On Respect

Presumably, everybody is interested in respect. For this reason, it is always the first thing I give everybody I ever meet. The problem is folk are not always very good at returning it, even people I've known nearly thirty years.

A lot of people figure me for a bum, since, although I attended Cornell University in the eighties, I have lived in public housing most of the last twenty-seven years and don't have good credit; I guess some people feel that just because you are needy, you only call to take advantage of them most of the time. I am, most assuredly, however, nothing of the kind. I don't have good credit, but there is a very good reason for this that is revealed in my new book "The Kingdom Seeker: the Diary of Saint Thomas the Divine," published by Authorhouse.

Anyway, what a lot of these people from Rhianna to Oprah Winfrey to Larry King to all my soi-disant friends and family had better understand about Tom Adams is that it's not money that buys my respect. What does buy it is how much you ever looked up to my Lord and Savior Jesus of Nazareth along with the beauty, the warmth, the sensitivity, and, possibly, just possibly any real talent any of you ever brought to the table, but, above all, how much any of you love holiness; these are the things that attract me to anyone in the first place, and only these things will keep me in the end, for I am not just anybody in this world! Is this clear?! To these folk I will say that don't noboby down here on earth give a damn about your big fancy degrees or your big fancy jobs or your big fancy names or your big fancy homes or anything else you've got buddyroos! Nothing you have or ever could have will ever matter more than any of these poor souls down here; what folk do care about is how much love you bring to the table for them, how well you respond to a friend that calls you after twenty years just to say hello and see how you are doing, and how you treat plain old ordinary folk - particularly poor people - that have never wished you anything but the greatest success! These are the things the Jesus many of these people so claim to love and adore cares about, okay! Is the above clear?

Anyway, if you just say the word "winner," a few times, you will at least see who all those were in this world, and with more than a hundred awards on my resume thirty years ago, I, Tom Adams, am definitely this!

Peace!