Real Talk Kim

Before 2.5 million people knew her as Real Talk Kim — before Limitless Church, before the bestselling books — Kimberly Jones was a preacher's kid lying in her parents' spare bedroom at 36 years old, two divorces behind her, her multi-million dollar interior design business gone, unable to get out of bed for nine months.

In this episode of Who Is Jesus To You?, Kim takes David Harris Jr. back to the beginning: a strict religious childhood where she “broke teeth on the pew,” and a moment at eight years old, looking up at a choir full of sad faces, when she decided that if heaven was full of those people, she didn't want to go. She was singing on Rod Parsley's platform by her early twenties — and standing on the Sea of Galilee performing “I Know Him By Name” when a voice in her head said, you don't even know the singer. Warned by the men of God in her life not to marry the boy she was dating, she packed her Yugo at 2 a.m. and married him anyway. “If you told me I couldn't do it,” she laughs, “I was going to do it.”

What followed was eighteen years of running — what she thought was a three-year break from church that turned out to be nearly a decade — until it all came down at once. And what happened in that bedroom at her parents' house is the heart of this conversation: the late-night TV moment when a preacher looked into the camera and named the unforgiveness she didn't know she was carrying, and the prayer she started praying every day after: God, help me forgive, because I don't know how.

Then came the commute. One hour to her makeup counter job, one hour home, six months of nothing but preaching in the car — “I didn't listen to music, I listened to the Word” — until the girl who thought tongues were demonic prayed her way into the gift on I-75. (How she got there involves a Taco Bell slogan, and you have to hear her tell it.)

And then the day her car started overheating in Atlanta traffic, smoke pouring out, and instead of despair she felt an urge she'd never felt before: pick up the phone and encourage somebody. “God, you think of everything,” she remembers praying. “You gave me my own smoke machine.” That one video went viral — and Real Talk Kim was born. She preached her first sermon at 41.

The most tender ground comes near the end: her father — the pastor who didn't believe women belonged in the pulpit — and the day she heard him call out from the congregation, “That's my girl.” Kim opens up about losing him, about the one season her faith was truly rocked, and about the stunning full-circle moment of taking over his church and watching it become something neither of them could have imagined. “If God had healed my daddy,” she says, “I would not be doing what I'm doing right now.”

Along the way: the miracle in a prayer line that changed how she ministers forever, the nightly ritual of falling asleep to Scripture, and a closing prayer over listeners that is worth the whole episode on its own.

Ask her who Jesus is, and the answer comes from everything she lived: a Redeemer who “takes you right back to the place you're most embarrassed of — and uses you the greatest in that place.”

Watch the full conversation above. Find Kim at Real Talk Kim on all platforms, including her daily 8 a.m. Bible reading on the Real Talk Kim YouTube channel.