Joshua Broome

Before he was a preacher, before the book, before the marriage and the four boys, Joshua Broome was an eight-year-old sitting in the window of a South Carolina restaurant where his mom worked, watching a green truck pull into the store across the street. The store was called Rogers. Roger was his grandfather. The young man getting out of the truck — greeting his own father, eventually bringing a wife and two kids of his own — was Joshua's dad. He watched that scene play out almost every day of his childhood, from a father who never once crossed the street.

In this episode of Who Is Jesus To You?, Joshua tells David Harris Jr. how a boy trying to close that loop — it must be me; maybe if I become enough, I'll be enough — became a 22-year-old aspiring actor in Los Angeles, recruited off a Friday night by headhunters for the adult film industry. Asked what he hoped to accomplish, he said “famous.” What he meant, he now understands, was: I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be chosen. Six years and more than a thousand films later, under a name that wasn't his own, he was the most awarded man in the industry — and privately watching more than forty friends and colleagues die by suicide and overdose, cashing checks with degrading messages written on the memo line, and coming apart.

Then comes the sequence of moments this episode is built on, and each one lands harder than the last. The night at his favorite Beverly Hills restaurant when he suddenly saw his own life clearly and began to unravel. The suicide note dated January 13, 2013 — which he still has — listing the things he believed he could never be: a husband, a father, a man whose life meant something. And the day he walked into a bank in Sherman Oaks half-hoping the teller's disgust would give him the final push, and instead she typed quietly, handed him his receipt, and — as he stood there weeping — said, “Joshua, is there someone I can call?” It was the first time he had heard his own name spoken aloud in eighteen months.

That question led to a phone call to his mother, a one-way move back east with no plan, and a job coaching CrossFit — where, two years later, a quiet elementary school teacher and former University of Iowa cheerleading captain walked in. She said no to every date. She said yes to a Sunday morning run. And when Joshua blurted out a five-minute confession of everything he'd ever done, she stopped, squared up, and said the sentence that split his life in two: “You are not defined by the worst thing you've ever done — and you won't be defined by the greatest thing you ever do. Because you are not the author of you. God is. Do you know Him?”

Her name — you can't make this up — is Hope.

Five days later, on Easter Sunday, Joshua heard the gospel preached for the first time, through the story of Mephibosheth — the hiding man offered a seat at the king's table forever, who could only answer, “What do you want with a dead dog like me?” Every hair on Joshua's body stood up. He fell to his knees, and the man who eventually stood back up wasn't the man who went down. That Monday he knocked on the church door and told the first pastor he found: “I need a Jesus coach.”

The rest of the conversation is the fruit: the seminary-trained preacher who now speaks over a hundred times a year, the husband and father he swore he could never be, the moment his firstborn son grabbed his finger in the delivery room and he heard God say I love you more than that — and the phone call, years later, to the father who never crossed the street, where what came out of Joshua's mouth wasn't the speech he'd rehearsed for twenty years, but: “Dad, I love you. And I'm sorry for blaming you for every wrong thing I've ever done.”

Ask him who Jesus is, and the answer carries all of it: the God who “meets you wherever you are — but won't leave you as you are.”

Watch the full conversation above. Joshua's book is Seven Lies That Will Ruin Your Life, and he and Hope have built Made Whole, a free four-session series for anyone ready to walk out of shame.