Celebrating the power of possibility. Hi, I'm Clarence Waringen and I believe anything is possible. This is Anything is Possible. I'm Halloran Hilton Hill, part two of my conversation with the man with the great spirit. Clarence Waringen, thanks for joining us. Oh man, you're more than welcome man. So when we left off we were talking about your dad and you call him your dad, not your stepdad. Absolutely.
This is my dad named after him and his transition and how he modeled for you what it was like to be a man, to be a father, to be a husband, all of those things and how you've kind of copied and pasted from his example what you wanted to be in your life. But this was also a time in your life, you work for Knox County Schools now which we will get to, but you've had this career as a basketball player.
You've had this career as a coach. You're coaching and you get fired and then the dominoes start to fall. Your father passes away. You go through a divorce. You're losing a job, but you're meeting the love of your life. So your father, when you hear it, just hearing it, you kind of go, wait I made it through all of that. So your father passes away and I don't know, there's something about what I miss is just my father's presence more than anything else, just to be in a room with him.
It was almost like my life had a foundation or a cornerstone and when he was gone, it didn't feel like I had anything to rest on. Something's missing. Not only is something missing, but you realize that the only thing that's going to fill what's missing is what you are becoming. You've got to become that thing. You've got to become the solid foundation of your family. Then divorce, oh boy.
Yeah, that took a turn because I think right, maybe I want to say man, it was four, five months before I was about to be remarried, I almost lost my life because of drugs and alcohol. Let's talk about that. Yeah man, just out one day with some of my boys and of course we were doing stuff that we weren't supposed to be doing, snort cocaine, be real about it, drinking, partying. Why? Man, I was just going through so much at that time. Were you trying to numb the pain?
Not only numb the pain, but just ease the pain. How do I get through it? This was something that I dealt with prior to. It wasn't just that night. I struggled with this off and on throughout my life. A lot of people didn't know that side of me because I was a private person. I had my people who I dealt with and I never shared that. No one never knew because I didn't act like it. We just had our group of people that we hung with, people that knew me knew okay, he didn't die.
But then God exposed me and I was telling one of my buddies, Mike Dorsey, I don't know if you know Mike Dorsey, Mike Dorsey, a good friend of mine, but I was telling him on his park ass, I said, I am so glad that God exposed me before he disposed me because that night I could have lost my life. What happened that night? So that night we used our party. I had a good time and I got spooked. I was on my way home driving and I got spooked.
So spooked is when you think something is going on that's really not going on. So I thought someone was following me. I thought someone was trying to get me. And before you knew it, man, I took off running. I got out of my car, took off the running. So I don't know if you know the effects of marijuana and drugs at the same time, cocaine and alcohol, all that stuff. It's like you just got a ticking time bomb. It's like you just shaking it up and you don't know what you're going to get out of it.
And when I woke up, I was in jail. I jumped through some man's window in his house, came out, they arrested me, took me to jail. I had felonies. I was embarrassed. I just knew that my wife to be now was going to leave me. My mom told her, girl, if I was you, I would leave him. You know what she said? She said, no, she said, I'm not going to leave him because there's something about this man that I want to support and I want to be a part of. And I never forgot that when she said that to me.
That's why today I would never, ever do anything to hurt her or harm her because she stood there with me doing some times when any other person probably would have said, you know what? I'm not going to deal with this. We're too old for that. But yeah, man, she hung in there and our marriage has been so successful since then. Did you have children at this time? Yeah, I had my daughter. Yeah. Nicole was, that was 2005. So yeah, Nicole was probably a teenager at that time. So now you got all of...
Oh yeah, man. She seen it in the paper. Of course, it was all on ESPN. It was all, you know, Knoxville, New Sending. It was all in Memphis. So you took your life over. You thought the shame, the condemnation, nobody was going to want to work with you anymore. I'm not going to get another job. You know, I got to get over these felonies. Possibility powered by Covenant Health, Home Federal, and the Knoxville News Sentinel.
So I met this guy by the name of David Downing. He had West End Academy. He was the president of West End Academy, which is a school for... It's kind of like a last chance for students who got kicked out of Knox County Schools. This is your last chance to kind of get it right. And so I went there as a mentor for the program and shared my story. Kids already knew who I was. They knew, oh, this is the basketball player playing at UT. Oh, he's the one getting in trouble.
Well, I told them all my story. I told them everything that had happened because it was fresh then. It was right two or three months after it happened. But that man gave me an opportunity to share my story. I ended up writing a 31-day devotional guide during that whole year. I found Christ. My wife and I got married shortly after that. And I haven't looked back since. But I appreciate that because he reintroduced me to God again.
He reintroduced my whole thought process, my whole mindset and my mind shift toward just trying to redeem myself, basically. Get back to where I needed to be. So you felt like being exposed was a good thing. Yeah, absolutely. Because if I never were exposed, I think I would have never gotten off that path. I think I would have stayed on that path and constantly sneaking. I would have been back in this same marriage doing the same stuff that I did in the last marriage.
And that's how God works. Sometimes He will expose you to redirect you. That was how it happened in my case. He exposed me to it because he said, you know what? I could kill you. You're dropping anybody one of them now. You're going to be your head blown off your heart. He put me in a position where he knew already the plan. He already knew what this was going to be. As I sit there in jail, I'm thinking, Lord, if you just give me out of this, I promise you I ain't going to do this.
You ain't got to worry about me doing nothing else. And I can look back now and say, you know what? That was part of his plan. I think there's a text in the Bible where it says it was good that I was afflicted because it allowed me to know. I think of this song, Love Lifted Me. I was sinking deep in sin, far from the peaceful shore, very deeply stained within, sinking to rise no more. But the master of the sea heard my despairing cry from the waters, lifted me.
Now, safe am I. Love lifted me. When nothing else would help. So what I see is two types of love. The love that beautifully and intentionally exposes you so that it can expose you. When they used to have dark rooms, you would take the film into the dark room so that you could expose the film to show the true picture. You would take the negative and you would turn it into a picture in the dark room. So he exposed you or he took the negative and he brought a little better picture out of that.
But then the other part is how the love of your wife lifted you. Absolutely, man. Because imagine what would have happened to you had you not been exposed to radical unconditional love. It transformed you. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, man. And I'm the most grateful person in the world, man. When I met you, though, it was your real talk program and that's what got me was this guy has a greater sense of purpose on his life. Right? When did all that start?
So that started at Vine Middle School in 2009, 2010. Conzo Martin was kind of like my guy who, you know, we used to talk a lot and he said, man, you got something good going on, you know, in your life, man. Let's start to do this. And so Conzo used to, you know, we used to talk a lot and we still do it to this day. I love Conzo Martin. Oh, that's my dude. And he told me about the program and I was like, you know what, I'm a...
We started at Vine Middle School with four kids and we just used to sit in, we just used to talk, man, just to have some conversation. I had already wrote my curriculum for the program when I was going through my storm. I wrote a 32-day curriculum and I was like, you know what, I can use this curriculum as speaking points for the kids.
So I never imagined that the program would jump off like it did, but we started right there and four kids, before you know it, I had six kids coming in every morning at 7.15 and right before school started. And then we did, you know, we had 20, we had 25 and I'm like, oh, this thing is growing. So we started bringing in guest speakers. So Conzo was like, hey, man, you need to get some doctors, you need to get some lawyers, you need to get all these people to come in and talk to the kids.
So I built my list up to now, I have over 150 guest speakers in my program. And the program went from Vine Middle School to 10 middle schools, 10 elementary schools. You know, we just started like, everybody like, I want to have this program. I hear you got coaches at UT coming in and speak to the kids. I hear you got doctors, I hear you got lawyers, I hear you got, you know, the mayors coming in and speak to your kids. And God just so favored, man, and just like the program just blew up.
Like, wow. And then I started getting, you know, people like, I want to donate to your program. What do I need to do to donate to your program? So I was like, oh man, I got to get 501C3, I got to get all this stuff. So I didn't know anything about none of that until five years ago. And I was like, you know what, they said, you need to become a nonprofit. Okay, let me do that. What do I need to do? Had to get a lawyer, get all that done.
But when we came 501C3, then I built the website and just started, you know, doing those little things. And now we have 10 schools, 450 kids in the program. That's amazing. God is just. Would you have ever imagined that when you're in the middle of that valley, that that was, because that's what gave birth to all of that. Had you, if you didn't have that story, if you didn't tell that story, it wouldn't have led you to the devotional. The devotional wouldn't have led to a curriculum. Oh yeah.
It's, man, all things work together. And it's all, you know, it all works together, man, for the good of God. And this is crazy because how it happened, it was just, you know, just that story alone drew kids in because kids were thinking, oh man, he's just like us, man, he come from the hood just like we did, you know. He didn't have it. He didn't have anything. It's like we did. And that's what I used to tell kids. It doesn't matter where you come from. All right.
Doesn't matter what you're going through. I got a story. I can tell you guys that I've been through this and I've been through this and I've been. But here's how I got out of it. Here's how I overcame it. And so that was the power of the whole process. And so, yeah, man, that's what I looked back. Yeah. We haven't even talked about what you do for the next kind of school, but you're a recruiter. Yeah, a recruiter. You're recruiting, you mean the same thing like in coaching.
You're recruiting teachers and assistant principals because you understand this if you have the impact of a real high quality person in your life. And I'm sure you can think of a number in your life. Clue in you, brother. Yeah. Well, you know, we have some great friends in common, but I count you as a great friend and I'm proud of you.
I'm proud of what God is doing in and through you and the way God has this wonderful way of repurposing our pain, man, and turning it into purpose and then using it for a greater purpose. And it's good to have, it's good to, the test can be that testimony, man. So I'm just glad that I went through the test and God gave me the test. And now I'm glad that I can talk about it. Some people can't talk about it.
You know, some people can't, you know, can't elaborate on the things in life that they've been through, some people didn't get that opportunity to do that. Where did you develop the fearlessness to be transparent? Oh, man, that took, that was hard because, you know, it took me a minute to be able to tell this story and tell the truth and tell the truth about what happened that night and what, you know, it had all transpired. But I just asked God, man.
I grew in my relationship and I think the closer you get to Christ, the more comfortable you're okay with who you are. And like, you're okay with the story. You're okay with the pain. You're okay with, you know, the vulnerability. Like, I'm okay with letting people know, hey, you know what? I wasn't the Clarence Waringer that I am now 25 years ago. How did your mom receive all of that?
It was tough for her that, you know, during the storm, yeah, when I was going through those dark days, it was tough on her. She was embarrassed a little bit. But she was like a mother, you know. She never, she still loved me. She was like, you know what? No matter what you're going through right now, mom will still love you because that's what mothers do. My dear friend, just finished a book about forgiving yourself.
How did you find the space and the grace to live beyond your shame and forgive yourself? Well, that goes back to just those relationships, growing closer to Christ. When you grow closer to Christ, it manifests within your spirit. It helps you grow outside of what you've been through. All right? So that relationship piece, that accountability piece, all tied in together, you know, to help me become the person that I am. And, you know, just growing. Have you forgiven yourself? Oh, man.
You have to. You have to move on. If God forgives you, why should you not forgive yourself? So, I just look at life like, you know what? The Lord has forgiven me. Who gave me life has forgiven me. So why am I constantly beating myself down with this? I have to let it go and let God. And that's what I did. I said, God, you know what? You take control over this will. I'll let you drive it. And I'll be obedient to who you are and what you mean to me. I love what God has done in and through you.
Right? It is a real massive story of possibility. You also play spades. I love play spades, yeah. We have not had that opportunity yet to engage in that way. I would like to put you on notice. You're not ready for this. I just want to tell you all about that, man. I come from a family of spade players and you play bead wisdom? I do play. I grew up playing a game called Rook, which is virtually bidwis. So I do understand the mechanisms and machinations of both spades and bidwis.
I like spades better than I do bead wisdom. But if you ask my sister in Chicago, they would be like, they play bead wisdom. They would be like, no, we spade players. I feel like you have some swagger. You're a competitor. All the time, yes. And I just needed to put you on notice and accept your invitation. But here's what I love about playing cards. You have to make something out of the hand that you have. You have to make something out of the hand that you have.
And you have to communicate with your partner. And you guys have to figure out how to take the two hands that you have to make a winning hand. Don't this sound like a marriage? That's what I'm saying. This is what I'm ending on. That's what I'm ending on. Ending on where we started, where you said you were dealt a hand, but then God gave you a great partner. Man, what?
And it's nothing like when you're playing spades and you're like, I don't know if this book is going to ride and your partner goes, ah! I got you. That's my wife, man. That's my wife. That's my partner. Yeah, man. And we got a beautiful thing going on, man. And the beauty of it all is that God is in the center of it all. So when you have God in the center of your marriage, all things are possible. All things are possible. Clarence, we're at your thank you for being on anything that's possible.
My pleasure, man. Thank you for inviting me, man. Have a wonderful day today, man.