Kelvin's Story
Photo by Bryant Taylor
Growing up, I had good parents who loved both my brother and me. My mother has always been a praying lady, but God was never pushed on us. We went to church about two times a year, mostly around Christmas and Easter. I grew up in the inner city of Cleveland, on the east side of town. It wasn’t the worst of neighborhoods, but it wasn’t the best. There were some bad elements in my neighborhood--gangs, drugs, and violence.
When I was around twelve, I lost one of my friends to the violence of the streets. He wasn’t a bad guy--he was actually a good guy. He wasn’t in a gang, but he hung around them because most of us knew each other.
One Halloween night, some guys from another neighborhood tried to start a fight and pulled out guns. My friend ran to someone’s house looking for help, but the lady who lived there had recently been robbed, and as he banged on the door, she came out shooting. My friend tried to run, but she shot him in the head and he died. After he died it kind of gave me a mindset like, “we all gonna die so what’s the purpose?” That, along with the music I listened to made me think, “I’m not gonna make it past eighteen.”
I was never the big trouble maker. I may have busted bottles in the streets and threw them at houses from time to time. I may have shot out a couple of windows with BB guns, but I wasn’t doing those things all the time. I still had my father at home and he didn’t play that. If he had found out, I might not be alive to tell my story...lol! I was just a kid who didn’t know what life was or what I should be seeking to do in life.
In the late 80’s early 90’s, when I was about fourteen, many of the guys in my neighborhood began to sell crack cocaine. Some of the bigger dealers were people I knew, so I always had access to get drugs to sell. I would look at them buying cars, having money and I wanted that. Both my mother and father worked, but it seemed like they slaved and worked real hard for the money. I saw these guys go out for a few hours and come back with pockets full of money and that drew me in.
I thought it was cool and I started trying to sell drugs. I had a couple of drug deals going on at the same time. I sold with some of my friends from my street (we didn’t really know what we were doing), but I also knew guys who had been selling for awhile and I rolled with a couple of them. They showed me how to rock up the cocaine and how to look for people who used drugs. I wasn’t a big time drug dealer, but everyone who deals drugs or are in gangs is a detriment to the community. But even then God was keeping me.
One night a lady who was real close to my family found out that I was dealing drugs. She called my house and told my mother, who pleaded with me to stop. I told her I would, but I didn’t stop right away. It seemed like every time I worked my way up the ladder something would happen and I would get knocked back down to square one. Friends’ mothers would find the money or a few hundred dollars worth of cocaine would get dropped. The last straw for me was when a guy I called my cousin, had some of our drugs in his mother’s house and she found them. She flushed all the dope; over a thousand dollars worth. I just said forget this mess. I took the little money I had and got out.
Around that time, God blessed my parents and we moved to a better part of town. It was funny because until we moved, I always thought that I would live and die in that neighborhood. I never thought about my future. In high school, I was getting almost straight F’s with a few D’s. I never did work in school, but when we moved, I started thinking about what I wanted to do with my future. I went from “F” Roll to Merit Roll. I begin to get more positive with life. I graduated high school only a year behind, but I did graduate by the grace of God. A few years passed and I wasn’t dealing drugs any more.
During this time a lady I call my Aunt Wadeoline invited me to church. When she first invited me and some other people, I think she was just tired of us in her father’s house late at night watching Def Comedy Jams. We were laughing and so loud that one night she said, “You all need to come to church with me,” and I said, “Cool. When and where?” She said, “Saturday” and I said, “Saturday, man what kind of a cult is that?” I had never heard about the Sabbath or Seventh Day Adventists, but I started attending the Southeast SDA church in Cleveland, Ohio. This was in ‘95 and at the end of that year I stood up to be baptized. I think I made that choice because it seemed like a good thing, but I still wasn’t converted. I hadn’t had that road to Damascus experience. I was just playing church.
I never used cocaine, marijuana or pills, but I drank a lot of beer, alcohol and champagne. For a few years I was a borderline alcoholic. I would come to church some days with a hangover from Friday night. My aunt would ask, “Boy, what’s wrong with you? Are you drunk?” But she never condemned me.
I would wake up in the mornings and one of my boys and I would get a couple of six packs of beer just to start the day. We would just drink throughout the day. I wasted a lot of money doing that. In hindsight, you realize sin is just a big waste--a waste of time, money and life. It just wastes everything, but God had started working on my heart before I even knew it.
After drinking for awhile, I started waking up each morning with heartburn. I began to think, “There’s got to be something better than this.” I didn’t know it then, but God was taking the taste of alcohol out of my system. Before I knew it, God took that demon out of my life, but this was before I had ever really sought God. Yes, I was baptized in the church, but I didn’t know God. I just said yeah to the vows-- couldn’t even tell you what I said yeah to, but God was moving in my life.
Although my family had moved to a better neighborhood, the potential to sell drugs resurfaced. I was preparing to sell drugs with one of my friends, but he started telling everybody what we were about to do. He would call folks up on the phone and just start blabbing about it. That scared me because growing up, most of the folks I knew dealing drugs kept it from almost everybody. The most successful guys didn’t just blow their money on all the foolish stuff. They didn’t boast about what they were doing, so this was new for me and I backed away.
Some of the fellows I knew started selling drugs. I didn’t sell drugs, but I hung out with them. I began to hustle for money with some of them by rolling dice, playing cards and shooting pool. Many times I was cheating folks, people I called my friends. Looking back on it, I realize I was a bad person, maybe not the worst, but I was a bad person. This was part of my life. I would make a few hundred dollars a week just hustling for money and that was good enough for me.
During this time, I prayed to God to take all my illegal money from me whether it was from drugs or hustling, because I only wanted what God would provide for me. I always tell people to be careful about what you ask for because within a couple of months, I blew through a pretty good amount of money and had nothing to show for it. For the first time, I really didn’t have any money and it was hard. I thought, “Yeah, God is going to take the bad money and give me new money, good money.” But it didn’t happen that way.
That was in the spring of 1997. After a couple of months, I began to get stressed because I didn’t have anything and I was becoming frustrated. At that time, my brother was cutting hair and worked hard for his money. One day, someone robbed him while he was trying to buy a car. That was it for me. I knew who they were and I went to the house where the guy was staying, but he wasn’t there. My flesh told me to go in the house and do...well...let’s just say some very bad things.
I believe his grandmother and cousin were at home at the time. I had every intention of doing the most horrific thing I could think of because you don’t cross me or mine. I wanted him dead. But the Holy Spirit spoke to me and clearly said, “Kelvin, leave that lady alone. She didn’t do anything--they don’t have anything to do with his actions. After sitting outside his house for a few hours, I went back home. But I was still very agitated. I wanted his life so he or his folks would never think about starting some mess with my family ever again.
For the next few days, I rode around his neighborhood looking for him, but I will show you how God was watching over me. A couple of days after the robbery, he got arrested and went to jail. God was keeping me even when I didn’t recognize it. I was still sad because my brother had lost everything he worked hard for. I was even madder at myself because I couldn’t help him out. I was like, “Man I’m tired of this mess,” for lack of a better choice of words.
Now just at that time some of the guys who were dealing came into some big contacts. One guy told me, “Hey if you want to get back on, I can put you on” (meaning: get me all the drugs I needed to sell). I went home that day and I was in trouble because yes, Kelvin needed money, but I didn’t know what choice to make. See the devil knew that at one point in my life, money was my god. I sat down that day and began to pray my first earnest prayer, which became the first poem in my book entitled, ’’Whispering Cries.”
I started praying, “Oh Father tell me why, who sits on high, is it my life feels so empty that I wish I could die, I believe in your words and have faith, but sometimes seeing the false fruits of sin, I want a taste...” I was like, “huh man that rhymes,” and I started to write out my prayer. When I finished, it was enough for me not to want to go back out into that lifestyle or cause pain in other people’s lives. This was the beginning of my conversion and I began pouring my heart and life out on paper. Everything may not have been my own personal experience, but if it wasn’t mine, then it belonged to someone I knew or had been around.
God opened my eyes to show me that everything that glitters out there is not gold. He also showed me how he kept me from death. People tried to rob me at gun point and I was too stubborn to give up the coat. They squeezed the trigger, but the gun didn’t fire. I believe that Jesus took that bullet for me back on Calvary. There was another time some guys were trying to fight me. They pulled out knives and started swinging them at me. The knives caught my coat, but God spared me. I was riding in the car with a few pounds of marijuana and went speeding past a state trooper going 80 plus in a 60 mile zone. The cop never moved. The list could go on, but God showed me how He was always with me and on top of that, He had forgiven me.
I was blown away that a sovereign God could love a sinner like me, but I read passages like 1Timothy 1:15, where Paul says that Christ Jesus came in the world to save sinners of whom he was chief. I mean what kind of God would do something like that? The more I opened the word of God, the more real everything became to me. Reading passages like Mark 13, that describes the signs of the time and seeing some of these things around me, really put God into perspective for me. If God is real then that means the devil is real, too. I began to write more poetry trying to expose the street life for what it is. I tried to tell people that it’s not all some folks make it sound like and that there is a better life in Christ.
I wrote the poetry and I only shared it with my mother and my aunt Wadeoline. One day at A.Y. (Adventist Youth) time, the church that was supposed to bring the A.Y. program didn’t have anything prepared. My aunt went up to the A.Y. director and said, “My nephew has a poem he can recite” and I did it. When I finished, people from the other church said, “Baby, you need to let everyone hear this. Our young people need to hear this message.”
I didn’t do anything right away, but another woman in the church asked me if I had any more poetry. That woman was my sister in Christ and co-founder with me in Standing for Christ Ministries, Tracee Oglesby. I began to let her read it and she just kept trying to encourage me to share it with as many folks as I could, but I still didn’t do it--I just kept attending church.
I would go to church whenever it was open, but I never said much. I just sat back quietly and listened. One Wednesday night during prayer meeting, we were standing in a circle and a woman mentioned how I visited her when she was sick. People said, “Oh that’s nice,” and I thought that was the end of it. A few weeks later, Pastor Alfred Booker, then the pastor of Southeast (and is still my pastor to this day), was delivering the sermon. As he preached, Pastor Booker started shaking his head but continued to preach. A little while later, he shook his head again, as if to say, “No.”
Church was a little longer than usual this day because of a prayer service. Finally, Pastor Booker said, “God has been telling me to do something today and I kept saying no because in all my years of ministry, I’ve never done anything like this.” He said, “There is a young man here today who God has told me to anoint and I will not refuse the Holy Spirit again.”
He didn’t know me at the time, but he did what God called him to do. When he came down off the pulpit, my heart dropped and I thought, “He’s coming to me”, so I lowered my head. Pastor Booker said, “Young man what’s your name?” I was sitting next to my Aunt Wadeoline and she was like, “He’s talking to you.” I wouldn’t say anything so she said, “His name is Kelvin Bailey.” Pastor Booker told me to come forward and he called all the Elders around me and he laid hands on me. He said to me, “God has set you apart for His service.”
I still didn’t really understand what all that meant at the time, but people from my church began to say, “We heard what happened to you. God is going to use you in a mighty way.”
Pastor Booker asked to see some of my poetry and he read one of my poems entitled, “My World.” He asked if I could recite the poem at church. I need to say that Kelvin was not a ‘get up front’ person and is still not to this day. I don’t like it, but I do whatever God wants me to do to share the message. I did get up that Sabbath, closed my eyes and began to recite the poem. When I finished, almost the entire church was standing on their feet. They were clapping, giving me encouragement and telling me, “God has a calling for you.”
Tracee started scheduling places for me to recite poetry whether it was at a Youth Federation where I would recite my poem, “Trouble in the Church House”, or at drug rallies where I would read poems like, “My Eulogy”, “Whispering Cries”, “My World”, and many others. I began to allow God to use me to share a message of hope with others. My prayer to this day is that someone will be drawn closer to God as a result of the ministry.
In the near future, Standing for Christ Ministries plans to develop more outreach programs. We’ve slowed down a little, but God has once again reignited the fire. We understand that there are souls on the outside waiting to hear the message that God can save from the ‘gutter most to the uttermost’. Our desire is to open a community center one day, but very soon we want to start a mentoring program to help our young people. We know we can’t reach everybody, but our goal is to reach as many as we can as God sees fit.
When I was around twelve, I lost one of my friends to the violence of the streets. He wasn’t a bad guy--he was actually a good guy. He wasn’t in a gang, but he hung around them because most of us knew each other.
One Halloween night, some guys from another neighborhood tried to start a fight and pulled out guns. My friend ran to someone’s house looking for help, but the lady who lived there had recently been robbed, and as he banged on the door, she came out shooting. My friend tried to run, but she shot him in the head and he died. After he died it kind of gave me a mindset like, “we all gonna die so what’s the purpose?” That, along with the music I listened to made me think, “I’m not gonna make it past eighteen.”
I was never the big trouble maker. I may have busted bottles in the streets and threw them at houses from time to time. I may have shot out a couple of windows with BB guns, but I wasn’t doing those things all the time. I still had my father at home and he didn’t play that. If he had found out, I might not be alive to tell my story...lol! I was just a kid who didn’t know what life was or what I should be seeking to do in life.
In the late 80’s early 90’s, when I was about fourteen, many of the guys in my neighborhood began to sell crack cocaine. Some of the bigger dealers were people I knew, so I always had access to get drugs to sell. I would look at them buying cars, having money and I wanted that. Both my mother and father worked, but it seemed like they slaved and worked real hard for the money. I saw these guys go out for a few hours and come back with pockets full of money and that drew me in.
I thought it was cool and I started trying to sell drugs. I had a couple of drug deals going on at the same time. I sold with some of my friends from my street (we didn’t really know what we were doing), but I also knew guys who had been selling for awhile and I rolled with a couple of them. They showed me how to rock up the cocaine and how to look for people who used drugs. I wasn’t a big time drug dealer, but everyone who deals drugs or are in gangs is a detriment to the community. But even then God was keeping me.
One night a lady who was real close to my family found out that I was dealing drugs. She called my house and told my mother, who pleaded with me to stop. I told her I would, but I didn’t stop right away. It seemed like every time I worked my way up the ladder something would happen and I would get knocked back down to square one. Friends’ mothers would find the money or a few hundred dollars worth of cocaine would get dropped. The last straw for me was when a guy I called my cousin, had some of our drugs in his mother’s house and she found them. She flushed all the dope; over a thousand dollars worth. I just said forget this mess. I took the little money I had and got out.
Around that time, God blessed my parents and we moved to a better part of town. It was funny because until we moved, I always thought that I would live and die in that neighborhood. I never thought about my future. In high school, I was getting almost straight F’s with a few D’s. I never did work in school, but when we moved, I started thinking about what I wanted to do with my future. I went from “F” Roll to Merit Roll. I begin to get more positive with life. I graduated high school only a year behind, but I did graduate by the grace of God. A few years passed and I wasn’t dealing drugs any more.
During this time a lady I call my Aunt Wadeoline invited me to church. When she first invited me and some other people, I think she was just tired of us in her father’s house late at night watching Def Comedy Jams. We were laughing and so loud that one night she said, “You all need to come to church with me,” and I said, “Cool. When and where?” She said, “Saturday” and I said, “Saturday, man what kind of a cult is that?” I had never heard about the Sabbath or Seventh Day Adventists, but I started attending the Southeast SDA church in Cleveland, Ohio. This was in ‘95 and at the end of that year I stood up to be baptized. I think I made that choice because it seemed like a good thing, but I still wasn’t converted. I hadn’t had that road to Damascus experience. I was just playing church.
I never used cocaine, marijuana or pills, but I drank a lot of beer, alcohol and champagne. For a few years I was a borderline alcoholic. I would come to church some days with a hangover from Friday night. My aunt would ask, “Boy, what’s wrong with you? Are you drunk?” But she never condemned me.
I would wake up in the mornings and one of my boys and I would get a couple of six packs of beer just to start the day. We would just drink throughout the day. I wasted a lot of money doing that. In hindsight, you realize sin is just a big waste--a waste of time, money and life. It just wastes everything, but God had started working on my heart before I even knew it.
After drinking for awhile, I started waking up each morning with heartburn. I began to think, “There’s got to be something better than this.” I didn’t know it then, but God was taking the taste of alcohol out of my system. Before I knew it, God took that demon out of my life, but this was before I had ever really sought God. Yes, I was baptized in the church, but I didn’t know God. I just said yeah to the vows-- couldn’t even tell you what I said yeah to, but God was moving in my life.
Although my family had moved to a better neighborhood, the potential to sell drugs resurfaced. I was preparing to sell drugs with one of my friends, but he started telling everybody what we were about to do. He would call folks up on the phone and just start blabbing about it. That scared me because growing up, most of the folks I knew dealing drugs kept it from almost everybody. The most successful guys didn’t just blow their money on all the foolish stuff. They didn’t boast about what they were doing, so this was new for me and I backed away.
Some of the fellows I knew started selling drugs. I didn’t sell drugs, but I hung out with them. I began to hustle for money with some of them by rolling dice, playing cards and shooting pool. Many times I was cheating folks, people I called my friends. Looking back on it, I realize I was a bad person, maybe not the worst, but I was a bad person. This was part of my life. I would make a few hundred dollars a week just hustling for money and that was good enough for me.
During this time, I prayed to God to take all my illegal money from me whether it was from drugs or hustling, because I only wanted what God would provide for me. I always tell people to be careful about what you ask for because within a couple of months, I blew through a pretty good amount of money and had nothing to show for it. For the first time, I really didn’t have any money and it was hard. I thought, “Yeah, God is going to take the bad money and give me new money, good money.” But it didn’t happen that way.
That was in the spring of 1997. After a couple of months, I began to get stressed because I didn’t have anything and I was becoming frustrated. At that time, my brother was cutting hair and worked hard for his money. One day, someone robbed him while he was trying to buy a car. That was it for me. I knew who they were and I went to the house where the guy was staying, but he wasn’t there. My flesh told me to go in the house and do...well...let’s just say some very bad things.
I believe his grandmother and cousin were at home at the time. I had every intention of doing the most horrific thing I could think of because you don’t cross me or mine. I wanted him dead. But the Holy Spirit spoke to me and clearly said, “Kelvin, leave that lady alone. She didn’t do anything--they don’t have anything to do with his actions. After sitting outside his house for a few hours, I went back home. But I was still very agitated. I wanted his life so he or his folks would never think about starting some mess with my family ever again.
For the next few days, I rode around his neighborhood looking for him, but I will show you how God was watching over me. A couple of days after the robbery, he got arrested and went to jail. God was keeping me even when I didn’t recognize it. I was still sad because my brother had lost everything he worked hard for. I was even madder at myself because I couldn’t help him out. I was like, “Man I’m tired of this mess,” for lack of a better choice of words.
Now just at that time some of the guys who were dealing came into some big contacts. One guy told me, “Hey if you want to get back on, I can put you on” (meaning: get me all the drugs I needed to sell). I went home that day and I was in trouble because yes, Kelvin needed money, but I didn’t know what choice to make. See the devil knew that at one point in my life, money was my god. I sat down that day and began to pray my first earnest prayer, which became the first poem in my book entitled, ’’Whispering Cries.”
I started praying, “Oh Father tell me why, who sits on high, is it my life feels so empty that I wish I could die, I believe in your words and have faith, but sometimes seeing the false fruits of sin, I want a taste...” I was like, “huh man that rhymes,” and I started to write out my prayer. When I finished, it was enough for me not to want to go back out into that lifestyle or cause pain in other people’s lives. This was the beginning of my conversion and I began pouring my heart and life out on paper. Everything may not have been my own personal experience, but if it wasn’t mine, then it belonged to someone I knew or had been around.
God opened my eyes to show me that everything that glitters out there is not gold. He also showed me how he kept me from death. People tried to rob me at gun point and I was too stubborn to give up the coat. They squeezed the trigger, but the gun didn’t fire. I believe that Jesus took that bullet for me back on Calvary. There was another time some guys were trying to fight me. They pulled out knives and started swinging them at me. The knives caught my coat, but God spared me. I was riding in the car with a few pounds of marijuana and went speeding past a state trooper going 80 plus in a 60 mile zone. The cop never moved. The list could go on, but God showed me how He was always with me and on top of that, He had forgiven me.
I was blown away that a sovereign God could love a sinner like me, but I read passages like 1Timothy 1:15, where Paul says that Christ Jesus came in the world to save sinners of whom he was chief. I mean what kind of God would do something like that? The more I opened the word of God, the more real everything became to me. Reading passages like Mark 13, that describes the signs of the time and seeing some of these things around me, really put God into perspective for me. If God is real then that means the devil is real, too. I began to write more poetry trying to expose the street life for what it is. I tried to tell people that it’s not all some folks make it sound like and that there is a better life in Christ.
I wrote the poetry and I only shared it with my mother and my aunt Wadeoline. One day at A.Y. (Adventist Youth) time, the church that was supposed to bring the A.Y. program didn’t have anything prepared. My aunt went up to the A.Y. director and said, “My nephew has a poem he can recite” and I did it. When I finished, people from the other church said, “Baby, you need to let everyone hear this. Our young people need to hear this message.”
I didn’t do anything right away, but another woman in the church asked me if I had any more poetry. That woman was my sister in Christ and co-founder with me in Standing for Christ Ministries, Tracee Oglesby. I began to let her read it and she just kept trying to encourage me to share it with as many folks as I could, but I still didn’t do it--I just kept attending church.
I would go to church whenever it was open, but I never said much. I just sat back quietly and listened. One Wednesday night during prayer meeting, we were standing in a circle and a woman mentioned how I visited her when she was sick. People said, “Oh that’s nice,” and I thought that was the end of it. A few weeks later, Pastor Alfred Booker, then the pastor of Southeast (and is still my pastor to this day), was delivering the sermon. As he preached, Pastor Booker started shaking his head but continued to preach. A little while later, he shook his head again, as if to say, “No.”
Church was a little longer than usual this day because of a prayer service. Finally, Pastor Booker said, “God has been telling me to do something today and I kept saying no because in all my years of ministry, I’ve never done anything like this.” He said, “There is a young man here today who God has told me to anoint and I will not refuse the Holy Spirit again.”
He didn’t know me at the time, but he did what God called him to do. When he came down off the pulpit, my heart dropped and I thought, “He’s coming to me”, so I lowered my head. Pastor Booker said, “Young man what’s your name?” I was sitting next to my Aunt Wadeoline and she was like, “He’s talking to you.” I wouldn’t say anything so she said, “His name is Kelvin Bailey.” Pastor Booker told me to come forward and he called all the Elders around me and he laid hands on me. He said to me, “God has set you apart for His service.”
I still didn’t really understand what all that meant at the time, but people from my church began to say, “We heard what happened to you. God is going to use you in a mighty way.”
Pastor Booker asked to see some of my poetry and he read one of my poems entitled, “My World.” He asked if I could recite the poem at church. I need to say that Kelvin was not a ‘get up front’ person and is still not to this day. I don’t like it, but I do whatever God wants me to do to share the message. I did get up that Sabbath, closed my eyes and began to recite the poem. When I finished, almost the entire church was standing on their feet. They were clapping, giving me encouragement and telling me, “God has a calling for you.”
Tracee started scheduling places for me to recite poetry whether it was at a Youth Federation where I would recite my poem, “Trouble in the Church House”, or at drug rallies where I would read poems like, “My Eulogy”, “Whispering Cries”, “My World”, and many others. I began to allow God to use me to share a message of hope with others. My prayer to this day is that someone will be drawn closer to God as a result of the ministry.
In the near future, Standing for Christ Ministries plans to develop more outreach programs. We’ve slowed down a little, but God has once again reignited the fire. We understand that there are souls on the outside waiting to hear the message that God can save from the ‘gutter most to the uttermost’. Our desire is to open a community center one day, but very soon we want to start a mentoring program to help our young people. We know we can’t reach everybody, but our goal is to reach as many as we can as God sees fit.