“Blessed are those whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the one whose sin the Lord will never count against them.”
—ROMANS 4:7–8
As brown, lead-laden water gushed from the faucets of Flint, Michigan, twenty-eight-year-old Noah Patton, the single father of three, faced yet another affliction in a long line of tragedies. But this time Noah’s plight drew the eyes of a watching nation:
“ ‘Our Mouths Were Ajar’: Doctor’s Fight to Expose Flint’s Water Crisis”1
“Flint Mother: I’m Worried My Son Will Wake Up Different”2
“The Poisoning of an American City”3
The headlines appropriately reflected the anguish of a city already ravaged by problems and once labeled one of “America’s most dangerous cities.”4
Noah’s youngest daughter, Mercedes, was exposed to lead at the young age of two. “I don’t know if she’s a crybaby because of the lead. I don’t know if she whines because of the lead . . . as of right now, I really don’t know the effects yet,” Noah told me. “I don’t know about lead, but I’m sure they call it poison for a reason.”
The level of lead poisoning in the children of Flint was so high that some experts said it was equivalent to children’s lead exposure in war-torn countries like Iraq. Dr. Mozhgan Savabieasfahani claims, “The high level of extremely toxic lead in children of Fallujah resembles very much the same amount of lead poisoning in the children of Flint.”5 The consequences of such exposure can be life changing. Lead is linked to “lower IQs, less verbal competence, worse speech processing, and worse attention.”6 In addition to developmental effects and brain damage, lead exposure has been linked to miscarriages, hair loss, and other physical ailments.7
In January of 2016, a federal state of emergency was declared in the blighted Michigan city. Two years earlier, the city of Flint had changed its source of water from neighboring Detroit to the Flint River.8 For decades, the Flint River had received all sorts of toxins from the automotive plants that dotted its shores.9 Now the lead- and toxin-filled water streamed right through the faucets and showerheads of Flint’s homes. Flint residents complained about the putrid, discolored water for eighteen months, but Flint officials assured everyone that the water was perfectly fine.10 “There are a lot of bigwigs in Flint,” Noah told me. “Some people who worked in the city were drinking bottled water before they told us.” Although these Michigan Department of Environmental Quality officials claimed the bottled water was provided in response to a city health notice and not because of lead poisoning, residents like Noah are understandably frustrated that they were encouraged to drink from their taps.11
But Flint wasn’t always a town plagued by problems and forgotten by government. For much of the 1900s, Flint was a booming auto hub, with General Motors employing nearly half of the residents. For many in the African-American community, Flint represented hope.
“My granddad comes from Clarksdale, Mississippi,” Noah informed me. “He used to tell me all the time that his granddad was a slave. He showed me a piece of cotton and everything.” Noah explained that when his grandparents and great-grandparents lived in the Mississippi Delta, they would pray to God for opportunity. “Places like Flint were made for an African-American gentleman to actually thrive and slam his Cadillac door and pay his bills and, you know, buy land,” Noah detailed. “It wasn’t nothing like down South. You know, Flint was up North. And it was free, so Flint was the American dream for a black person for a long time.”
Flint was the American Dream in large part because companies like GM were willing to invest. Not only did GM invest in their factory, they invested in the community as a whole. In fact, Noah’s childhood home—once vibrant, now vacant—was built by General Motors in 1919. His neighborhood, Civic Park, was the first planned subdivision in Flint. “Our city is beautiful—was beautiful,” Noah caught himself. “And we got, like, big old homes and everything. Everything is big, but then the shops left out of nowhere.” Now foreclosed homes dot the streets. Drifters and drug addicts languish where enterprising families once lived. Schools once buzzing with students stand vacant and decaying. “Once the money left . . . our city just diminished,” Noah recalled—right before his very eyes.
At its height, some 80,000 Flint residents worked for GM. Today, just 5,000 Flint inhabitants work for the automotive company.12 After GM closed, there was a mass exodus out of Flint. More than 100,000 people fled the area, leaving Flint with a population of just over 97,000.13 In addition to being one of the most crime-ridden cities in America, Flint is also one of the poorest, with more than 40 percent of residents living in poverty.14
“The feeling of depression is still around Flint,” Noah said. “If I didn’t know God, I would be like everyone else running around here, feeling like we living in the end of time. That’s what it feels like when you walk through Flint. You don’t have any clean drinking water. Every house but two houses on the street is abandoned. At least five people get killed every other day.” In fact, a young man and fellow church member portrayed in a short film about Noah’s life was killed at age twenty-seven, shortly after filming was completed.15 The devastation in Flint closely mirrored the personal affliction that racked Noah’s early years of life. But for Noah an encounter with the poisoned water of Flint would change his life forever.
On Wednesday, November 13, 2003, fifteen-year-old Noah Patton lazily opened his big brown eyes as light poured into his white-walled, window-filled childhood home. It seemed like just another ordinary day: school and breakfast with his three siblings and mother crowded around the kitchen table. But today was not ordinary. Far from it. It was a day he would never forget, a day that would send his life into a downward spiral.
But, you see, Noah was aptly named after a biblical character like his three siblings and dozens of his cousins. Noah was well suited for the youngest Patton son. In the infamous Genesis account, Noah’s ark saves him from the deadly waters that flooded the earth and rid it of violence and corruption. A similar torrential storm was heading the teenage Noah’s way, one filled with death, suicide, guns, violence, and drugs. Even though literal floodwaters were not approaching Noah’s Flint home, poisonous water of another kind was. And unfortunately, at least at first, Noah would not have an ark to save him.
As Noah got ready that Wednesday morning, his sister abruptly entered his room. “We can’t go to school today,” she told her brother. “Mom is feeling depressed.” Noah’s mom, Lynn, suffered from manic depression. But after several stints in the hospital, she seemed to have overcome the illness. With big black-rimmed glasses dominating her petite face, Noah and his siblings jokingly called their mother, a former Navy sailor turned stay-at-home mom, “Dexter” from Dexter’s Laboratory.16
Noah’s dad worked at General Motors, the lifeblood of Noah’s hometown of Flint. Noah’s parents constantly fought. “By the time that I was born . . . my dad was pretty much done with the whole situation . . . when GM left, he left with GM,” Noah said.
Noah’s dad still works at GM to this day. “I never had a relationship with him, none whatsoever,” Noah told me. “I think I met him one time for thirty minutes when I was, like, seven.”
With Noah’s dad absent, his grandfather, Roy, stepped in to fill the role of father. Noah, his brother, and his two sisters would live with their grandparents during his mom’s trips to the hospital. “That was how we got most of our learning about the Bible,” Noah said. As a Bible scholar and man of deep faith, Roy instilled in his grandchildren a love for Jesus Christ and a trove of biblical teachings.
Every Sunday, Noah and his siblings would load up their grandfather’s minivan with Bible tracts. The kids would then pile into the vehicle and fill the mailboxes of Flint with little booklets that explained the Christian faith. As Noah and his siblings walked the streets each week, handing out biblical literature, his grandfather would trail closely behind. “We were in the middle of the hood,” Noah told me. “But he followed us, so nobody messed with us.” After the family finished their missionary work, Noah’s grandfather would treat the kids to a meal at Burger King before returning home for evening Bible study.
“That’s when Flint was full of houses,” Noah reminisced. Today, Flint is full of abandoned buildings and broken dreams. Forty percent of its residents live in poverty as they face the infamous lead poisoning water crisis that dominated the headlines in 2016. But when Noah was a kid, Flint had promise. Now, just pain.
Noah’s personal pain started on that memorable Wednesday when he stayed home from school to care for his mom, who began pacing their family home back and forth and talking to herself. She spent Wednesday night in the hospital but left the very next morning. On that tragic Thursday, Noah remembers being in the kitchen and watching his mom cook tacos. She was mumbling to herself and singing gospel songs before pausing to give Noah instructions. “Don’t look up, but look for the cameras,” she told him. Realizing that she was still in a delusional state, Noah kissed his mom on the head and replied, “OK, Mom. You’re losing it, but I love you. I’m going upstairs.”
“It scared the crap out of me, because I thought she was saying maybe there was cameras in the house or something like that. You know what’s funny?” Noah said to me. “After she passed, somebody told me maybe she was talking about the movie cameras.” It was long before Noah would become the subject of a short National Geographic film, but his mom seemed to have some kind of intuition.17 After having that last conversation with his mom, Noah joined his brother and sister in his room. The three siblings sat around the bedroom turned makeshift music studio when their stepdad suddenly appeared at the bottom of the stairs. “Call an ambulance!” he yelled.
Noah bolted from his room. As he descended the staircase, the young teenage boy had a haunting suspicion that his mom had committed suicide. “As I got down to the kitchen, I began to smell the gunpowder . . . it smelled like a firecracker. God was just preparing me for what I was about to see,” Noah believes. “As I hit the corner, I see my mom laid back on the bed with a gunshot wound to her head.”
A cascade of tears poured out of Noah’s eyes as he took in the sight of his fallen mother. Noah’s sister followed just behind him and let out a piercing scream. Her cry reverberated around the house as she shook her mom’s body. Although Noah’s mom was still alive and evidently clinging to life, she was brain-dead and unable to speak. Petrified, Noah fled the scene, hiding around the corner at his best friend’s house. Noah’s world had been turned upside down. His grandfather had passed. His dad was out of the picture. And now his mother was gone.
“It hurt so bad. Mom, why would you leave us? Why would you leave us here?” Noah asked in his National Geographic film.18 From that day forward, discord enveloped the parentless family. Noah’s siblings fought constantly. “I was forced to kind of, like, fend on my own in the house,” Noah related. Eventually his siblings moved out, and Noah found himself in a silent home without running water, heat, or electricity.19 He was sixteen and entirely alone.
“I waited,” Noah told the film crew of his documentary. “I thought my brothers and sisters were going to come back home, and the lights were going to be back on one day, and it was going to be just like the day before Mama passed. It never happened.”20 When Noah turned seventeen, he briefly moved in with his grandmother, the only parent figure he had left. Six months later Noah turned eighteen, became an adult, and returned to live alone in the crumbling, abandoned family home in the heart of Flint. He fell into a seven-year pit of hopelessness and crime until a stint in jail and a step in faith changed his life.
“I was always a soldier, but I was a soldier in the wrong army,” Noah told National Geographic.21 That’s how Noah describes the period of his life when he descended into crime and self-destruction. “I was riding down the road, smoking weed,” he explained. “I had to keep a gun because I was always either getting over on somebody or somebody wanted to shoot my house up.” Noah’s home got shot up so often that he kept an AK-47 and a MAK-90 submachine gun with a seventy-five-round magazine wind-up drum on it for protection. Noah recalls watching his toddler children step over his AK-47, prominently displayed in his kitchen, as they scurried toward the breakfast table each morning.22 “I had a fascination for guns,” he said. Noah was so proud the day he got his first .40-caliber. “I picked up that gun every day and checked it and talked about my .40s,” he recalled. He vividly remembers his four-year-old son picking up the gun and pointing it at his dad. “Here, Dad, here goes your .40,” the young child said, mimicking his father’s actions. “That was one of the first wake-up calls for me. Although it would take a lot more before I got the message,” Noah told me. “I can never forget that morning.”
To make money, Noah started “scrapping”—removing copper and aluminum pipes from the slew of vacant houses in Flint. He also bought and sold firearms illegally. “I was like a walking pawnshop,” he said. At the age of eighteen he got arrested for the first time when he was caught stealing aluminum siding. He had several other run-ins with the law after that: operating a chop shop, where stolen vehicles were quickly disassembled for their parts; possession of marijuana; fleeing a police officer; two high-speed chases; and two standoffs with the police. “Literally, the police [were] outside. I’m in the house. I’ve got my gun. They’ve got their gun. I did that twice,” Noah said.
Noah quickly became known as the rich guy in Flint. He ran the chop shop in his backyard. It was a lucrative endeavor, but when the police noticed all the stripped-down cars behind Noah’s house, it eventually earned him one hundred days in jail. “I’ve got pictures of me in a 1980-something Mercedes-Benz, and I had over seventy-something cars,” Noah said. “I was determined to be successful. I still had all the aggression in me from what my mom did.” Being well-off in Flint made Noah a target in town. He knew his days were numbered, and he said he was “ready to die in the streets.”23
But even though Noah briefly lost his way, that faithful young boy was still buried inside him, urging him to come back home to God. “I had a lot of teaching in me,” Noah said. “I knew what I was doing wrong, but I was doing it to get to the next level. I just didn’t know what next level I was getting to.” Noah’s Bible-based roots crept up even during the rough period in his life. Although he smoked weed, he refused to try any other drugs. “I wouldn’t allow anybody to sell drugs out of the house because the house was where I learned all my Bible scriptures,” Noah emphasized. His grandpa’s library of Christian books still sat adjacent to where Noah slept. Everyone had to respect his family home.
“I prayed to God before I would go do something stupid . . . And I actually made it home safe,” Noah said. One time a bullet broke through Noah’s window and hit his couch. When he went to retaliate, he only managed to shoot once before the gun jammed.24 “God’s always seen a way out of it. I’ve never been shot. I’ve never been stabbed. It just seemed like God had a purpose for me.” And he did.
“I was working for Satan and didn’t know it,” Noah remarked to me. “In my mind I thought that I’m surviving. You know, it’s not my fault that I got left with no parents, so I’m just going to do what I’ve gotta do. Anybody get in my way, oh, well, they’re going to catch my wrath.” Young men in Noah’s neighborhood recognized his financial success and haughty attitude, and they looked up to him as a role model. “All of them would run up to my car because they know I was the guy who used to have nothing at fifteen and sixteen, and now I got rims and the biggest clip and I got a bunch of money. I was promoting bad,” Noah lamented.
When Noah went to jail for his chop shop operation, he befriended another inmate. Both men were barreling toward destruction but agreed in jail that they would leave as new men, putting their criminal pasts behind them. “I need to use you,” Noah heard God telling him in jail. “If I let you out, you have to work for me.” Noah started to realize that God had a purpose for him, but how could God possibly use him? He still had an open case for selling illegal guns, which carried a possible two-year prison sentence.
When Noah finished his hundred-day jail sentence, instead of leaving reformed, he returned to his old ways and reneged on his decision to change. Months later, Noah encountered his former jail mate. Something was different about him.
“Man, how you staying out trouble?” Noah asked.
“I just be at the church,” his friend told him.
Intrigued by his friend’s conversion, Noah began volunteering at Joy Tabernacle, a tiny yellow-brick church with a dozen or so brown pews. “That right there started the process of changing me,” Noah said. Within weeks of volunteering and after seven years of a life filled with crime, Noah Patton gave his life to God. He soon realized his purpose: to show the young men who looked up to him there was a better way to live.
“I took my calling as a preacher out of nowhere, with pending charges,” Noah pointed out as he let out a slight disbelieving laugh. “I’m serious: with pending charges, on my way to prison!” We both laughed at the contrast between prison and preaching, but the juxtaposition wasn’t foreign at all to our shared Christian faith. After all, God used the imperfect to bring about revolutionary change: Moses killed a man before leading the Israelites out of Egypt; Peter denied Jesus three times before becoming the rock of the church; and Paul persecuted Christians before authoring much of the New Testament. The idea that Noah could go from prison to preacher was the very meaning of Christian redemption.
“I hold a lot of guilt,” Noah admitted. “I sold a lot of people guns and stuff, and they got killed or, you know, they ended up in jail. And my image was so messed up that I kind of was scared to move on and be a preacher.” One day Noah had a breakdown: “I was feeling kind of bad. Scared to move forward with the kids and kind of feeling all of the weight of not having nobody and scared to go to jail and everything.” But his preacher offered wise words. “You’ve got to let go and let God,” the preacher advised, before physically washing Noah’s hands with Flint water.
The irony could not be starker. Here was dirty, lead-tainted Flint water—ruined by man and rejected by all—cleansing the hands of Noah Patton of all of his wrongdoing. What man had destroyed, God used for good. “It symbolically washed away all my pain. It washed away all the things I did in my hands, all the things I stole, all the things I took—everything.” Noah marveled. “It just became a symbol of restoration in my life because I don’t have a father. I hadn’t had anybody to care about what I did with my hands.”
It was so simple and yet so meaningful. Just as the waters in Genesis had wiped away a corrupt and violent earth, the water of Flint purified Noah’s hands, removing his past transgressions and renewing him in the eyes of the Lord. The biblical name Noah’s parents had bestowed on him now seemed all the more fitting: God had given the biblical Noah a vessel for rescue and the modern-day one a savior for redemption.
“That was so instrumental to my changing . . . [My preacher] just had to do something as simple as say, ‘You free. You know I’m washing your hands for free. You don’t have to worry about the past. Just let go and let God change.’ And I did it, and God is doing it.”
When Noah turned back to God, all of the bad in his life seemed to fall away, though not initially. The mother of his three children left town with the kids, and Noah became depressed, alone in his house and without his children. But even through his struggle, he stayed in the church and leaned into God. “The next thing you know, I end up getting my kids because she ended up abandoning [them],” Noah said. “Keep in mind, I still have pending charges.” Because Noah had outstanding light bills that he couldn’t pay, he and his three children resorted to using candles. “I had illegal lights. Kids. The water crisis . . . And I was worried about going to jail,” Noah recalled. “But I still went to church every Sunday. I still read my Bible. I still taught Sunday school. I preached my first service. I was still basically walking with God.”
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity came Noah Patton’s way. The Community Foundation visited Noah’s church, seeking to film the life of someone struggling through Flint. They selected Noah. His mother’s final words to him, “Don’t look up, but look for the cameras,” suddenly made sense. “The day before the film crew came, a warrant popped up for my arrest for the two-year prison charge,” Noah said. Conflicted over whether to turn himself in immediately or shoot the movie first, Noah decided to share his story. “I don’t know if you notice in the movie, but I had a hood on,” he remarked. “I was wanted for a warrant that happened two years before that. I had already changed everything good in my mind, my heart, in everything. But that warrant popped up out of nowhere.”
In addition to the warrant, Noah’s probation officer finally gave him a court date for one of his high-speed chases. Noah pleaded for a delay in the court appearance. “I understand you’re doing good now and the case is old, so I’ll give you some time. I’ll give you until the twentieth of June to turn yourself in,” the man graciously offered. With an outstanding warrant, Noah took a risk by being filmed. “Even if I did have to go to prison, I was going to be able to touch somebody’s life and let them know that they don’t have to go through this. I was trusting in God,” he acknowledged. Noah’s riveting documentary, filmed by Dana Romanoff and published by National Geographic, was featured on YouTube, where it has touched the lives of more than thirty thousand people and counting. God was working through Noah even when he couldn’t see it.
On Father’s Day, Noah’s son got baptized, and on the very next day Noah turned himself in to the police. “In my mind, I’m about to go ahead and do these two years. When I get out, I’m going to be a better person, and so I went to jail,” Noah explained. Noah spent the whole summer in jail, mentally preparing himself for the prison sentence that likely awaited him. “I was really just walking by faith,” he said. He faced a daunting five felony charges and significant prison time. But God had others plans.
Noah’s church and many reputable members of the community wrote letters to the prosecutor, attesting to Noah’s changed life. It made a difference. “To God be the glory, I didn’t have to go to prison!” Noah exclaimed. When Noah arrived at court, instead of two years in prison, he was given two years’ probation. “That never happens,” Noah pointed out. “If you’re a felon in Michigan and you get caught with a firearm, it’s two years minimum—no ifs, ands, or buts about it. But the prosecutor had favor on me.” Supporters of Noah’s movie bonded him out, and Noah was now free to continue walking down the path God had laid before him. “When I got out of jail, the movie finally came out, and I didn’t have to go to prison. I got full custody of my kids,” Noah gleefully stated. “I’m just a living testimony from that part on.” Like his biblical namesake, “Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.”25
Noah found strength within himself to overcome an abandoned home, poverty, and a life of crime. While he took responsibility for his actions, the same cannot be said for the government in the wake of the Flint water crisis. It was a twenty-first-century betrayal of epic proportions, and accountability was notably absent. Democrats blamed the Republican governor, while Republicans blamed the Democratic Environmental Protection Agency.
The blame game between parties bothered me, leading me to say this on CNN’s set after the Democratic primary presidential debate in Flint: “This shouldn’t be a political issue . . . When you have poisonous water in Flint, Michigan, this happens in third world countries. This doesn’t happen in the United States of America. We need to get to the bottom of it. Whatever party official, you’re out . . . and you should resign if you knew about it.”26 Instead of putting party aside and people first, politicians pointed fingers. In the end, the regional EPA chief and the state director of Michigan Department on Environmental Quality resigned amid criticism.27 “All those bigwigs run together, I’m pretty sure,” said Noah, placing blame on both the government and the automotive industry that contributed to polluting the Flint River.
Both 2016 presidential candidates acknowledged the crisis in Flint. “The people of Flint deserve to know the truth about how this happened,” Hillary Clinton said.
Standing in a Flint church, Donald Trump remarked, “It used to be that cars were made in Flint and you couldn’t drink the water in Mexico. Now cars are made in Mexico, and you can’t drink the water in Flint. That’s terrible.”28 But neither pitch got Noah’s vote. He chose to sit out the 2016 election.
“I didn’t trust neither one of the candidates, to tell you the truth. I didn’t,” Noah told me. “Because I mean we’re talking about the government”—the same government that instructed Noah and his family to drink the water. “It was safe,” they claimed. “So in my mind the government is corrupt altogether, so I trust in God,” he explained. “I pray for government, and I trust in God.”
Betrayed by government and left behind by big business, the residents of Flint, Michigan, are left to pick up the pieces of their broken city. How does a broken inner city without hope move forward? “I think the answer is the residents,” Noah suggested. “The people that live in Flint should start basically venturing out in a positive manner and rebuild the city ourselves . . . Let’s buy our own grocery stores . . . We need to own our own banks . . . We need to start our own businesses.”
“Exactly,” said Ben Carson, secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), when I shared Noah’s outlook with him. “When you start thinking the way you just described . . . you’re going to find a way out. You’re going to find a way to develop your talents. You’re going to find out how to help people around you develop theirs, and you’re going to be thinking more in terms of what you can do rather than what you can’t do. It makes all the difference in the world in terms of how you approach something.”
In this vein, Reverend Reginald Flynn, pastor of Foss Avenue Baptist Church and North Flint Reinvestment Corp, is trying to open a locally owned grocery store.29 Noah himself is in small-business boot camp and just accepted a loan from the city to start his own lawn care service. His new venture cuts the yards of vacant lots, transforming the visible decay in Flint.30 Lawn by lawn, Noah is reviving his Flint community. Noah suspects that government looks at his community and thinks, They’re killing each other already. There’s nothing we can do. “The people need to stick together,” he said. “I think when people in Flint start to wake up and say, ‘Hey, they’re treating us like slaves. Let’s buy ourselves our freedom,’ I think that would help.”
This, of course, does not mean that there is no role for government in urban renewal. Secretary Carson explained, “The government should be focused on how to develop human capital . . . They can do things like encourage public-private partnerships by creating win-win situations.” This means incentivizing big business to invest in blighted areas, looking from a thirty-thousand-foot view and connecting willing investors with populations of people in need of opportunity. Under Carson’s leadership, HUD is utilizing an underused government program called Section 3. Section 3 mandates that beneficiaries of certain HUD funding hire local, low-income individuals, train them, and offer contracts to their businesses.31 “It has largely not been used over the fifty years that it’s been on the books,” Carson said. “We are now putting a major push on using that.” For decades, contractors claimed that they were unable to participate in Section 3 because local residents did not have enough training. Carson maintains that there is a very simple answer to that: advance notice to contractors and training programs for residents. “It simply means that you have to think ahead,” Carson said. “You know a year or two or three ahead of time that you’re going to do that, so you train them then, and they’re ready to go at that time and they have marketable skills that allow them to escape dependency. It’s not a matter of how many people you can get in public housing, it’s how many you can get out of it.”
I asked Noah what he would say to the federal government if he had the chance. Here’s what he wants his leaders to know: “Nobody wants to be a failure, but when you’re raised around a fallen environment, it becomes natural to fall. And Flint has some residents that just haven’t given up, that just have enough fight in them to say, ‘I might have messed up in the past—like you see this tattoo on my face and now I’m a preacher—but, hey, I want to live. I want to be successful. I was young. I didn’t know better.’ I think the government needs to know that.”
Rather than dismissing an entire segment of society as lazy or unmotivated, Americans in general ought to recognize the fighting spirit that still resides in the heart of many Flint residents. Even though people may lose their way, they are not hopeless. “It takes time for people to grow up. It takes time for people to grow out of depression. It takes time for people to grow out of being abused and neglected,” Noah said. “And now that we’re growing out of it, we deserve a push to help us get where we need to go because all the odds was against us for so long . . . and now that we see better and we want different, we need help with changing our past for the future.”
I shared Noah’s message with Secretary Carson, who understood it all too well. He grew up just over an hour away from Noah, in Detroit. His dad left when he was young, abandoning Carson, his brother, and his mom. Stuck in an impoverished community and a seven-hundred-square-foot single-parent home, Carson refused to let his surroundings determine his future. Thanks in large part to his mother, Carson overcame the odds, earning his undergraduate degree from Yale University and an MD from the University of Michigan Medical School before doing his internship and residency at the nation’s most selective medical school, Johns Hopkins. At the age of twenty-three, he became the nation’s youngest chief of pediatric neurosurgery. Describing his mom, Sonya, Carson fondly stated, “She refused to be a victim. She refused to allow us to be victims. That was probably the greatest thing that she gave to us.”
Even though Noah’s future was uncertain at times, his unwavering faith in his Father in Heaven was not. When Noah grew up, he recited the Twenty-Third Psalm every night with his brother and sisters. It reads, in part:
The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.
He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,
he refreshes my soul.
He guides me along the right paths for his name’s sake.
Even though I walk through the darkest valley,
I will fear no evil, for you are with me;
your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
Noah grew up lacking much in the eyes of the world—little money, a broken community, crime-ridden streets—but he was taught by his grandfather to say he lacked nothing. And Noah did walk through the “darkest valley”: a fatherless home, a mother who took her own life, and a once-bustling home full of siblings now empty. But Noah’s faith in something bigger than this earthly life helped him overcome his past and defy the odds in building a prosperous future.
Now, instead of praying the Twenty-Third Psalm every night, Noah prays the “Our Father” with his children. When Noah faced the daunting prospect of a life in prison, his faith gave him the strength to keep fighting, for himself and for his children. Taking a knee in between his kids’ twin beds, Noah worried he would have to leave them behind for a life behind bars. With only a candle for light, he nevertheless began to pray.
“Our Father . . .”
“Our Father . . .” his three little babies echoed behind him.32
“. . . who art in heaven . . .” he continued.
“. . . who art in heaven . . .” the three little ones repeated.
“. . . hallowed be thy name . . .” Noah said.
Noah, of course, never did have to go to prison, and he continues to pray that prayer with his children every night. “That’s just to keep them in the mind-set,” he said. “You know, they watched me go to sleep every day listening to gangsta rap and smoking weed, so now I have to reset their minds and reset the vision of where we’re going in our life. I didn’t have a vision, I didn’t have goals, so by praying and taking them to church and everything like that, I’m giving them hope for a future. I’m letting them know this is what [we’re] riding with now.”
Noah aims to shepherd in the right direction not only his children but his neighbors as well. He has shared his story far and wide, but never for money or fame. “It’s not for my recognition,” Noah said. “I really want the young man that’s standing outside the corner store trying to sell a bag of weed . . . to know that it’s not the end of time. You can stop right then and there, and God will pick you up and bring you into the next day.”
There is one thing that Noah wants people to know about Flint: “We’ve been survivors since day one.”33 While Flint might be down, they’re not out. It is a city full of fighters and, despite its troubles, a wellspring of faith. Though lead-filled, poison liquid flowed from the faucets of Flint, the cleansing eternal waters of change transformed the heart of one man, Noah Patton, who is in turn changing the hearts and minds of those around him. Just as in the story of Noah’s ark, there is always a rainbow just beyond the unforeseen waters that flood our lives.