Twice Over a Man: Orvin Kimbrough’s Fierce Journey of Faith, Forgiveness, and Fortitude

Orvin Kimbrough is a seasoned leader, author, and entrepreneur who currently serves as the steward of one of Missouri’s largest privately held banks. A lifelong resident of St. Louis, Orvin’s journey from childhood adversity to professional success has shaped his mission to inspire others through faith, resilience, and service. In this episode of Courageous Crossroads, Orvin shares the powerful story behind his book, Twice Over a Man: A Fierce Memoir of a Orphan Boy Who Doggedly Determined a Finer Life. He speaks candidly about overcoming
trauma, the importance of faith in finding purpose, and his belief that courage is an active choice —one made daily in the face of hardship. Through deep conversation with host Jeff Johnson, Orvin explores how surrendering to God, reframing struggles as opportunities, and embracing none’s personal story can create a lasting impact. Their discussion touches on the nature of true service, the power of forgiveness, and the necessity of perseverance, making this a compelling
episode for anyone seeking to find strength through adversity.

Orvin’s book is available at the following links:

◦Use this link to purchase Twice Over A Man from IngramSpark
◦Use this link to purchase The Thrivers Workbook
◦Use this link to purchase the audiobook exclusively on Audible: Twice Over A Man

Thank you for listening! We hope you feel inspired and encouraged by our conversation today. If you did, be sure to share this episode with others.

Let’s stay in touch:

• Follow us on Instagram @crossroadsapologetics
• Email us at info@crossroadsapologetics.org
• Visit our website www.crossroadsapologetics.org

See you in the next episode! Be blessed!

Full Transcript

Intro:
Welcome to Courageous by Crossroads Apologetics, a look into what motivates us to step out in courage and the everyday bravery of men and women like you. In each episode, we hear a personal story of bravery centered around this. What’s the most courageous thing you’ve ever done? And now your host, founder of Crossroads Apologetics, Jeff Johnson. 

Jeff Johnson:
Well, welcome back, everybody, to another episode of the Courageous Crossroads podcast. I’m so grateful to be with you again this week. And I’ve got another fantastic guest for you. Orvin Kimbrough is another dear friend of mine. He’s got a book titled Twice Over a A Fierce Memoir of An Orphan Boy who Doggedly Determined Finer Life. And it is absolutely something that you need to get your hands on. And we’ll put a link to it in the show notes here. But Orvin has an amazing testimony of coming from a difficult background and persevering and demonstrating great courage and finding himself on the other side of it. And you’re going to be so enriched with this interview. In fact, I was enriched just talking to my good friend. The first, I don’t know, maybe three minutes, four minutes of the interview are he and I catching up and him encouraging me. And I decided to go ahead and leave it in because it’s so much about the character of the man. So Orven is just a wonderful leader and a great encourager. So you’re going to enjoy this podcast. Here’s Orvin. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
But no, I’m blessed to see you. You got this glow around you. I’m not sure if you got the lighting set up. You got like a whole biblical thing going on of the Spirit right now, or, I mean, I, I, I, I felt like I was in the presence of the One. 

Jeff Johnson:
I don’t know about that. I don’t know about that. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
It’s definitely shining through you. 

Jeff Johnson:
Yeah. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
Yeah. 

Jeff Johnson:
You know, it was such a blessing to see you and your wife down in Arizona. That was just that breakfast that we got to share was. I’m still pondering that. You know, the Lord just gave us a little gift for sure, and being able to sit with you guys and, wow, wonderful. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
Well, I, I have found in this season, there are so many people who have incredible stories. I only know a snippet of your story, and I just can’t wait. I, I can’t wait for you to get your project done, get it out of you. Because once you get this project out of you, it’s going to wait, make way for the next big thing that God’s going to do in your life. And one of the things that I’ve heard you say is, you know, be of maximum use. 

Jeff Johnson:
Yeah. 

Orvin Kimbrough
Be of maximum use. 

Jeff Johnson:
Yeah. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
And so you, you. So being a being of maximum use doesn’t mean complete consumption and focused on a bunch of different things all the time. Being a maximum use is like, what’s that one thing, that one gift that God has put on the inside of you and your story? Just the snippets that I’ve heard. I’m like, okay. Being a maximum use is when you get that story out in a way that people can consume it and just sit with it. And then you’re out there talking and encouraging and inspiring. Being of maximum use. Oh, man. 

Jeff Johnson:
See, you’re an encourager already, Orvin. This is why I like hanging out with you. I gotta move to St. Louis. Spent some more time with you. That’s one of the tenets of my recovery program, is that we’re supposed to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God and to our fellows, and that’s where. That’s where all that comes from. And our family motto is enriching the lives of others through the richness of our own. So it is this pouring out. So I’m going to take that encouragement. Orvin, God bless you. I’m going to. Because I’m watching you further on down the road and what you’ve done and the way you’ve had the fortitude to get your book done and put it out in print is. Is a beacon to me. So I’m watching you. But let’s jump into the podcast here and how about we start off, Orvin, with you putting yourself in context for our listeners? I’m speaking with Orvin Kimbrough and can you tell us where you’re at right now, what you do, a little bit about your family, maybe a little bit about your background. Whatever you feel like the Lord wants you to share. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
Well, thanks. I’m in St. Louis. I was born in the Metro east, just across the river in Illinois, and have lived in St. Louis all my life. Today I get the privilege to steward a bank. We are the second largest privately held bank in the St. Louis market. We’re one of the largest banks in the state of Missouri. And I call myself the Accidental Banker because that was never in the cards for me. But I’m here and I’m at the top of my seventh inning. I’ve been married to the same woman for 25 years. And we celebrate, we’ll celebrate 26 in June and we have two kids. One is in college, a junior in the Florida area and then one is getting ready to head off to law school here in May in the D.C. Area. So we are fully empty nesters. But life is full. Life, life. We’ve got so much going on, you know, each and every day and we just feel blessed and fortunate to, to get to do the work that we get to do. My wife, she does consulting and she works with a couple non profit organizations and mostly in the healthcare space for people who are uninsured or underinsured. So yeah, that’s life. So, you know, I wrote this book and I, I wrote this, I feel like I’ve been writing this book all I, when I came out of my 20s, I was telling this older gentleman that, that I was going to write a book and he said, you know, people who write books have lived, have a lot more life lived and you know, maybe I should get some more experience. And, and little did he know that up to that point I had lived, you know, multiple lives. And I was just, I was really just incredibly fortunate to be having that conversation and you know, myself, no matter the day, that same level of gratitude for life back then is the same level of gratitude for life that I have right now. So it hasn’t, you know, it hasn’t faded, it hasn’t changed. But in my book I really frame it as a demonstration project. It’s a demonstration project. It’s a. I bear all, I bear all in terms of the things that produced me. And there was a lot of pain that produced me. But in bearing all, what I’m trying to say to the reader is you can go through a lot, but that lot doesn’t have to hold you back. You get up and keep pushing each and every day. That’s the, that’s the most powerful thing about faith. Like you just keep moving and you don’t have all of the answers. And so in life we have to apply our faith in different ways. And so that book is really this idea that in order to release yourself and make yourself of maximum use, you have to own your story, own it and then release it. And when you release it, you become a blessing. You become a blessing to others who are trapped in their own personal prisons. 

Jeff Johnson:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s so good. Orvin’s book is titled Twice Over a A Fierce Memoir of an Orphan Boy who Doggedly Determined A Finer Life. And this book has been a something you’ve worked on for how long, Orvin? Because I remember talking to you a year ago and you were knee deep in it. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
Yeah, so. So the, the bulk of the work happened over the last year and a half, two years. And I’ve started. But I started it in earnest, really, in 2019, and had starts and stops and didn’t know what kind of content I would include. I was, I was overwhelmed. I was whelmed by the content. And I say wham. I changed overwhelmed to wham. I say wham. Because I was still producing. So being overwhelmed means you’re paralyzed and you’re not doing anything. I wasn’t that. I was doing a whole lot, but I was whammed. And then I said, I really need help thinking about the structure because there’s so much content. There’s so many stories that I could tell that I think would bless people, would inspire people, would push people, would compel people. And so I ended up getting some structure a couple years ago, got some structure and really started in earnest. Day and night, weekends. It wasn’t just weekends only. It was day and it was day and night. Up early, write a couple hours, work evening. Right. And then weekends. All day. All day writing just to get this out of me. So, so yeah, it took about a year and a half. 

Jeff Johnson:
And we’re going to put a link for the book in the show notes, so everybody’s going to be able to get to it. But let’s dive in a little bit on this topic of courage, which certainly takes a lot of courage to write a book, but I would imagine there’s a lot more in there about the substance of just your journey that speaks to courage. I’m going to ask you in a minute the main question. What’s the most courageous thing you’ve ever done? But before I do that, let me get your mind on the topic of courage. How would you define that? What do you think about when you think about courage? 

Orvin Kimbrough:
I think courage is active. Courage is taking agency. It’s owning agency. It’s motion. It’s pushing forward. It’s not just thinking, it’s doing. It’s. It’s operationalizing. 

Jeff Johnson:
Nice. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
Whatever it is you are thinking. 

Jeff Johnson:
Right. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
You do. 

Jeff Johnson:
Right. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
And, and it comes up in different forms for us. I mean, courage isn’t just this, you know, this overwhelming thing that you just, you, you feel compelled to do. We make and take courageous acts each and every day. Day. Courage is saying no to that thing that, you know, is pulling you in and you choose to say no. I’m, I, I have actively said no to this thing and turn in a different direction. 

Jeff Johnson:
Yeah, and you’re doing courage and you’re. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
Doing something that’s right and doing something. 

Jeff Johnson:
You’re making me think about a proverb. I was looking up a Proverb here. Proverbs 25:14. It says, like clouds and wind without rain, a man who boasts of a gift he does not give. So it’s not about just talking a good game. It’s not about, you know, it’s about getting in the game and doing it. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
It’s about getting, it’s about the man and the woman in the arena. 

Jeff Johnson:
Yeah, I like that. Yeah, for sure. Now, who do you, when you think about courage, do some people come to mind? Do you have some people that are iconic or represent good representations of courage for you? 

Orvin Kimbrough:
Yeah, I mean, I, I certainly can think about some biblical figures, but you know, but in terms of like outside of, of the Bible, I, I would say, you know, Steve Jobs was courageous. You know, so one of the things that Steve Jobs, I heard him say this and it was almost as though he said, hey, we’re going to bend reality. And, and I don’t know what Jobs, his faith was. God bends reality. And so when you, when you plug into that divine source, good things happen. But it was this, just this idea that, hey, we can do more than we think we can do. Like, do, we can do more, we can push forward. And he did, you know, I think about people like Bill Gates who had this imagination about putting one of these devices on every desk in every home. They did, I think about in this market, a great man of faith, Dave Stewart, who started a company and had the audacity to call it Worldwide when it was just a seed, right? You can call it Worldwide. 

Jeff Johnson:
Yeah. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
And then you got up every day pushing into that vision. Remind me, Joshua in the Bible. So, so Joshua came after Moses. 

Jeff Johnson:
Yeah. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
And so, but Joshua did some things, didn’t he? 

Jeff Johnson:
Joshua did some big things. Joshua was Moses’s number one guy. And so he went through and he did all the stuff right alongside Moses, right hand man. And then when Moses handed it off and passed, he gave it to Joshua to go do a bunch of stuff. And Joshua was, how old was he? 84 or something like that. He’s an, is an old man. And then he went and did a bunch of stuff. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
He went and did a bunch of stuff. Yeah, I mean, you know, so. So what I love about what you just said is, yeah, he just went and did a bunch of stuff. I mean, so ultimately. So ultimately, when I think about people who are. Are courageous, they are doing a bunch of stuff, no matter what is going on in their life. You know, they get up each and every day and put the next foot in front of the next, and they keep moving. 

Jeff Johnson:
Yeah. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
And so I think that’s important. And I think. I think so much of. When I think about this book. I started off by saying that 70% of us in America has some form of interpersonal trauma that is intended to sabotage us, to hold us back, to steel our fight, to lessen our courage. And so. And I see it in the workplace, I see it just in society where, you know, society can beat the fight out of you, the world can beat the fight out of you. And so that. That courage, that fire. Think about when you were a little boy. I mean, like, the energy that you had. And most of us. I’m talking to our audience. When you were a little girl, that energy that you had, it was a thing. It was bright light, that courage, because you hadn’t experienced certain things that life throws at you, and then life all of a sudden threw these things at you, and. And it’s dulled your fire. And so for me, trauma. I went through a lot of trauma. And the only thing I believe that gave me the courage to keep the light burning bright was this divine connection. That’s what. That’s what. That’s what gave me the courage. Even when I didn’t have the words, like, I just. I did not know that the Holy Spirit was in me. I did not have the words for that. But back then, people would say to me, or if you’re like Martin Malcolm, you know, speaking Martin Luther King Jr. And Malcolm X, you’re like Martin Malcolm. I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t. I didn’t know what that meant. But what they were saying is. They were saying, you know, there’s something in you and around you. And they’re not saying that, you know, or if you are perfect. No, I’m broken. I’m. I’m as broken as they get. I’m. I’m just a man. But what they were seeing is that source. That. I didn’t have definition for that source back then. But what gives us the ultimate courage is to lean not on our own strength, lean not on our own understanding. But to tap into something that’s greater. Because when you get to the end of yourself and we all get to the end of ourself, what do you have? Yeah, what will give you the energy to get up and keep going, right? And it’s gotta be. It’s gotta be something big. For me is Jesus. I mean, that for me gives me the greatest courage. 

Jeff Johnson:
First Kings, chapter 19 talks about Elijah, who was at the transfiguration with Moses and Jesus. He along with Enoch were the only two people that never died. You know, God just took him up and an amazing prophet and that. First Kings 19 tells the story of Elijah after he’s just dealt with the prophets of baal, you know, the people that were BAAL worshippers and all of that kind of stuff. And Jezebel comes after him, says, I’m going to get you. And after he’s had all this amazing experience with God, he says a crazy thing. He says he was afraid and he goes and he lays down under a broom tree and he says, lord, I’m tired. Just kill me. I mean, this is the prophet baal, after he’s had all this experience with God, Just kill me. And then he falls asleep. And what does the Lord do? He brings angel with bread and water and he feeds him. And then he gets up and he sees the. And he eats the food. And then the angel does it again. More bread and water. He does it a couple times. And then Elijah gets up and goes to your definition of courage. Or, you know, he goes and does some more amazing things. Can you put yourself in that story? I mean, are you feeling the same as Elijah where you just, you come to the end of it and you’re like, I’m done. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
So, so many times, you know, when I was a, When I was five years old, I was sexually abused. And, you know, the thing about sexual abuse is. Sticks with you in a different kind of way. I mean, I’ve experienced every kind of abuse that you can think about, if you can think it. You know, I’ve experienced it. But, but sexual abuse is particularly harmful and challenging and, you know, sticks with you in a. In a way. And I remember, and this wasn’t the only time that I thought this. God, I’m just, I can’t do this. I don’t know. I don’t know why this is happening to me. And I’m five. I mean, like, I remember it like, so I still, I mean, like, it’s not a. It’s not a, oh, I faintly, no, no, I, I remember. And, and so when you get to the end of yourself, even as that little boy, and you say, God, I’m just, I can’t just take me like I would prefer, I would prefer not to even be alive. And I don’t know, I think God, much like the story that you just told, kept dropping bread and water and milk all in my life and giving me the strength to push through. When my mother died, we moved with a cousin, and she didn’t have any kids, and she was incredibly abusive. And I tell the stories of, of my experience with her in the book, but same thing, you’re getting beat and it beats the fight out of you. And you say, Laura, I, it, I remember talking to my counselor back then, and I said, you know, after one of these beatings, I tried to drown myself in a tub of water. Now, I know now that you can’t drown yourself in a tub of water. Your will kicks in. And when I was talking to my counselor, you know, he hugged me as only, as I thought only a father could. And he said, your life matters. What were you thinking? And I said, I don’t know that I was thinking. I just, I don’t know that I wanted to kill myself, but I wanted to kill the pain. And so even in that moment, I think that was bread and water, that was milk, that was substance that God gave me. In that moment, you get to the end of yourself, and when you have no more fight, God shows up for you in a way that is unexplainable. And I cannot explain it. And the fact that you’re telling this story and I’m thinking about it this way, I’ve never thought about it this way. 

Jeff Johnson:
Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Orvin, thank you for sharing that. I, I, I want to know a whole lot more about your story. And I think what I’m going to do is I’m going to stop right here and I’m going to ask you the question, what’s the most courageous thing you’ve ever done, Orvin? 

Orvin Kimbrough:
So I, I, I’ve been thinking about that question since you positioned it a few minutes ago. And, you know, I started off thinking, well, maybe it was when I told my mom that I was being sexually abused. And the reason that I, I think about that is because on the other side of it, the person who was abusing me told me that if I ever said anything he would kill me and he would kill my siblings. So I was five and I told my mom and I grabbed her leg and using five year old language. And so I thought, well, maybe that was the most courageous thing. And then I said, well, you know, maybe the most courageous thing that I did was still loving Shirley, my cousin who abused us and loving her after she was incapacitated. Loving her, still loving her just for taking us in, despite the trauma that she caused. And then I said, well, maybe the most courageous thing was just still loving my mom. You know, my mom died of alcohol and drug abuse, and so she was never there for us as kids. So the abuse that Uncle Curtis exacted upon me happened when I was in the care of my mom. But my mom once told me that she didn’t love me and that I was a mistake. So maybe the most courageous thing that I’ve ever done was to say, you know what? I found peace within me and I forgive you. I forgive you. I, I. That, that action of like, for me, forgiveness is an action. Yeah, it’s an action. It’s not. It, it’s an action. It’s not, it’s not a thought, it’s an action. So maybe that’s it. 

Jeff Johnson:
See, this is. You’re. I’m so glad that I asked you for your definition of courage before we heard what you just shared with us, because you talk about. It’s an action. You talk about getting up and keeping moving and going and doing. Would you consider yourself a courageous person? I hope so. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
I, I could consider myself a courageous person because I get up every day and I give it one more day, and that’s all I can do. I’m not, I have not survived. I am surviving. And so the very act that you get up each and every day and you keep moving toward the destiny, toward the goal that God’s put out there for you, then you’re being courageous each and every day. Courage is a daily act. It’s a daily act. 

Jeff Johnson:
See, that’s exactly it. I think I can ask people the question, what’s the most courageous thing you’ve ever done in your life? But I can also ask them, what’s the most courageous thing you’ve done today? And people would have answer for that. You know, I got up and I went to work. You know, I hugged my wife, I read a book to my kid. You know, whatever it is, when I felt like doing something else, you know, I mean, and it’s not being flippant. I mean, those are all courageous, you know, just getting one day after the next. The action that you so aptly defined courage as being. Orvin, your story’s fantastic. And I’m telling you, I’m reminding my listeners we’re talking to Orvin Kimbrough, the author of Twice Over a Man, a fierce memoir of an orphan boy who doggedly determined to find her life. Highly recommended to all of our listeners, and the link will be in our show notes, so please go get yourself a copy or 10. I learned this in recovery as well, and I’m curious what your mind is about it. We say that we don’t regret the things of the past, nor do we wish to repeat them. We comprehend the word serenity, and we’ve come to know peace. So I wonder, you know, in the context of recovery, you can imagine, you know, we make so many mistakes of our own volition. You know, we. We turn left when were supposed to turn right. And so we say that in that context, that we don’t regret the things of the past, nor do we wish to repeat them. We comprehend the word serenity and we’ve come to know peace. But given the power of your story and what you’ve gone through in your life, I’m curious how you hear that statement. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
I don’t regret the things of my past, nor do I wish to repeat them. I’ve come to know serenity. And so I think our lives, the journey, the experiences make us who we are today. I think I’m a much more compassionate leader because of my experiences. I see people even when they don’t think. I see them, even when the mask is up. I see people’s trauma. I see people’s hopes. I see people’s aspirations because I’m in touch with my traumas. I’m in touch with my hopes. I’m in touch with my aspirations. So I don’t. I really believe that you can’t anchor to the past. If you anchor to the past, it will decelerate you. The accelerate you. And so understand the past. Use it as fuel. Use it as energy to help you push forward. I think about pain and trauma and the past as energy. I mean, it gives me energy, it helps me. It helps me focus. I think about how those experiences frame my relationships with my family, my kids, how those experiences shape how I show up in the. In the world, and I turn all of the past into a competitive advantage. 

Jeff Johnson:
That’s a good way to put it. Tell me more about that. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
So. So you think about it. So a competitive advantage. The only thing that differentiates you in this world is your story. Come on. 

Jeff Johnson:
Right. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
It differentiates you, and it’s how you leverage your story, how you. How. How you take your story and package it in a way that it gives momentum and energy and encouragement and. And. And inspiration to other people. I didn’t say motivation. I said inspiration. Motivation comes from within. When. And so when. When. When people have sort of energy and they, you know, they are. They are inspired. You’ve shared your story, Jeff. They are inspired to do something. And when that motivation that’s in them, that may be dormant starts to bubble up and connect with your narrative, your story, how you overcame whatever it was you overcame, great things happen, and great things happen for society. I mean, think about people who. Who say, man, that person right there, that is who inspired me. Yes, you were inspired externally, but you’ve got to have the internal drive and the motivation, and it’s there. It might just be dormant. 

Jeff Johnson:
Mm. Mm. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
So competitive advantage. So the competitive advantage is. My story is a competitive advantage. It shapes how I show up and how I differentiate in the marketplace. 

Jeff Johnson:
Mm. When you are. You already mentioned, you know, your faith and your reliance on God, so I might be asking a redundant question here, but I’m curious. When you were going through your darkest times, did you have a sense of, I just have to endure. You know, we talked about the Elijah, you know, just kill me now, Lord, because it’s too hard. So there’s always the, you know, that dip into the valley. But what kept you going? What was the flavor of courage that kept you persevering? 

Orvin Kimbrough:
I. I think for me, I got to. When I got to the end of me, I said, I just have to surrender. And. And you don’t surrender to man. We’re in the arena. I ain’t surrendering to you. 

Jeff Johnson:
Did you have faith like that when you were five? 

Orvin Kimbrough:
No. No. I don’t know. What I’m telling you is I don’t know that I believe that God has always been in me, and I could not name it. 

Jeff Johnson:
I see. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
And so even at 5. At 5, it was more of just one day, after the next day, and after the next day. But this is only after years of introspection, of saying, you know, I surrendered because I. I. So at that stage, I didn’t have control over my environment when I didn’t have control over my life until I was maybe 15 or 16. And. And so I. I had to come to an understanding of I don’t know that. I said, hey, I have to endure. I did come to an understanding that I have to surrender. And there’s something greater. There has to be. I grew up, my environment, where I was born in East St. Louis, it’s one of the poorest places in America. Where I. Where I grew up in north St. Louis, one of the poorest places in America. And so my environment was tough and life taking. And it was also life giving. It was life giving. If you look at it as fuel, if you look at it as well, it’s a competitive advantage. And so for me, when I think about surrendering, I surrender to God. And then I say, okay, I’ve surrendered to God. There are three things that are so important. No matter what stage of life you are in, whether you are a professional and you are in the workplace and you are trying to figure out what your next move is, whether you have undergone significant trauma as a young person, there are three things you have to reframe your thinking. That’s first and foremost, instead of asking, why did this happen to me? Why is this happening to me? What is it that I’m supposed to learn from it? That’s the question that you ask. So I got to a point to say, okay, there must be something, Lord, that I’m supposed to learn from this. There must be something. And so the very fact that I’m on that journey of trying to figure out what is it that I’m supposed to learn. And when you learn something, you do something. The next step is personal agency. So part of the doing for me was to share my life as a demonstration project. That’s part of the doing. Part of the doing is to do it. Afraid. So when we talk about courage and risk taking, the fact that I have put in this book the horrible, detailed facts of my life for all to review and read, you know, that’s me honoring my God. 

Jeff Johnson:
Wow. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
Who said you, you surrender, reframe your thinking, reclaim personal agency. Because you can act on the world. And when you act on the world and you do it in love, you unleash other people to live into their highest and brightest best to maximize what they do for God and to others. 

Jeff Johnson:
Yeah, just such a blessing why you wrote the book and, and to have that kind of insight, Orvin, is amazing to me. I mean, go to going through it because I’m sure that there’s a lot of people that go through this similar thing that you go through and they make a different choice you know, to not do that. What can you tell our listeners? I mean, you just did. But is there anything else that you can say to our listeners about how to tap into that thing when you’re going in the middle of the grinder or you’re Elijah laying under the broom tree? You know, to not give up, to keep pressing on, to really be courageous and keep moving. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
So I think the punchline is take the focus off of you. 

Jeff Johnson:
Yeah. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
So my brother recently died. He. He was 48, and he died January 31, and he was in hospice. My brother was shot when he was 17 years old. My freshman sophomore year in college. He was shot multiple times. And we grew up tough. And so it’s not statistically unexpected. What’s statistically unexpected is I’m sitting here talking to you. So I’m talking to him, and I went to see him every day when he was in hospice and asked him if it was okay to record some of our discussions and say, sure. And I said, man, when were kids and you got shot and all of that went down, and I moved you to Columbia, Missouri, where I was in school at Mizzou. And he was a. He was a quadriplegic. So he went to Rusk Rehabilitation center to learn to breathe and, you know, to try to get some. Some mobility. He never got any mobility. And I said, I expose you to people who had gone through traumatic situations as an example of a future fraternity brother of mine who was a paraplegic. He had been shot, too. And he was in law school, and he had the baddest chick on campus. And he was in law school. Baddest chick on campus. I mean. And so I had all these brothers just pouring into my brother, and I said, you don’t have the use of your limbs, but you still have the use of your mind. Those were words I said to him back then. Back then. So I’m having this conversation with him. He’s on his deathbed. And I said, you know, you were the smartest of us. What happened? Why did you give up? My brother and I, our relationship has, over the years, been mostly estranged. I’ve been there, you know, as best I could. But what was challenging for me was he gave up on life. And it’s hard for me to be in environments where people just. You know, you just give up. Yeah, stuff happens to us, but you can’t give up, because I can’t do for you what only you can do. You need to do for yourself. So you have to tap into something. You have to get to the end of yourself and tap into something. You have to take the focus off of you and tap into something and then realize what you can do for yourself. So he said to me, he said, brother, I remember all of it. I’m so grateful. I’m thankful for you. But when I got shot, it stole my soul. Those were his words. It stole my soul. I could not. And, and he did not. He could not. And he. His words, he could not. So he did not. And so when I think about our listeners, I think the most challenging place to be in life, and I’ve been there, is to be hopeless. So when you get to the end of yourself, there has to be something more. Because if there’s not something more, boy, you surrender to man. You give up, because that’s not surrendering to God, that’s you surrendering to man. You’ve given up on life. And when that happens, people jump off of stuff. 

Jeff Johnson:
Yeah. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
Literally and figuratively. 

Jeff Johnson:
Yeah. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
And so I just want people to be encouraged no matter where they are, Jeff, in life, whether they are going through a family situation, whether they are going through a work situation, just be encouraged. Get to the end of yourself. Take the focus off of you. Place the focus on God, and God is ultimately going to place the focus on other people. That’s what happens. And you start pouring into other people and helping them live into their vision and becoming their best. It does something on the inside of you. So when I think about my mission in life, because I was a kid, I said, I’m always going to help. When I got into college, I said, well, it got refined. I said, my objective, my North Star, is to create conditions to help people live better lives, period. And by doing that, by focusing on God and then doing that, being in relationship with God and being in relationship with people, by pouring into people, my life has been richer. 

Jeff Johnson:
Wow. Amen. Amen. Amen. I don’t know if I could put a better finish and touch on our time together, Orban, than that. Is there anything that you would like to say on the topic of courage or anything else about your book that hasn’t been said, brother? 

Orvin Kimbrough:
All I would say is my encouragement to people has been, don’t just get it, just read it. Just don’t just get it and read it and share it. And it’s not my story anymore. This is God’s story. 

Jeff Johnson:
You tell me, fit yourself to be of maximum service to God and to your fellows. You say that I’m doing that, Orvin, you’re doing that, my friend. And I’m a better man for knowing you. So I knew you before you wrote the book. I knew you while you were writing the book. And I know you after having written the book. And I’m a better man for it. Orvin, thanks for joining us today. 

Orvin Kimbrough:
It’s been a blessing and an honor. Thank you. 

Outro
Thank you for joining us today on Courageous. If you’d like to hear more about the work and ministry being done at Crossroads Apologetics, please visit our home on the web@crossroadsapologetics.org Would you or someone you know like to be featured on Courageous? Send us an email at infoossroadsapologetics.com or infoorossroadsapologetics.org telling us about the most courageous things thing you’ve ever done.