Free How Long Will I Cry? by Miles Harvey Page B

down and down. If you wanted a prostitute you could
get one here any time of the night. If you wanted any drugs—heroin,
crack, weed, whatever—you could easily get that at this motel.
That’s the type of people that this motel did business with:
bottom-feeders who prey on people in poverty. And that’s what we
experience all over America in inner cities. There it goes. The
cookie starts to crumble.
    And so, as I was coming out the door of that
funeral—the one with all the gunfire—I was thinking I had to do
something. And I looked at the motel, and instantly the thought
came to my mind: “We need to get that motel. We need to get it now.
And we need to turn it into a community development center.”
    And then right after that thought was:
“How?”
    Then right after that thought was: “I’m gonna
put a tent on the roof of the motel. I’m gonna hold a vigil up
there. I’m gonna raise the money and bring attention to the gun
violence and to the deaths.”
    And I laughed, you know, and said, “I’d never
do that.”
    And the next day, that thought would not
leave me.
    What does it feel like to be called by God?
Wow. I think if I had to describe it, I’d say it’s a prompting, an
urge to do something that does not go away. And you can try to get
rid of that urge, but it just maddens you. It haunts you.
    I imagine for some people it may be
different. Maybe they have a Moses-type of encounter where God
speaks in the burning bush and all of a sudden they get this
revelatory thought. But for me it has always been more like an
ongoing, haunting thing that was prompting me to do better, to
excel and not settle for less. It just kept pulling on me.
    I was born in Union City, Tennessee, and I
lived in a little town called Kenton, population of about 2,000. I
stayed there until I was 8 with my grandmother and my grandfather.
My mother left me with them so she could go off to pursue a job in
Muncie, Indiana. And later on I found out the real reason she left
was because she had a boyfriend and she was gonna get married and
they wanted to go and get things set up before I came. But I didn’t
find that out for a long time. Being left behind, that hurt. Me and
my mom were really tight; we still are to this day. So being left
with my grandparents—even though they were wonderful—was
traumatic.
    And when I moved to Muncie, it was a very
violent household. My stepfather was abusive. He was crazy. He’s
cool now, but he was crazy then. And when I was about 12 or 13, he
got addicted to drugs. And that even made it worse.
    I used to get in trouble at school all the
time. It wasn’t that I fought every day, but I had a reputation of:
“Don’t, don’t mess with him.” I’ve always had that attitude: “If
you hit me, I’m gonna hit you. Don’t go to sleep around me, ‘cause
if you hit me, somehow, some way, there will be payback.”
    I was just a real bad kid. But in fifth
grade, I got a new teacher. His name was Joe Stokes. He was white,
by the way. Red hair. Very white. And he just stayed on me. Every
day. I mean every day. And if that had not happened, who
knows? I probably would be doing something illegal. But Joe Stokes,
he made me believe in myself.
    I stayed in Muncie until I was 18. I played
basketball at Muncie Central High School and ended up getting the
basketball scholarship to Armstrong State, in Savannah, Georgia. I
stayed there for a year, and then I quit playing basketball and
moved back to Muncie to go to Ball State. And in around the time I
moved back, I had a call to ministry—to want to preach.
    It was a gut feeling. I’m just now, in my
latter years, understanding it, and learning how to listen to it.
So when I had this idea about doing a vigil on the roof, I kind of
pitched it to God that if I found one person who agreed with me
that it was a good plan, I would do it. But everybody thought it
was stupid. My staff members all laughed and joked and begged me
not to do it. Then I told my wife, and