Brink of Greatness
“I cannot be called brave and courageous until I do the hardest thing, which is to acknowledge publicly that I am a survivor of sexual human trafficking.” And with that, Norma Bastidas changed everything. Growing up in the community of Sinaloa, Mexico; violence, sexual abuse and human trafficking are a way of life, as the cartels run the streets. On any given day, young girls and boys are picked up by the cartels and violated – in a way that no child should ever experience. Norma was sexually abused so many times throughout her childhood – that she lost count. She was kidnapped from a sidewalk in Mexico City, forced into the backseat of a car at the age of 18, and found herself hostage in a prostitution ring. Saved only by the grace of a man, or as Norma references him, ‘her angel’, she was able to escape the bondages of this human trafficking ring, only to find herself caught up in another prostitution sex trafficking ring, this time in Japan. Norma was forced back into the sex industry and worked as a high-paid escort without access to her passport. Her captors put massive debts on her life, forcing her to work to […]
When things go bad, it is often difficult to know you’ve reached the lowest point of the plummet. Sometimes you have to brace yourself for what comes next… Lisa Williams was at the lowest point of her life – so she thought. She was in the hospital surrounded by family as they disconnected the defibrillator from her dad. The silence in the room quickly filled with sobs of tears. It was at that moment Lisa heard a voice yell out “Stop Crying he will hear you Lisa.” Shocked at first that her stepmom would call her out at this very personal moment. And why her; when the entire room was emotional? She immediately went from sorrow to deep despair. Guilt consumed her. She felt the hospital was incompetent during the twelve days her dad spent in the hospital. As a daughter and clinical administrator, Lisa wanted to help her dad but was told to do nothing. This was against everything she believed. Dad’s death and the guilt of not acting, sent Lisa into a deep depression. Isolation. PTSD. Even a divorce. Everything was changing and not for the better. Depression affects more than 16 million men and women (almost 6.7 percent of the adult population) […]
“We’ve been fighting this battle to get ahead of this infection to stop the spread, we hate to tell you, the outcome is not good,” explained the doctors. The news was anything but good. This was not the December holiday surprise Jim McCay was expecting. How could a small misstep one evening, at the end of a beautiful day out boating with friends turn into this…? “If we don’t eliminate the infection, you will not be alive in 3 months,” “My brain just turned off, and my wife said, I went totally white…” explained Jim. To eliminate the infection, the doc was now talking about removing part of Jim’s leg. The exact words used were “to get the best outcome possible” we will need to remove from the knee down. And still there would be no guarantees that this would stop the spread of this vicious infection. The surgery to amputate Jim’s leg from the knee down was now set for the first week of January. As it turned out, the hospital was mobilized for a big accident the exact day of the scheduled surgery. The surgeon would not be available. This was anything but smooth sailing. There would be more surgeries […]
A life of trauma and tragedy transformed into a warrior against sexual abuse and violence; a beacon for truth, hope and knowledge. Dr. Gregory Williams is a most unusual man. Most anyone would run and hide from the sheer embarrassment of a tortured childhood – from the hands of a father completely out-of-control. He remembers seeing the front cover of the famous Sears catalog at just four years old as a pivotal moment in time. This was the first remembrance of being sexually abused by his dad. The abuse was a daily occurrence. There were even times his father would bring friends in to take-part in the rape. As he explains in our ‘brink talk,’ his dad wasn’t the only family member to violate young Gregory. It went on for twelve more years, until at the age of seventeen, he finally found the courage to tell his dad to STOP. He would keep this to himself for the next 35 years, never whispering a word to a single soul. While at a presentation in 2015, he unexpectedly told the audience “You know, I was abused as a kid.” No sooner did the words leave his mouth; when the self-doubt began. “Nobody’s going to […]
He was on a mission in one of the most hostile areas on the planet, in Southern Afghanistan; a place also known as “The Devils Playground”. He knew something wasn’t quite right. He blamed himself for the death of the enemy. He questioned his decisions of leadership that placed him in the wrong spot at the wrong time. Timothy Payne was about to go through a ‘life transformation’ that was both dramatic and purposeful at the same time. In a flash, an instant; a moment in time he will never forget, a hidden improvised explosive device (IED) flashed beneath him – changing his life forever. As he describes it, “I was walking, looking at the ground and it went off, it was the biggest like red, white and debris flying at me like thousands of miles per hour… my left leg blew up like a firecracker, and my right leg was gone right below the shin, and I’m laying there looking at my arm blown wide-open… trying to figure out, like how bad am I?” He wouldn’t know the answer to that question for a couple of weeks, until the moment he awoke from a coma. Timothy Payne had lost both his legs […]
Andy had just finished volunteering with a group of guys to build a home for the show, ABC’s Extreme Makeover Home Edition. He had been working with groups like Habitat for Humanity and Extreme Makeover when he asked himself the question: “Why aren’t we doing this for our own military families?” He and his buddies decided to try and build one house to see how it would go. The outpouring of support from the community was an unbelievable moment for them. The feeling you get from doing something big, the pride in seeing it come together, but mostly the enthusiasm from everyone involved in the project made Andy Ladner realize, that this was just the start… “When we finished that first house, and delivered the keys, we were watching helicopters fly away and two of us were sitting on the back of a truck,” when Andy realized “There has to be more than this, we’ve been doing disaster relief for years, along with food and toys, we need to make this into a legal organization because it’s more than just one home.” Andy Ladner is one of those guys who sees a problem and he wants to fix it. He […]
In many ways, John’s life was all mapped out; at least in his mind it was. An excellent student; good grades, athlete, good attitude, even perfect attendance in school. The kids in school were always trying to get John high by offering him drugs. He managed to stay clear of drugs despite the peer pressure that permeated the air at junior high school. Yet, the drugs were all around him. In fact, this part of Ohio has a bit of a reputation for addiction, drug dealing and the kinds of crime that typically come with a devil’s playground. “I was that guy who said, I would never touch drugs, I’m going to play in the NBA,” says John. He was a big sports fanatic, playing baseball, basketball, football, he even ran track. All of that changed one day when a group of guys; the summer before his sophomore year met at a friends house. There were about fifteen kids from around the neighborhood just hanging out, passing around weed while talking about sports and the summer break. As the joint was being passed from hand-to-hand, one of the neighborhood guys who John did not know very well, passed the joint to him […]
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