Before My Glory by Justin Alliman

“I don’t sell drugs” “I don’t do drugs” “I don’t shoot hoops” “I don’t rap over beats” “But I do possess the same grind mentality” “It’s all or nothing!”   Statistics say that I should be locked up, dead, or an underachiever. One thing that I always knew for certain, was that numbers do not tell the whole story. I was told many things at a young age, and becoming a positive contributor to society wasn’t one of them.Justin Alliman shouldn’t have succeeded.He was born in Ottawa, Ontario and was the second youngest of five children, to first-generation, Jamaican parents. At four years old he became an orphan and suffered years of post-traumatic stress. He became deaf and attended ten different schools before he was thirteen. Justin dropped out of college, had his basketball scholarship stripped away from him and he lost family members.But he’s not a statistic.At a young age, Justin decided that he was going to turn his trials into triumphs and the tests that God had put him through, would be his testimony. Children should never have to deal with what took place in his earlier years; however, at times- even children are faced with decisions that they must make on a day to day basis. He had already been through hell and back and his attitude towards life and wanting to beat the odds, kept him on the right track. Justin was consistent and with that, persevered and found great success with his basketball training business, enabling him to travel and inspire youth worldwide.And then it fell apart. He got a call, his brother had been killed.Intense, heartbreaking, real, and inspirational, ‘Before My Glory’ is a story of overcoming adversity, proving that our lives are shaped by what we want them to be and not by anyone else.