Drug Dealer Lifestyle Couldn’t Satisfy
“We drinking the best cocktails, and smoking the best marijuana, got the freshest clothes on. We are around millionaire drug dealers.” It was a natural decision for Wendell White to become a drug dealer. Growing up in poverty on the southside of Chicago, he was surrounded by dealers who’d made a fortune.
He recalls, “Real life people that we know have a million dollars in cash money selling drugs. We want the million dollars. We want the Ferraris and the Bentleys and that we see the big-time drug dealers driving. That was the fuel for everybody. It was money. We were only doing this for money.”
It was also the family business. He says, “My mom, she wasn't on – addicted to any drugs, but she sold drugs so that mean she was out of the home a lot. So, she ran the streets a lot. So, it was pretty much us raising ourselves.” Which left Wendell, the second oldest of nine children, to take care of his siblings. Not only did Wendell grow up fatherless, he also lacked the love and affirmation he needed. He remembers, “sometimes I'll just lay down and just cry myself to sleep. I just didn't want to be there. You know, so I was alone.”
While his mom never made the big money, his uncle did. Wendell worshiped the man, hoping to one day be just like him. Wendell recalls, “I looked up to him because he had everything that, at the time, that I thought meant something. He had money, he had cars, he had all the women.” So, it wasn’t long before Wendell joined a gang, following in his uncle’s footsteps. He says, “I started selling drugs, actually for myself when I was like 13 or 14 years old. We were just in to, you know, try to escape the poverty-stricken lives that we were living. It made me feel a part of something. You know, it felt like a family.”
By 17, Wendell felt like he had arrived. “Man, I was loving it. We got the motorcycles, we got fancy cars. We living the lifestyle of the rich and famous, that we was thinking. You know, like everybody wanted to live this life.” A life that also included violence, gang wars, and constant threat of going to prison. Things Wendell just took in stride. He says, “I wasn't scared of the police. I wasn't scared of the rival gangs. I wasn't scared, none of that. It was kill or be killed. And I wasn't scared to die, nor was I scared to kill anyone.”
Then came a devastating betrayal. What Wendell thought was a drug deal with a rival gang member turned out to be a set up. He was beaten and forced to pay $100,000 dollars in cash and drugs before landing in the hospital for six weeks. The man who set him up was his uncle.
Wendell says, “I felt betrayed. Somebody that I had looked up to all my life and they had betrayed me. I was lost. I just didn't understand, like why would somebody, you know, that I love so dearly, do me like that?” Then, when his gang wanted revenge, Wendell wouldn’t give-up his uncle’s location. So, they kicked him out.
He says, “They turned their backs on me. And again, I was all alone again, you know. I was just in a real, real rough place. I was broken. I was really, really broken. I was hurt.”
Moving on with life, Wendell forgave his uncle, and for the next 10 years moved between Milwaukee and Chicago trying to rebuild his drug business. For a while he did well, until his suppliers decided to cut him out, leaving him broke, and on his own again. He recalls, “Everybody that was around me had left me. I was alone again. And man, I went through a real deep depression.”
In 2014, at age 33, Wendell reconnected with Raneshia, an ex-girlfriend. She had been going through her own dark times and convinced him going to church might help. They ended up going twice. The second Sunday, Wendell says he felt God speaking directly to him. He says, “It's like God saying like, ‘I can help you. Like I can help you. I can help take that pain away. I can help you.’ And then, as I sat there and thought, ‘I done tried everything else. But I've never tried God’."
So, at the end of the service, he and Raneshia went up front and committed their lives to Christ. Wendell says, “I felt like the weight of the world had lifted off my shoulders. I said, ‘man, if I'mma do it, I'mma do it right’.”
The couple soon married and began their new life and faith journey together. Wendell admits it wasn’t easy, as he sometimes sold drugs to make up what his day job paycheck didn’t cover. Eventually though, with the discipleship and prayers of his church, he learned to fully trust God in every situation.
He says, “I appreciate everything that I went through. I appreciate the slip ups and the fall. I appreciate all that, because they got me to the point where I'm at right now.”
Today he’s fully dedicated to God with a loving family, a good job, and ready to share his faith with anyone he meets. He says, “All I try to do now is I try to impact as many people as I possibly can and lead them back to Christ to let them know the same God did it for me, He'll do it for you. And once you understand who God is, man, you know, man, you've got a friend in Jesus.”
