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After my father died in Manhattan under some ill circumstances, my mother became a born-again Christian. Just so you don't think she ran out and did that just because Pops died, they were already divorced and through with each other. So she found God a year after my father's death, when I was around seven years old. At that point, she began taking us to church and all. I was the only kid in my neighborhood that wasn't out playing stickball or whatever on Sundays, because by the time my mom got done talking to her church friends after the service, I couldn't find anyone!

We were poor, too. Always moving around from apartment building to apartment building, like some game of Housing Authority Hop Scotch. We finally ended up with my grandparents, so that gave my mother the time and money to put herself through nursing school. As for me, I was growing up in the gutter; even though I had a mother that loved me and taught me right from wrong, what kid out there is going to listen and obey all the time? I was too young for drugs and all that junk, but I was on my way! Sports, though, kept me occupied, and so did art. Graffiti art, to be exact. In the Bronx, I saw the original graf art galleries on the regular, just by getting on the D or the 4 train. I used to love the smell of the subways, (every time I'm back in NY, when I catch that scent wafting up through the grates on the sidewalk, it takes me back...), and I would watch with my jaw dropped as the larger-than-life pieces would swish by me, slowing down, and finally stopping as New Yorkers got on and off the train. Then, they were gone as the train rattled to the next stop. But it didn't matter, because a few minutes later another train would come with more graf to peep.

When I was 11 my mother moved us down to PA, but we made frequent trips back to the city. As for me, graf was burned into my mind's eye, but I could never do it well myself! That didn't stop me from bombing every now and then, though! I wanted my little suburban PA town to look like my home, so occassionally I had to hit up some local business or freights in the yard nearby with some wack "Fuzz" tags.

My interest in graf returned when I was 15, and ironically, my mother bought me markers and a sketch pad for Christmas that year. That was it, though; I was constantly doing pieces, getting Source magazines just to look at that one page of graf, and taking pictures. Later that year I became a Christian myself, realizing that I was a sinner for all I had done in my life and needed a Savior. No, i was never a drug-dealer or a murderer or a rapist, but the Bible told me that everyone has sinned in some way, and that's all it takes to be separated from God for eternity. Thank God, though, that He showed me Jesus and that He'd forgive me if I'd repent. I did.

As the years went by, I "grew" spiritually through prayer, Bible reading, and just talking to other cats. I also grew in my graffiti talent. Around 1998 I started to be down with my current crew, Gospel Graffiti. Fasm, the leader of the crew, asked me if I wanted to be down with them, and I said no at first because I sucked at spraypainting. But eventually I agreed to rep for GG. (I started writing "j.one", which represents "Jesus won (one)"; if you take out the dot, too, it sounds like my mother's name, "Joan" (Jone).) Since then, God's blessed me with numerous opportunities to paint and learn from other people like Fasm, Camer, Phayth, my boy True, and other cats. Over that time, I've gotten better at it too.

It's funny: we usually think of God as this old man with a long, flowing beard, and we tend to think that He's distant from us, or that He's very demanding, on the other hand. Those are some of the ideas I used to have about God. One thing I never dreamed, though, is that God is a God who gives us things that we love, and He blesses those activities even more when we do them to glorify Him. I never thought I would do graffiti art as a Christian, and even have other cats that i could get down with painting a wall or something. I think God takes those things that we enjoy and makes them even more legit when we give our hearts to Him. God's a God who made us to enjoy life and enjoy pleasure, and true life and pleasure are those things that come from His hands.