Real Inspiration
By Anita Neal Harrison • Photos By L.G. Patterson
There’s something about the New Year that makes more seem possible. As we take down old calendars and hang up new, we feel a chance to discard our pasts and begin our futures. We feel freedom. We feel empowerment.
And we feel the need to remind ourselves that we’ve been through all of this before, and we might as well be realistic.
These four Columbians would agree that it’s good to get real. Each of them faced crises that required getting serious about their choices in life. Their stories show that getting real also requires embracing hope.
This New Year, celebrate the reality of new beginnings with Adrian Clifton, Matt and Emma Walker, and Roger Findley.
Redeeming Dreams
Adrian Clifton
Adrian Harris had never felt so ashamed. Just a moment before, she had drawn looks of admiration from all those around her. Now, there were just looks of horror. The kids she’d been tutoring and their teachers had trusted her, believed in her. And here she was leaving them, with her arms behind her back, her wrists secured in handcuffs.
Until that moment, Adrian Harris, now Adrian Clifton, had felt sure of herself. A senior at Hickman High School, she’d done whatever she’d pleased throughout her teens and never faced serious consequences. She and her girls in the Female Mafia Clique had run the streets, fought rival girl gangs, shoplifted, smoked weed, drank and done whatever else to feel big and bad. Several times, Adrian had landed community service, but that was no big deal.
And for all her rebellion, there had been one area of her life where Adrian had always made good choices: She was an honor roll student and she had plans to be a teacher. As a child, she’d often gathered neighborhood kids so she could help them with their homework. Her community activist mother, Verna Laboy, knew that passion to help others could take her daughter places, and whenever Adrian would get herself into trouble, Laboy would encourage her daughter to remember her dream.
In the end, that dream would prove to be Adrian’s saving grace. When she was arrested while tutoring at West Boulevard Elementary School — for hiding a boyfriend wanted for murder — Adrian saw the seriousness of her choices.
“I realized I could’ve been charged with a felony,” she says. “My whole future, college, all of that would’ve been down the drain.”
Because she cooperated with police, she wasn’t charged. She worked harder than ever in school and laid off some of her criminal activities. But she still wasn’t on the straight and narrow. A gangster with the street name Bleak wooed her with shopping sprees and weekend trips to New Orleans. Adrian, still a high school senior, told her mother she was spending those weekends with girlfriends.
“Back then I was so naïve and young and stupid,” she says. “Now I realize how dangerous it was. We’d go to these dangerous projects, and I’d be at these parties and clubs, and we’d be drinking and smoking. It’s just amazing I didn’t get hurt or kidnapped or killed.”
She was still with Bleak when she began attending the University of Missouri, and she still had her addictions. Yet she managed to do well with her studies, and she still dreamed of teaching.
Then she got pregnant.
Once again, Adrian knew her future was at stake. Abortion came to mind, but she’d seen friends struggle with regret after that choice. She thought about taking a break from school, and her advisers and professors tried to persuade her to do so, but she decided to keep heading toward her education and career goals. Her mother wasn’t surprised.
“No matter what choices she made and what consequences she had to deal with, she’d always get back on the path,” Laboy says. “One thing about her, I think she always wanted to do better. Deep down, she had an internal compass, a barometer.”
Today, Adrian Clifton is a wife, mother of three and a Ph.D. student. She gave birth to daughter Amari without missing a beat the semester the baby was born, and later graduated on time. From there, she fulfilled her lifelong goal to teach with a position at Rock Bridge Elementary School. Still driven, Adrian began an intensive graduate program to earn her master’s degree in curriculum and instruction through the Fellowship Program at Mizzou in just one year. At the program’s start, she discovered that she was pregnant again — the father was Bleak — and again, she would not be sidetracked. She continued teaching, met all of her deadlines for her master’s program, had her son, and cared for him and his older sister.
“I didn’t do it alone,” Adrian says, explaining that Bleak, her mom, her sisters and her fellow teachers all supported her.
Meanwhile, Bleak began his own transformation. Sometime before his son’s birth, he and Adrian began attending urban Empowerment church. And then when Herman Clifton IV arrived, Bleak gained a new sense of responsibility.
“I didn’t want my son to go down the same path I had gone down,” he says.
It took time, but Bleak left behind his old lifestyle; he’s no longer Bleak but Herman Clifton III.
In 2008, Herman and Adrian married, and in 2010, they welcomed their third child, a daughter named Serenity. After five years at Rock Bridge, Adrian decided to take a break from teaching to earn her doctorate — with a full-ride scholarship. And though she’s not teaching now, she’s still pursuing her lifelong dream to make a difference in children’s lives. She volunteers at Granny’s House, a safe place for children in public housing to spend time and develop character, and Adrian teaches Sunday School at urban Empowerment church, a ministry reaching out to urban and un-churched communities. And that Ph.D. — that’s so she can open a faith-based school serving inner-city students.
It’s a big dream, but in the words of Adrian’s husband, Herman: “She has a lot of determination, a lot of drive; she’s a strong woman.”
For Richer, For Poorer, In Sickness And In Health
Matt & Emma Walker
When Matt and Emma Walker married, they believed that come what may, their love and God would get them through. That ain’t-no-mountain-high-enough thinking is common enough among college sweethearts — as is the parental concern such thinking tends to evoke — but the reaction to Matt and Emma’s wedding plans was stronger than usual.
“My mom actually didn’t want me to get married,” Emma says. She pauses, then explains: “She didn’t want me to become a widow.”
Watching videos of Matt and Emma’s wedding day show reason for such concern. Matt was thin, struggled to stand for long and had a frightening pallor.
At just 24, the groom was in kidney failure.
The cause was Alport syndrome, a genetic disease with no cure that affects membrane structures in the kidney, inner ear and eye. Matt, who also suffered hearing loss from the disease, received his diagnosis at age 16, but at that time, his kidneys were still functioning and were expected to continue functioning into his 30s.
Matt and Emma met while students at Union University, a Christian college in Jackson, Tenn. Close friends first, the two of them had just two dates before Matt proposed. The wedding was set for one year later, when Matt would be finished with school and Emma would be a college senior.
About six months into the engagement, Matt began to feel ill. He was exhausted all the time and having debilitating dizzy spells. He needed a transplant. With his mother able to donate, chances were good that the transplant would be a success, but still, Matt gave Emma the chance to withdraw her engagement promise.
Instead, she began figuring when best to schedule the wedding and the transplant so she could take care of him as his wife.
There was no blissful honeymoon for Matt and Emma. Their wedding was on Aug. 1, 1998, and Matt’s transplant was on Sept. 22. Although the transplant went well — for Matt and his mom — neither Matt nor Emma was prepared for the struggles and frustrations of recovery. Neither were they prepared for the few thousand dollars of medical bills that rolled in, despite their having insurance.
With Emma still in school and not earning an income, the newlyweds were soon buried in debt.
“We were having to do things like put groceries on credit cards,” says Matt, who had a Web programming job. “Some of it was out of our control, like the medical bills, but a lot of it was we didn’t know any better. There was some downright stupidity when it came to finances.”
After Emma graduated and began working as a graphic designer, life was better. In mid-2001, the Walkers moved to Columbia to be near his parents, and in 2003, along came a daughter, Isabela. Emma stopped working, and without her income, the bills again piled up. Matt, Emma and 6-month-old Isa ended up living in his mother’s basement. Although neither Emma nor Matt recognized it at the time, Emma was also battling post-partum depression. Under all that pressure, the couple’s relationship began to crack.
“There was a time when I honestly believed my wife didn’t love me anymore,” Matt says. “And there was a pivot point there where I decided that I didn’t care; I was going to love her.”
For Emma, there wasn’t that moment of decision.
“It was a gradual thing of me coming out of that [depression],” she says, “and he was there the whole time.”
Emma does, however, remember a different turning point.
“I remember Matt coming home and saying: ‘Hey, I heard this guy on the radio, and he makes a lot of sense. We should do this.’ ”
The “guy on the radio” was Dave Ramsey. The Walkers signed up for Financial Peace University, a Bible-based 13-week video training series often given at churches, and within six months, the couple had erased about $15,000 of their $60,000 debt and climbed to a position of getting and managing a home loan.
“We got focused and mad at our circumstances, and we disciplined ourselves — it’s not a magic method,” Matt says.
The Walkers’ marriage also profited from the two of them sharing a goal. And when their second daughter, Carmen, came along in 2008, they were prepared.
Yet the real test came in 2009, when Matt faced his second transplant. The average life of a transplanted kidney is 10 years, so he had beaten the average with his first transplant. Facing the transplant was harder as parents — “It was very sobering to have to go through all my life insurance papers and make sure all the beneficiary information was correct,” Matt says — but both Matt and Emma, Christians who attend Woodcrest church, felt a God-given peace.
And this time, the two of them were ready, in their finances and in their relationship.
“It’s funny; we’ve had complete do-overs,” Matt says. “We had a crappy marriage; we had a daughter we weren’t financially prepared for; we had a kidney transplant — a medical emergency — we weren’t prepared for. We got a complete do-over. It’s just completely night and day.”
And now, 13 years into their marriage, it’s not naiveté but experience convincing Matt and Emma Walker that come what may, their love and God will get them through.
Finding Hope To Hope
Roger Findley
It doesn’t take much for Roger Findley to feel grateful. Every morning, he’s thankful for a warm place to sleep, for a hot shower, for a job.
And more and more, he’s grateful for a sense of worth, “the feeling of being able to walk into a room full of people and not feel like you’re the lowest thing there,” he says.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Findley felt low enough to take his own life. He’d been an alcoholic since his teens, had three failed marriages in his 20s and had received an “other than honorable” discharge from the Army at age 32. He’d only joined the Army at age 28 at the suggestion of a prosecuting attorney — “I was a rambunctious guy when I’d be drinking and had gotten into skirmishes,” Findley explains. His later discharge came after he tested positive for cocaine.
Over the next two decades, Findley was a drifter. He’d have periods where he’d straighten up, but then his addictions would take control. He ended up living in a bus in a friend’s field in rural Pettis County. He had no plans, saw no reason to live — but in early 2009, he reached out for help. He went to the Harry S. Truman Memorial Veterans’ Hospital and was admitted for four days of in-patient care. He received counseling, medication and an offer to enter the Truman VA’s Addictions Treatment Program, which he declined.
After his discharge, Veterans Affairs kept in touch but near the end of 2009, could not find him. Finally, the VA contacted the friend who owned the bus, but Findley was no longer there.
He was in jail and had been for four months.
He was awaiting trial for his fifth DWI, a felony offense. He fully expected a prison sentence, and then one day, the jailer came back and said: “There’s a lady here from the VA who’d like to talk to you. Do you want to talk to her?”
Findley was astonished anyone still cared.
“I thought they’d gave up on me, too — cause I’d gave up on me,” he says. “It was really good somebody had hope for me when I didn’t.”
That visit marked the start of a slow, but steady, rise for Findley. With the VA’s support, he was able to get a furlough from jail to participate in the Addictions Treatment Program, which covered everything from learning to cope with cravings to developing a positive social network.
One of Findley’s doctors recommended he begin taking Antabuse, a drug that causes unpleasant effects when combined with even small amounts of alcohol. At first, Findley refused, asking, “Why would I want to take something that’s going to make me sick?” The doctor explained that the physical action of taking the pill would be a daily commitment to stay sober. Still with some reservation, Findley yielded.
“I told him, “My way of thinking has gotten me where I am today, so you tell me what you think would be best for me, and for once, I’m going to follow someone else’s suggestion.’ “
Findley completed the 21-day course and then returned to jail. Impressed with his program performance, the judge allowed him a second furlough, this one for a full year, so Findley could complete the VA’s Compensated Work Therapy Transitional Housing Program, which helps unemployed veterans gain work experience and an income while living in a therapeutic residential setting.
“When I was offered the CWT program, I couldn’t believe it,” Findley says. “I thought: ‘Here is a chance, a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I’m going to grab it.’ ”
Findley began working at the Veterans’ Hospital, and each day, he found more reason to press ahead. He discovered that little accomplishments — just doing the next right thing even when it required a little more effort — built up his self-esteem. And the program was long enough to allow those little victories to mount up.
“It was the very thing I needed,” Findley says of the program. “It gave me a chance to get some successful time behind me to develop a new way of life.”
Findley was doing so well that at sentencing time, he received five years’ probation. He’d also impressed the Veterans’ Hospital enough to earn regular, full-time employment as a supply tech, and with help from the Housing and Urban Development-Veterans Affairs Supported Housing program, he was able to begin renting an apartment last April.
Finally, on July 5, he reached one of his major goals: To earn enough money to no longer qualify for help.
“And I’ll tell you what, it really felt good,” he says.
Blake Witter, a social worker at Truman, witnessed Findley’s transformation. She remembers how guarded he was when he first came for help and how he slowly put himself out there for relationships.
“Once he was able to start trusting, he was able to communicate with people in a way he hadn’t done before,” she says, “and that let other people feel they could take a chance on him.”
For Findley, no one’s trust meant more than his two daughters’ and five grandchildren’s, with whom he now either talks or texts daily. Before he had almost no contact with them because, as Findley says, he just wasn’t a pleasant person to be around. He’s no longer that person.
“I have something more to give,” he says.