TESTIMONY
Nigel Anderson: Finding His Father
By Sheryl Fountain
The 700 Club
CBN.com
– Rap artist Legin exploded onto the music scene in 2009, winning the best male rap artist at the Youth Gospel Entertainment awards. His distictive rhymes interweave past pains with his restored faith in God.
To his friends and family, he is simply known as Nigel Anderson. Growing up, Nigel was always in church, but his home life was far from peaceful.
"My father was an alcoholic," he tells The 700 Club. "He ended up getting addicted to drugs and some hard stuff, and my mother would shelter me from that stuff. I was never really exposed to those things, but he would come home drunk, high, and she was getting emotional abused because of that. She was trying to work her hardest to save her marriage. She stuck by him, but he just made a decision to stay with those things."
Despite her efforts to help, his mother decided to leave.
"She didn’t want to hold on to that relationship at the risk of endangering my life and let me be exposed to things that could’ve messed me up."
Over the next 15 years, Nigel rarely saw his father.
Anger and bitterness against began to build.
"Most people that know me would say I was a good guy, good reputation, kind of chill, but on the inside, I was dying man. I was hurting."
He escaped by attending parties and having sex.
"I was so hurt by dad not caring enough to be a man, I was like, 'Whatever man, I’m just going to do what I want to do.'
I had some sort of control over my life when I was doing what I wanted to do all the time."
He began to experiment with music.
"I began to make beats. I found out I was good at writing rhymes.
I just began to dive wholeheartedly into music, just rapping about any and everything. My goal was always to write a check to buy my mom a house. I really wanted to do that 'cause she gave up a lot for me."
Nigel got a job working for a finance company. It provided him with the lifestyle he always wanted.
"I was brought under the wing of a very prominent person in the company. It was like one of those quick rises to fame."
He discovered his boss was defrauding the company, and he was out of a job. He says, "When you open your eyes and you saw that you were manipulated into just building up somebody else’s pockets, you began to realized that [you've] been lied to again.
It's just another black dude that let me down."
He received a letter from his father inviting him to lunch.
"I don’t know what I was going to do, but I know I wanted to cause him some pain. I wanted him to feel what I had been feeling for 15 years. I wanted him to suffer some.
"I remember walking up behind him to go meet this man who had caused me so much pain. At first it was like tears in my eyes and then it turned to anger. This was payback time. When I walk up to this dude, I’m just going to punch him in the face. I touched him and he turned around. I saw a man in his 50s that looked like he was 80.
He just said he was sorry.
All that anger just turned to pity immediately.
"I said, 'Dad, I forgive you.' The beautiful thing about that moment was that was for the first time that I think I’d ever felt somebody else experience freedom."
A few months later his father passed away. Nigel began to ponder what happens after death.
He began to seek God for answers.
"I decided to know who this God guy was. I just cried out to Him and I told Him, 'I need You. If You’re really there, I need You to talk to me.' The funny thing is He began to talk back to me in my heart and prove who He was."
Nigel surrendering his life to God.
Opportunities for music began to open up.
"Doors opened. The Lord connected me with people. I met great people.
I get to see God do for someone else what He did for me."
Nigel married and is expecting his first child. He says, "Without having a natural father, I know I am going to be a good father to my child because God’s been a good father to me."
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