Rocky Road to a New Life : Armed Clinton was headed in the wrong direction. He hung out with gangs, dealt drugs. But now, he’s determined to put that life behind him and to become a minister.

When he ran the streets, Amed Clinton remembers how, during drug pickups, thoughts of jail suddenly crossed his mind and chilled his heart.

That fear always passed. But the worrying about his soul never went away.

“I was most afraid of dying,” recalls Clinton, 20, “and ending up in Hell.”

The way he lived, the two went hand in hand. “And Hell was the most frightening thing of all,” he says. “Hell don’t end.”

Still, it took more than fear to re-christen a drug peddler’s spirit--even if Clinton’s tired mind wouldn’t let him rest, and his conscience throbbed so that he could barely stand his own reflection.

Preacherly advice offered on a church step helped some.

And, then, there was the vision.

He was lying at the foot of his mother’s bed when he saw it. But he knew this was no dream.

It had come before, when Clinton was a boy. He had wanted to go to the bathroom, but the shadowy figure told him to stay in bed. He had tried to call his daddy but couldn’t utter a sound. Frightened, he lay there until sleep finally came.

This time he was a grown man. But Clinton was no less afraid. “It’s time for you to stop,” he recalls the faceless shadow saying before it faded. “I’m not playing with you.”

“I made the change right then,” he says. “I knew it came from God.”

That was two years ago. And it has been a bumpy road ever since.

Clinton has been arrested twice in the last year. The first was on outstanding traffic warrants and led to a brief stay in jail. The second was on a burglary charge during the L.A. riots. He says he’s innocent, but pleaded no contest last week.

He’s had trouble finding a job and has as many problems as a young man can handle. Still, he hopes to put his troubles behind him and become a minister.

“I get tested every day,” Clinton says. “We may fail more than we pass. (But) the most important thing is once we fail it, we don’t fail again.”

At age 14, Clinton reached the fork in the road--the place that stretches in one direction toward a system that too often has a lock on its gate and in the other toward the chaos and violence of the streets.

He had grown up the youngest of three children in a neighborhood of small stucco homes in South-Central Los Angeles. School was all right--even though he says he didn’t hit the books as hard as he could have--and he earned a diploma from Locke High School. Clinton loved to play a brisk game of hoop, but he longed to be a doctor.

To understand why he gave in to street life, he explains, you have to understand its allure: “When I was running with the crowd, I felt like I had power. I felt important, (like) I was the man.”

He admits that for four years he went the wrong way. He hung out with gang members--even toyed with the idea of joining one, but never did.

Clinton liked that he could walk down the street and people he didn’t know would call his name. Still, he says, he never totally felt as if he belonged. Sometimes he’d be with friends, drinking and shooting the breeze, when he’d suddenly get weary and want to be alone.

“The guys would say, ‘Where you going?’ ” Clinton recalls, “and I’d say, I’m going home. I’m tired.”

There were no arrests, but there were many warnings: He was shot at once by someone he knew, and he couldn’t sleep at night for the people knocking on his door.

Still, none of that changed him.

“The thing that turned me off was I might have been somebody to some people,” Clinton says, “but nobody to myself.”

Alberta Clinton remembers the strangers at her door.

“I heard the gate rattling and I see this (guy) sliding through,” she says.

The man pretended he owed money to one of her two sons. But she knew better. “I said I know what you came here for,” she recalls, “and don’t come to my door anymore.”

Alberta Clinton couldn’t watch her youngest son every minute. A single parent, she worked long night hours at a company that made jars to support her children.

Amed Clinton waited until his mother wasn’t around to peddle crack and sell guns from the trunk of his car. He even asked her for spending money, pretending he needed it.

But Alberta Clinton knew something was going on, by the people Amed hung out with, by the wired people who sometimes showed up at her door.

Amed’s girlfriend, Carmen Witherspoon, remembers that time as well. They met at a Metro Rail station and she found him charming, sweet. They had a friend in common and before long they began dating.

She says that she didn’t know Clinton sold drugs, although she wondered how he earned all that cash. And what was the deal with the pager he carried, always going off, and him running out?

When he changed, it seemed quick, abrupt.

“I think he got tired of that life,” Witherspoon says, pleased, “and I guess God was giving him warnings.”

Alberta Clinton had prayed for it. “I thank God for reaching him,” she says. “He could’ve stayed the way he was. I’ve got friends whose sons are gang bangers. I’m praying he continues to stay in the word.”

The Rev. Robert Henry remembers when he met Amed Clinton.

Clinton would pull his car up in front of Tree of Life Baptist Church in Watts and drop Witherspoon at the door.

“He’d be ready to go home, and I would ask why wasn’t he staying,” Henry says. “He’d say, ‘I’ll be here next Sunday.’ And the next, and the next. . . .”

One day, Clinton kept his word.

“Rev. Henry I guess always saw something in me,” Clinton says of the man he considers a spiritual mentor. “The first thing I did was join the choir. I guess that was the way.”

Henry heads Tree of Life’s departments of evangelism and music, and he spends much of his time with the church’s young members, many of whom have only one parent to give them guidance.

Henry has helped many find their way to Christ but says he is realistic about the difficulties they will have following in the footsteps of Jesus: “I’m scared when they become instant Christians. It don’t happen overnight with nobody.”

It’s enough that they grow in it every day, as Clinton has, Henry says, and he wishes more would do the same. “You’ve got so many of our young men who don’t want to turn loose what’s out in the world,” he says. “It’s hard to do your brother in when you’re got the fear of God in you.”

Clinton is no saint and doesn’t pretend to be. He oversleeps from time to time, missing Sunday School. And on more than one occasion, the Voices of Watts choir has been ready to sing when Clinton has darted in late, racing to his seat, his robe rustling behind him.

A tall, handsome man with skin the color of caramel, Clinton tries to ignore the romantic ballads he used to love, popping a gospel tape into the cassette player instead. But some songs he can’t resist, such as Shanice Wilson’s “I Love Your Smile.”

Most of the time he seems like any other young man, except when he spends a sunny afternoon in his mother’s back yard, reading the Bible instead of playing ball. Or when he quotes Scriptures to a stranger the way other young people recite baseball scores.

So it wasn’t a surprise when Clinton stood before the congregation, his heart pounding, his hands on fire, and said he would become a minister.

Clinton says he had had dreams in which he saw himself at the pulpit; moments in which he leafed through the pages of the Bible and found his finger resting inexplicably on passages that spoke of preaching.

He talked to his pastor for weeks about what he should do. And they decided that Clinton had no choice--if he was being called, he had to answer.

“It’s not something I want to be,” he said later. “It’s what I am. It’s what God intended me to be.”

The red chairs, where church members sit to make a statement or request a prayer, were pulled before the altar on that February Sunday. Clinton sat briefly in one, then stood and spoke.

“It was the most fearful day of my life,” he remembers. “My whole body was shaking.

“I told everybody if I was going to call myself a Christian, I have to carry a cross and take part in the ministry.” He will be ordained later this summer.

Henry understands. “His thing is he’s gone through so much wrong that he don’t want to go that way no more.”

But the minister also has words of caution: “Just because you accepted Christ don’t mean all your troubles are going to go away.”

It hasn’t been difficult to leave behind the crack sales, Clinton says; a former partner makes an offer, you shake your head no and walk away.

But there are more difficult temptations to resist, much harder tests to pass. Those that present themselves in a moment of rage, when you want to strike out. Those that come when you are with a loved one, lying in the dark. Those that enter your life and turn your world upside down, leaving you standing there, looking heavenward--and asking why.

A few months ago, Clinton found out Witherspoon was pregnant.

It was unplanned, and Clinton says that conflict briefly rumbled inside him when he discovered that he and his girlfriend had conceived out of wedlock. But Clinton reasoned with himself--”We don’t change overnight. Somebody would be lying if they said they did”--and the rumbling passed.

Witherspoon is pretty and 17, with long braids and a year to go before high school graduation. Clinton wants to marry her, and the child has solidified his commitment.

He hits the pavement daily, hustling to find a job to support himself and his budding family. He looks for full-time work in the evenings so he can continue going to Compton Community College. He wants to work in an office, typing or fiddling with computers.

Before long, Clinton just wanted something, anything at all.

Again, he reasons. It’s hard to find work in a recession, with no college degree, in the shadow of riots. So he keeps searching.

It’s much harder to reason away pain.

On the Sunday before Father’s Day, Witherspoon miscarried their baby girl.

Maybe, Clinton says, the Lord didn’t think it would be right, an unmarried minister preaching, his child crying in the pews. Maybe the Lord thought Witherspoon should have a diploma and he a good job before they brought a baby into the world. Maybe, Clinton says, “I’m going through that Job phase.”

It doesn’t matter. “Regardless of what the word says, I still feel a lot of hurt,” he says, “because she was my child and I was looking forward to it.”

While at the hospital, sitting with Witherspoon, Clinton turned the pages of his Bible and found a passage in the book of Isaiah: “For a small moment have I forsaken thee; but with great mercies will I gather thee.”

At that moment, he recalls, he didn’t question his faith. Nor did he question why he had lost his daughter.

But Clinton did have something to ask God:

“When you gonna gather me up with those tender mercies?”

Sean Davis is standing in front of an apartment in the Jordan Downs Housing Project when the caravan comes around the bend.

The group, from Tree of Life Baptist Church, is spreading the word about an upcoming revival. And Clinton, towering above the crowd, spots someone from his high school days.

“Hey,” Davis says as Clinton walks over to greet him. They shake hands, and Davis seems ready for the usual questions: “How you doin? When you last seen. . . ?”

But Davis isn’t ready for Clinton’s invitation.

“You’ve got to take a step,” Clinton says, gently urging Davis to come by the church. “Don’t sit around and let your light die out.”

Clinton explains: “I’m still a regular person. It’s just that I have God in my life now. I don’t need a bunch of friends on the corner.” Then he hands Davis a booklet and goes on his way.

Clinton says he can relate to young black men hesitant to put their faith in church. He understands the questions about peace of mind, about survival.

“I had those questions myself,” he says. He has found the answers, along with solace, in the word of God.

“I would recommend Christ to anyone,” Clinton says. “I’m still dealing. But in a good thing now.”

Clinton remembers driving home the second night of the L.A. riots, pulling over to let a firetruck pass, when officers swarmed his car.

He says they had no reason. Police say he was one of seven men who burglarized a business, a felony.

He was released on $5,000 bail and at a July 8 pretrial hearing pleaded no contest to a reduced misdemeanor charge. Clinton, who says he acted on the advice of his attorney, says he knew he was innocent, but was unsure how a trial would turn out.

“The main thing I was concerned about was going to jail,” he says.

The situation has strained his relationship with some church members, who believe that he must have done something wrong. And Witherspoon is unhappy.

Clinton believes that everything probably happened for a reason. Like when he spent time in jail earlier this year for outstanding traffic warrants and wound up leading three men to the Lord.

When he was locked up, Clinton says, he didn’t understand why.

“But when I left,” he says, “I knew why I had come.”