The Bryant Story 2014 (healed, Delivered, and on Fire - Continued)
by Terrence Clark
Interview with Paul Bryant
“Min. Clark the last interview was nine years ago. You wrote about how my wife and I were delivered from drugs. In my story, there were a couple of times I could have lost my life in Camden [NJ]. I got stabbed at twenty-eight. My lungs filled up with blood. They got me to the hospital in the nick of time, and that was nothing but the grace of God that allowed me to live.
I proceeded to go on living my life for the Lord. I began to go on searching the scripture and being sincere. He started to show his self in my life.
Although, delivered from drugs, I still had that ‘stinking thinking.’ I had issues being angry. I was lashing out from time to time on my family and friends, as well as people out on the street. I was angry, because how I let the enemy take over me and stop my spiritual growth.
Interview with Paul Bryant
“Min. Clark the last interview was nine years ago. You wrote about how my wife and I were delivered from drugs. In my story, there were a couple of times I could have lost my life in Camden [NJ]. I got stabbed at twenty-eight. My lungs filled up with blood. They got me to the hospital in the nick of time, and that was nothing but the grace of God that allowed me to live.
I proceeded to go on living my life for the Lord. I began to go on searching the scripture and being sincere. He started to show his self in my life.
Although, delivered from drugs, I still had that ‘stinking thinking.’ I had issues being angry. I was lashing out from time to time on my family and friends, as well as people out on the street. I was angry, because how I let the enemy take over me and stop my spiritual growth.
Website:
I had to ask God to help me forgive
myself. My wife would say, ‘Paul you will not go any further until you forgive
yourself. Once you forgive yourself then God can deal with you.’ I asked the
Lord to help me in that area, and he did. Now, I can see the fruit of my labor.
I can see the fruits of the Holy Spirit showing up in my life after my
addiction. The Holy Spirit had arrested me.”
And it was years later of the first interview. Paul Bryant’s father cut my hair and my daddy’s hair. Pastor Bryant always had a smile on his face as he manned the clippers at his shop on Academy Street, Glassboro NJ. He and his sons all donning the craft worked together in the lowly facility—next door to his church.
After some years of patronage, I began to miss one of his sons standing with him on the hair clipping strewn mats. Paul Jr. had left his daddy’s salon and was working elsewhere. I was later to find that there were other reasons for his absence.
God had worked many miracles in the prodigal barber’s life. I listened, in his new shop in Clayton, as my tape recorder recorded the conversation. He and his wife Theresa has gone through a lot. In fact, she was not there for the first interview because of issues.
I received a phone call in March 2014. It was Paul Bryant. “Hello. Reverend Clark. Are you still doing the magazine? You interviewed me and my wife eight years ago. There is more to tell.”
“After that, I began to go to the doctor because I had issues resulting from my addiction. While addicted, I didn’t take good care of myself. There were other things also that were wrong with me. I had poor circulation. I had Hepatitis c.”
Paul’s addiction was cocaine and marijuana. His wife, Theresa, the same but with alcohol added. Sitting in the Dunkin Donuts (Clayton NJ) wedged in a booth, in the corner, the two in front of me; Mrs. Bryant intercepted a quick pause.
She said she was walking to the bar. Her forty-second birthday was in a couple of days. “I told the Lord. I am not going to be doing this on my next birthday.”
She went home and told her husband, but believing that saying it and doing it was two different things. “I told the Lord, I can’t do this by myself. I have been doing this all my life. You just have to take it.”
Shortly after, while walking to the store one day, she started having pain around her stomach. She had bought one beer, attempted to drink it, but couldn’t get it down.
“The pain got so bad. I told Paul you’re going have to take me to the hospital right now. He rushed me to the hospital. The pain was so crucial in the waiting room. I was hollering and hollering. It was so bad. I got up and pushed right through the examination area doors. I cried somebody has got to get me. Right away they put me in a bed. After the exam, the doctor said Miss Bryant you have Pancreatitis.”
Her condition was so messy [her words], the head surgeon at Lady of Lourdes—Philadelphia, didn’t want to operate. The prognostication was not good. They gave her a fifty-percent chance of survival. The head surgeon told Paul that his wife had the worst case of pancreatitis. He said if she doesn’t get well in three days surgery was inevitable.
Paul continued with his side of his wife’s testimony. “I called my grandmother—Mother Bush—who lived in Pennsauken NJ. It was in April, on a Thursday evening—8 pm.
Mom-Mom, Theresa, is in trouble. If she doesn’t get well, they are going to operate on her.
She prayed over the phone with me. She started giving me the old time prayer. She started saying, the blood of Jesus. I felt the Holy Spirit through the line of the phone.
And, they checked my wife after seven days. They said, ‘Mr. Bryant, I don’t know what has happened, but we no longer have to operate on your wife.’
Thirty-eight days they didn’t let her eat. She was feeding through the IV. They waited after thirty days and nothing. Everything she would eat she would regurgitate. After thirty days, she climbed out of bed and asked the nurse if she could go out and smoke a cigarette. The nurse didn’t know Theresa had pulled out all her tubes.
The nurse said—No. Theresa went anyway and got on the elevator. The nurses called security. It was day thirty-three. She started eating right after that. My wife, Theresa, is completely healed from pancreatitis.”
Theresa continued. “Right now I am on the praise team at church and the choir.”
Even when she was in her addiction, she used to sing in church. It was her gift from God; she acknowledged. She believes that she couldn’t die, because she had to sing for the Lord.
“A church-mother told me I had to sing a song for her. When I got well enough, I did sing that song for her.”
Unknowingly, Paul had Hepatitis C infection in his body for twenty years. At that time, there was no test. When it was discovered the doctor put him on chemo treatment that consisted of Interferon injections and Ribavirin—six pills—three in the day, three at night.
He lost fifty pounds. He lost his taste buds. Faithfully, he still cut hair all that time to provide for his family. He had to be on chemo for twelve months. And still, the details of his testimony would not stop there. Around eleven and half months there was another challenge. The doctors diagnosed him with Leukemia, the last stage of Hepatitis C.
“They told me they were going to give me two years to live, recalled Paul.
He began to lose a pint of blood a week. Every three weeks there was a trip to Cooper Hospital to pump blood back into him. His doctors didn’t know from where his blood was leaking. They eventually discovered that his bone marrow wasn’t regenerating red blood cells anymore.
“But before they put the first pint of blood of me, I said Lord. It was about ten-of-nine. I said Lord, the blood that you shed on the Cross; can you take that blood and put it in the bag of blood that they are going to put in me?
I talked to him.
The nurse was getting ready to put it in me. She had me all set up. And let me tell you something. He heard my cry. I told him, if you heal me I will tell it—I will give my testimony. And right today, it has been over eight-years that I am healed from Leukemia.
Minister Clark, this is what happened to me when I didn’t see you. I was in a-world of troubled since the last time we had that interview. I told my wife–Theresa we got to get in touch with Rev. Clark so that we can finish telling what the Lord has done for me.”
Theresa listened intently to husband testimony. She praised God when he was done and continued with her own. “I also had Hepatitis C”
Paul interrupted, “Because I gave it to her.”
After diagnoses, the doctor told her she had to take the chemo too. Theresa thought he was giving her choice instead of actions. She had to pick a date to begin the therapy. She remembers being in a fetal position for a whole year. She had to take the medicine all year. She did and says today she can still feel it in her stomach.
Connectedly, she had an operation on her feet and could not walk for eight-months. The hospital had checked out the bone marrow in her foot. There was no cartilage—bones were rubbing against bone. Screws were put in her ankle.
Theresa couldn’t walk for a year. It was the time of the interview that she had begun walking again. She still uses a scooter at times. “I have no shame, said a joyful Theresa Bryant, sitting at her husband's side, because the Lord has brought us out.”
“God wants people to see his joy in you,” she continued. Walking together in ministry with her husband, she says people stop them all the time for prayer. She recalls praying for a woman with breast cancer. She is doing well now.
“The woman was half atheist—she believed, but she didn’t believe, added Paul. She was in the lifestyle that we came out. While in it, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. We said why don’t you give him a chance? The woman said, ‘you know what Paul, I will do that; I will give your God a chance. And, right today she is saved.”
Paul continued, “And as my wife has said, the Lord has brought us back into this small town—my home town. And all the kids, along with people from all walks of life, have seen a change in us. The Lord wanted us to come back from Pennsauken and Burlington City—back here so that people can see the change in our lives. And now, we are doing our ministry in this area.”
He left his old church and is now serving at Bernard Bunn’s church—New Birth Missionary Baptist in the neighboring town of Glassboro. There seven and a half years serving as a minister. Before, he was a walking-deacon.
Paul says at the time he was a deacon, he was on chemo. The treatment would make him hallucinate. It had begun to get the best of him. “I felt I couldn’t give God want he wanted–myself. I was gone. I was out of it.”
People would ask him; Paul are you dying? His face was gray. He lost weight. He was dying, but as he said, He continued to live. All the while, he kept cutting hair. And, he kept going to church and praising God.
The pastor at his new church saw the call to ministry in him. Since April 22, 2012 he has served in that capacity. He’s taking ministerial classes at a nearby school. He is in his second semester at Manna Bible Training at Institute off the campus of Rowan University directed by Pastor Tucker of MT Olive Baptist Church. He’s studying subjects such as Spiritual Philosophy, Spiritual Theology, and The Pentateuch.
His wife is praise dancer. They have their own business—scented homemade candles—TP Candles (Theresa and Paul). He says; they have been told; they have the best product around. With a God given recipe, and through some trial error, they are now selling their candles in stores and markets.
“Pastor Bunn kept telling me, Paul you can’t keep giving your testimony. There is a time and place for it. So when I want you to read the scripture, you read the scripture. We do things decently and order. And, I understood. To fulfill my calling, I started telling my testimony out in the streets.”
Moved by the Holy Spirit, Paul is prepping for a book that captures his life story and testimony. When completed, just like the first article by this magazine, he will give a copy to people everywhere—in churches and on the street.
Theresa will be a part of that. Her ministry is mostly to women, although to some men “When I start talking, they all get quiet. They tell Paul, ‘There is something about your wife, when she talks.’ And that because the Lord is in me, I am not going to do anything the Lord doesn’t want me to do. It’s God that has saved me—I give him all the glory.
Again, it has been nine-years between articles and the miracles with this couple continue as they continue to trust God. Their story is one of God’s [possibility] superseding man impossibility. TGC publications who publishes this magazine will be assisting with their book. I am sure there will be additional things to write at that time.
Theresa admitted she still suffered from insomnia (at the time of this interview) along with a sleeping disorder and seizures. We prayed amongst the donuts at the end of the session. I called them afterwards. She sleeps soundly now. We’ll add that to the book.
The Bryant’s mission is to encourage young people (or anyone) to not to make the same mistakes they made in life. This ministering couple is available to speak in churches, rehabs centers, youth events, schools, and anywhere people need help and a delivering word from the Lord.
To contact the Bryant’s for speaking engagement, their upcoming book, or their products, you may do so at (856) 553-3348
Read the first interview at The Bryant Story 2008
Terrence Clark is the founder and Chief Editor of the Voice of One Online (voiceofoneonline.com) and the Voice of One Magazine. If you have a testimony and would like an interview, please contact us at (856) 728-0777. If you have a story that would best be told in book form also contact the publishers The Glory Cloud publications at the same number or online at www.theGloryCloudpublications.com
And it was years later of the first interview. Paul Bryant’s father cut my hair and my daddy’s hair. Pastor Bryant always had a smile on his face as he manned the clippers at his shop on Academy Street, Glassboro NJ. He and his sons all donning the craft worked together in the lowly facility—next door to his church.
After some years of patronage, I began to miss one of his sons standing with him on the hair clipping strewn mats. Paul Jr. had left his daddy’s salon and was working elsewhere. I was later to find that there were other reasons for his absence.
God had worked many miracles in the prodigal barber’s life. I listened, in his new shop in Clayton, as my tape recorder recorded the conversation. He and his wife Theresa has gone through a lot. In fact, she was not there for the first interview because of issues.
I received a phone call in March 2014. It was Paul Bryant. “Hello. Reverend Clark. Are you still doing the magazine? You interviewed me and my wife eight years ago. There is more to tell.”
“After that, I began to go to the doctor because I had issues resulting from my addiction. While addicted, I didn’t take good care of myself. There were other things also that were wrong with me. I had poor circulation. I had Hepatitis c.”
Paul’s addiction was cocaine and marijuana. His wife, Theresa, the same but with alcohol added. Sitting in the Dunkin Donuts (Clayton NJ) wedged in a booth, in the corner, the two in front of me; Mrs. Bryant intercepted a quick pause.
She said she was walking to the bar. Her forty-second birthday was in a couple of days. “I told the Lord. I am not going to be doing this on my next birthday.”
She went home and told her husband, but believing that saying it and doing it was two different things. “I told the Lord, I can’t do this by myself. I have been doing this all my life. You just have to take it.”
Shortly after, while walking to the store one day, she started having pain around her stomach. She had bought one beer, attempted to drink it, but couldn’t get it down.
“The pain got so bad. I told Paul you’re going have to take me to the hospital right now. He rushed me to the hospital. The pain was so crucial in the waiting room. I was hollering and hollering. It was so bad. I got up and pushed right through the examination area doors. I cried somebody has got to get me. Right away they put me in a bed. After the exam, the doctor said Miss Bryant you have Pancreatitis.”
Her condition was so messy [her words], the head surgeon at Lady of Lourdes—Philadelphia, didn’t want to operate. The prognostication was not good. They gave her a fifty-percent chance of survival. The head surgeon told Paul that his wife had the worst case of pancreatitis. He said if she doesn’t get well in three days surgery was inevitable.
Paul continued with his side of his wife’s testimony. “I called my grandmother—Mother Bush—who lived in Pennsauken NJ. It was in April, on a Thursday evening—8 pm.
Mom-Mom, Theresa, is in trouble. If she doesn’t get well, they are going to operate on her.
She prayed over the phone with me. She started giving me the old time prayer. She started saying, the blood of Jesus. I felt the Holy Spirit through the line of the phone.
And, they checked my wife after seven days. They said, ‘Mr. Bryant, I don’t know what has happened, but we no longer have to operate on your wife.’
Thirty-eight days they didn’t let her eat. She was feeding through the IV. They waited after thirty days and nothing. Everything she would eat she would regurgitate. After thirty days, she climbed out of bed and asked the nurse if she could go out and smoke a cigarette. The nurse didn’t know Theresa had pulled out all her tubes.
The nurse said—No. Theresa went anyway and got on the elevator. The nurses called security. It was day thirty-three. She started eating right after that. My wife, Theresa, is completely healed from pancreatitis.”
Theresa continued. “Right now I am on the praise team at church and the choir.”
Even when she was in her addiction, she used to sing in church. It was her gift from God; she acknowledged. She believes that she couldn’t die, because she had to sing for the Lord.
“A church-mother told me I had to sing a song for her. When I got well enough, I did sing that song for her.”
Unknowingly, Paul had Hepatitis C infection in his body for twenty years. At that time, there was no test. When it was discovered the doctor put him on chemo treatment that consisted of Interferon injections and Ribavirin—six pills—three in the day, three at night.
He lost fifty pounds. He lost his taste buds. Faithfully, he still cut hair all that time to provide for his family. He had to be on chemo for twelve months. And still, the details of his testimony would not stop there. Around eleven and half months there was another challenge. The doctors diagnosed him with Leukemia, the last stage of Hepatitis C.
“They told me they were going to give me two years to live, recalled Paul.
He began to lose a pint of blood a week. Every three weeks there was a trip to Cooper Hospital to pump blood back into him. His doctors didn’t know from where his blood was leaking. They eventually discovered that his bone marrow wasn’t regenerating red blood cells anymore.
“But before they put the first pint of blood of me, I said Lord. It was about ten-of-nine. I said Lord, the blood that you shed on the Cross; can you take that blood and put it in the bag of blood that they are going to put in me?
I talked to him.
The nurse was getting ready to put it in me. She had me all set up. And let me tell you something. He heard my cry. I told him, if you heal me I will tell it—I will give my testimony. And right today, it has been over eight-years that I am healed from Leukemia.
Minister Clark, this is what happened to me when I didn’t see you. I was in a-world of troubled since the last time we had that interview. I told my wife–Theresa we got to get in touch with Rev. Clark so that we can finish telling what the Lord has done for me.”
Theresa listened intently to husband testimony. She praised God when he was done and continued with her own. “I also had Hepatitis C”
Paul interrupted, “Because I gave it to her.”
After diagnoses, the doctor told her she had to take the chemo too. Theresa thought he was giving her choice instead of actions. She had to pick a date to begin the therapy. She remembers being in a fetal position for a whole year. She had to take the medicine all year. She did and says today she can still feel it in her stomach.
Connectedly, she had an operation on her feet and could not walk for eight-months. The hospital had checked out the bone marrow in her foot. There was no cartilage—bones were rubbing against bone. Screws were put in her ankle.
Theresa couldn’t walk for a year. It was the time of the interview that she had begun walking again. She still uses a scooter at times. “I have no shame, said a joyful Theresa Bryant, sitting at her husband's side, because the Lord has brought us out.”
“God wants people to see his joy in you,” she continued. Walking together in ministry with her husband, she says people stop them all the time for prayer. She recalls praying for a woman with breast cancer. She is doing well now.
“The woman was half atheist—she believed, but she didn’t believe, added Paul. She was in the lifestyle that we came out. While in it, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. We said why don’t you give him a chance? The woman said, ‘you know what Paul, I will do that; I will give your God a chance. And, right today she is saved.”
Paul continued, “And as my wife has said, the Lord has brought us back into this small town—my home town. And all the kids, along with people from all walks of life, have seen a change in us. The Lord wanted us to come back from Pennsauken and Burlington City—back here so that people can see the change in our lives. And now, we are doing our ministry in this area.”
He left his old church and is now serving at Bernard Bunn’s church—New Birth Missionary Baptist in the neighboring town of Glassboro. There seven and a half years serving as a minister. Before, he was a walking-deacon.
Paul says at the time he was a deacon, he was on chemo. The treatment would make him hallucinate. It had begun to get the best of him. “I felt I couldn’t give God want he wanted–myself. I was gone. I was out of it.”
People would ask him; Paul are you dying? His face was gray. He lost weight. He was dying, but as he said, He continued to live. All the while, he kept cutting hair. And, he kept going to church and praising God.
The pastor at his new church saw the call to ministry in him. Since April 22, 2012 he has served in that capacity. He’s taking ministerial classes at a nearby school. He is in his second semester at Manna Bible Training at Institute off the campus of Rowan University directed by Pastor Tucker of MT Olive Baptist Church. He’s studying subjects such as Spiritual Philosophy, Spiritual Theology, and The Pentateuch.
His wife is praise dancer. They have their own business—scented homemade candles—TP Candles (Theresa and Paul). He says; they have been told; they have the best product around. With a God given recipe, and through some trial error, they are now selling their candles in stores and markets.
“Pastor Bunn kept telling me, Paul you can’t keep giving your testimony. There is a time and place for it. So when I want you to read the scripture, you read the scripture. We do things decently and order. And, I understood. To fulfill my calling, I started telling my testimony out in the streets.”
Moved by the Holy Spirit, Paul is prepping for a book that captures his life story and testimony. When completed, just like the first article by this magazine, he will give a copy to people everywhere—in churches and on the street.
Theresa will be a part of that. Her ministry is mostly to women, although to some men “When I start talking, they all get quiet. They tell Paul, ‘There is something about your wife, when she talks.’ And that because the Lord is in me, I am not going to do anything the Lord doesn’t want me to do. It’s God that has saved me—I give him all the glory.
Again, it has been nine-years between articles and the miracles with this couple continue as they continue to trust God. Their story is one of God’s [possibility] superseding man impossibility. TGC publications who publishes this magazine will be assisting with their book. I am sure there will be additional things to write at that time.
Theresa admitted she still suffered from insomnia (at the time of this interview) along with a sleeping disorder and seizures. We prayed amongst the donuts at the end of the session. I called them afterwards. She sleeps soundly now. We’ll add that to the book.
The Bryant’s mission is to encourage young people (or anyone) to not to make the same mistakes they made in life. This ministering couple is available to speak in churches, rehabs centers, youth events, schools, and anywhere people need help and a delivering word from the Lord.
To contact the Bryant’s for speaking engagement, their upcoming book, or their products, you may do so at (856) 553-3348
Read the first interview at The Bryant Story 2008
Terrence Clark is the founder and Chief Editor of the Voice of One Online (voiceofoneonline.com) and the Voice of One Magazine. If you have a testimony and would like an interview, please contact us at (856) 728-0777. If you have a story that would best be told in book form also contact the publishers The Glory Cloud publications at the same number or online at www.theGloryCloudpublications.com