God’s use, even though she had options to do otherwise. She was the same person at the awards show afterparty as she was on car rides to the grocery store. She never switched up. And I was taking it all in.

I also subconsciously compared her to the industry executives that I hoped would offer me a job at the end of my internship. Ariyan had ambition, but, unlike my peers, the industry wasn’t everything to her. It was everything to me. I’d be restocking my bosses’ mini fridges with Diet Cokes, daydreaming about how to get one of the scripts that I’d written for my screenwriting class into the right hands so I could be set for life. One day I was in the Carsey-Werner intern room watching reruns of A Different World when someone ran in and said, “Turn on the news! There’s been a shooting at a school!” This was back when school shootings were rare, so everything stopped while we learned about a place called Columbine in Colorado. It got real somber really quick and we interns were sent home early. As I wandered around Studio City that day, I began to think about my life. I remember thinking, These execs and show writers are everything that I want to be . . . but none of them have joy like Ariyan. Ariyan is the happiest person that I know out here! Earlier in the semester Ariyan invited me to a worship service at her church, but I didn’t go. She offered once or twice again but never pushed it. She just said to me, “If you ever want to come, let me know. Even if you’re out and it’s late, let me know and come through. I’ll leave a spare key in the flowerpot by the front door, and we can go together.” After the Columbine shooting, I finally said yes.

Because God has a sense of humor, the Saturday night before I’d planned to visit her church, I went out partying with some friends. We went to a bar and the night ended with my friend being arrested for public drunkenness (apparently that’s a crime in Pasadena). While we waited for him to be released, I started to think. It was about an hour drive back to our apartment complex in the valley and as we finally headed home, I began to think about my life again. You get real deep when you’re half drunk. I thought about the semester (which was almost over), the relationships and connections I’d made, and what I was going to do with my life. And then—Oh snap!! Church!! I thought, Just go home. You can go another Sunday. It’s been a crazy night. But as we got closer to LA, something shifted, and I told my friends to take me to Ariyan’s house. When they dropped me off, I found she’d left a key in the flowerpot by her front door so I could let myself in, just as she’d promised.

When I got in, I marveled at how she’d left Post-its all over the house with instructions on where I could find food, drink, and linens. I remember looking around, whispering a prayer of thanks, and then passing out on the pull-out bed. The next morning, I woke up to Ariyan cooking and playing CeCe Winans, and she was like, “You look awful, we’ll go to the second service.” And so we headed to church later, and for the first time in a long time, the Word of God penetrated my soul.

The pastor was named Kenneth C. Ulmer, and he preached a sermon called “The Wills on the Wheel” from Jeremiah 18. The premise of the sermon was that God’s will was to mold us like a potter shapes clay. In the pastor’s analogy, God was the potter (who had a will), we were the clay (who also had a will), and the potter’s wheel represented being in the will of God. No matter how marred the clay, or how good or bad it felt to be shaped by God, if the clay stayed on the wheel, it was in “good hands.” As he preached, I tried (with my hung-over self) to put myself in the sermon, but the only reference that I had for pottery was the scene from the movie Ghost with Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze. Not ideal, I know.

I tried to create a mental picture of what the pastor described and imagined myself as an amorphous, messed-up lump of clay in the corner of a pottery barn with God sitting next to an empty potter’s wheel nearby. If I followed the pastor’s metaphor, I knew I wasn’t on the wheel (or in God’s will) and I had no clue how to climb on. I was going to decide what to do with my life after that semester, not God. I was going to decide whether to live in NYC or LA after graduation, not God. I was going to decide what job I took or didn’t take, not God. So my question was, How does a messed-up lump of clay get up on God’s pottery wheel—how do I get in God’s hands? And for the first time, without answers, I began to personally wrestle with God’s Word for myself. I closed my eyes and began to pray. It’s a miracle that I didn’t doze off, but in that moment a song came to mind. It was a song that I’d heard many times as a child back in Brooklyn at Mt. Lebanon Baptist Church: “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder, we are climbing Jacob’s ladder, soldiers of the cross.” I began to cry because in that moment, the song seemed cruel. I knew myself, and I knew that in my own strength—even if I white-knuckled it and tried my best to be a “good Christian”—I could never get “high enough” to be in God’s will (or on the wheel). That was for Christians like Ariyan.

I wondered about where in the Bible that song came from and, as the sermon continued, I grabbed a pew Bible and searched for Jacob’s name. (I knew he was somewhere in Genesis.) Eventually I found the passage where Jacob dreams about a ladder that rests on earth and reaches all the way to heaven. I whispered to myself, “Oh snap. Jesus is the ladder! Jesus is how we get to God!” I probably sounded crazy to the people in my pew, but for the first time in my life, I began to understand why the gospel was good news.

At the close of the sermon, I did a super dramatic gospel stage-play slow walk to the front of the church, and I flung myself on the altar to rededicate my life to Christ. I could barely see through my tears. I flushed all my weed down the toilet, and, by the end of that semester, I was catching multiple buses from the valley to Inglewood for midweek Bible...