Warrior Stories

A NOTE FROM DAVID

FEATURED STORY

“I think God just answered my prayer.”

Jamie Medlin could hear his wife crying in the next room.

The company he’d been working for in Oklahoma had been devastated by a tragic accident, and the job that supported his family was gone. Bills kept coming. Jamie had spent years rebuilding his life, piece by piece, and now he sat wondering how he was going to provide for the people depending on him.

That morning, he did something he had never done before. He went into the bathroom, got down on his knees, and prayed specifically about money. Just money. He’d never brought that particular fear to God before.

When he finished, he reached for his phone to read his morning devotional, the way he did every day. There was a text waiting for him.

It was from Matthew Ince: What would it take to get you back to Memphis and working for Lion?

Jamie stared at the screen and started to cry.

His wife came in asking what was wrong. All he could say was, “I think God just answered my prayer.”

Lion is the painting and construction company connected to Warriors Center, a place where graduates of the program go to work, build a resume, and keep growing under men who’ve walked the same road. Today Jamie is back in Memphis, working for Lion, mentoring men coming up behind him, and going home every night to a family he once thought he’d lost for good.

But the road that got him there was long, and for a lot of it, nobody would have bet on this ending.

A Dark Start

Jamie was twelve years old when he joined a gang. He was looking for role models, and the men he found were rap artists in Memphis who sold drugs. So that’s what he did too.

“My mornings consisted of selling drugs, and my evenings consisted of using drugs,” Jamie said. “Staying out all hours of the night.”

It cost him almost everything. His marriage ended. His relationship with his son disappeared. He had no relationship with his mother or father. Eventually it cost him his freedom, too. Jamie spent thirteen years in prison.

Even prison didn’t break the pattern. If anything, it deepened it.

“When I got out, my people, places, and things hadn’t changed,” he said. “I still had a lot of popularity with that crowd.”

He didn’t want to violate his parole and go back. But he also knew that without something different, he was headed toward the same ending. A friend from prison, someone who’d been furloughed to a program himself, invited Jamie to come hear him give his testimony at a place called Warriors Center. That night, Jamie met David Vincent for the first time.

A week later, he picked up the phone and called David. David told him Warriors Center could help him get his life straight, and more than that, help him find Jesus Christ.

Jamie decided to go.

Learning to Trust

He arrived on a weekend, when nothing much was happening. A friend from prison who was already a resident showed him around. That Sunday, the men went to church, and during the altar call, Jamie went forward.

“I accepted Jesus and vowed that I was going to finish the program and get my life straight,” he said. “I wasn’t going back to my old life.”

The next day he watched his first Warriors Center graduation. Watching those men walk across that stage gave him a picture of what his own life could look like.

But wanting a new life and knowing how to live one are two different things. For Jamie, the hardest part wasn’t sobriety. It was trust.

“As a new believer, I wondered if God was really as real as people said He was,” he said. Years on the street and years behind bars had trained him not to lean on anyone. That started to change through two men in particular: Eric Barnett and Jimmy Meeks.

Eric worked mostly behind the scenes in the administration building and didn’t spend much time with the residents day to day. But he was around enough to notice that Jamie had become fascinated with the Great Commission and wouldn’t stop talking about it. One day Eric overheard him and called him into his office.

“If you want to train disciples,” Eric told him, “you must first be discipled yourself.”

Eric introduced him to Jimmy Meeks, a man who discipled pastors, and Jimmy walked Jamie through a book called Follow Me. Jamie would read on his own time, then sit down with Jimmy to talk through it. Eric and Jimmy became the two men who taught him what it meant to actually trust someone.

Almost Walking Away

Even so, Jamie thought about leaving more than once.

He was working the paint crews, putting in long days for no pay, and his flesh kept telling him he could do this on his own, make real money, and still get his life together without all the structure. Little frustrations piled up.

Hershey Burnett and Eric were the ones who talked him out of it. They reminded him what he’d committed to, and that walking away now would prove he hadn’t really surrendered anything at all. He stayed.

Not long after, the staff pulled Jamie off the paint crews and made him an assistant to Hershey, who ran the boot camp at the time. Hershey was the most disciplined, most submitted man Jamie had ever been around, and Jamie hated it.

“I didn’t want to submit to authority,” he admitted.

But Hershey broke it down for him scripturally, patiently, more than once. And Jamie started paying attention to the men who’d actually made it through the program and out the other side. Their lives were on track. They had all learned to submit to authority somewhere along the way. Jamie figured if it worked for them, it could work for him.

The Moment It Became Real

Jamie can point to the exact moment he knew something in him had actually changed, not just his behavior, but him.

He’d prayed for God to show him his purpose, and not long after, he was chosen to attend a discipleship conference. There were 3,500 men in that room, all of them worshiping. Jamie found himself with his hands raised, singing, fully in it, in a way he had never once done in his life.

“I realized God was actually changing me,” he said. “I had never been like this.”

After that came a mission trip. Then men, former gang members, started coming to Jamie for advice, telling him they looked up to him. Every one of those moments pulled him a little further out of himself.

From there, the responsibility kept growing. Warriors Center started a Sunday service called Mission Chapel, and senior residents like Jamie were given the chance to deliver short messages. Eventually he was invited to go speak to men in other programs entirely.

“I realized everything they’d told me was actually working,” Jamie said. “I was putting my lip action into hip action.”

Being trusted with that kind of responsibility meant more to him than almost anything before it.

“On the paint crews, I felt needed,” he said. “But when they brought me inside to teach, I realized they must really trust me. It felt like nothing I’d ever felt before.”

What Lion Taught Him

Which brings the story back to Lion, and to that phone call in Oklahoma.

Jamie says he ended up at Lion through prayer and faith, plain and simple. But what he learned there went beyond a job.

“It taught me that it isn’t always about me,” he said. “I see a lot of good men who just need a leader. You’re supposed to be there for others, not just thinking about yourself.”

These days Jamie has a new coworker at Lion, a fellow graduate of the program. He’s been through several crews already, and he told Jamie he was glad they got paired up. Jamie mentors him on the job, teaching him to paint the right way. But he’s also had him over to the house for dinner, introduced him to his kids, and talked with him about Jesus every day they’ve worked side by side.

“It’s great that I can teach these guys how to paint,” Jamie said. “But it’s even better that I can be a mentor to them spiritually. I teach them the right way to paint, and I try to teach them the right way to live.”

Being trusted with that role holds him accountable in a way nothing else does. It makes him proud, not of himself, but that he gets to be the kind of help to someone else that other men once were to him.

Today

Jamie is sober. He’s married. He owns a home and drives a dependable car. And the relationships he once thought were gone for good have been restored.

Today, Jamie enjoys being part of all six of his children’s lives.

His two grown children, the ones he walked away from when he went to prison, come over every week now. He has two stepchildren who’ve welcomed him into their lives, and two young children of his own who read him Bible stories at night.

“My wife is my biggest inspiration,” Jamie said. “She’s never used drugs or been to prison a day in her life. She takes care of our home, I take care of the bills, and every night I pull up to a beautiful house and a family I never thought I’d have.”

Ask Jamie what he’s most proud of, and he won’t point to the house or the job. He’ll point to the people who poured into him: David Vincent, Eric Barnett, Jimmy Meeks, Hershey Burnett, and a whole line of men at Warriors Center who didn’t give up on him. Right now, his focus is simple. He wants to be that same kind of example to the guys still coming through the program.

“I believe my purpose is to make disciples of men,” he said.

If Jamie could talk to the twenty-something who first walked through the doors of Warriors Center, broken, out of prison, and not sure he trusted anyone, he knows exactly what he’d say. “Well done. I’m not boasting. I just look at where I was compared to where I am today, and I’m grateful and humbled.”

And when he thinks about that morning in Oklahoma, on his knees on the bathroom floor, his wife crying in the next room, and a text message from Matthew Ince waiting on his phone, there’s really only one way Jamie can explain it.

“God was doing exactly what they said He would do.”

By the Numbers

Behind every story is the daily work of recovery, accountability, and rebuilding lives across all Warriors Center locations.

Celebrating Our June Graduates

Lives Changed • New Beginnings • Purpose Restored