Pastor Joe

They used to call him Crazy Joe.

Ten years of drinking. A slew of relationships he now calls infatuation, not love. A temper he aimed at women in words instead of fists — and a father's habits he swore he'd never repeat, right up until he became them.

Then, at 28, drunk at a Super Bowl party, he raced a man across the snow, fell, and tore the tip of his big toe off. He limped home with his shoe in his hand and stopped at his one-year-old daughter's crib, the way he always did. And he heard God say: A child can't raise a child.

He went to church the next Sunday and never looked back.

In this episode of Resilience is Power, Pastor Joe Scott tells the whole story — the boy dragged to the front row of church by his mother, the 19-year-old who found freedom in the military and lost himself in it, the master barber running "the Holy Ghost Corner" in an East Baltimore shop, and the officer God pointed at from the side of I-95. Twenty-six years later he retired as Chief of the Maryland Transportation Authority Police, the first African American to hold the post.

He also tells the part most testimonies skip: the pruning. His wife's health scare. A hard season with his son. The stress of command, and the thing men do instead of dealing with it — shut down. "God won't allow that," he says. "Not for me."

His daughter is 36 now. She has never met the man he used to be.

"I'm sharing my testimony — but that doesn't have to be your story. You don't need to take the long way. You can take a direct route."