NBA player Dwyane Wade couldn't hide his emotions this past Sunday when he sat in the first pew of the church he brought for his mother, Jolinda Wade.
"This is tears of joy," Wade said, beaming. "Tears of joy for my mother."
Before she was known as the mother of the Miami Heat superstar and 2006 NBA finals MVP, Jolinda Wade was known as an inmate, a fugitive, a drug user and drug seller. Her life turned around seven years ago when after years of urging by her children, she got help and got clean. Along the way, she devoted her life to spreading the Word of God and started her first ministry while doing time in state prison.
Now that ministry has a new home called the Temple of Praise. Dwyane Wade bought it, and her children and her congregation gathered to dedicate it on Sunday.
"I respect my mother so much, from the life that she used to live and to see her today in the life that she lives. I'm so proud of her," Dwyane Wade told The Associated Press before the service. "Everybody thinks I'm the miraculous story in the family. I think she is. I think what I've done means I've been very blessed, but she's been more than blessed. She's been anointed."
Wade's sister Tragil Wade, who essentially raised him, would get word that someone died in the Chicago-area neighborhood she often feared it was her mother. One day she talked her mother into accompanying her to church. That moment, they say, is the one that convinced Jolinda Wade to make some radical changes.
She got sober, turned herself into Illinois authorities to serve a prison term that she skipped out on under auspices of joining a work-release program, and repaid her debt to society.
"My mother is a miracle to me and to our family, to see from where she came to where she's at now," said Tragil Wade, who at 30 is only four years older than the brother she has looked over for virtually his entire life. "I can't even describe it. It's like, if you didn't believe in God, this right here would make the belief strong."
"I feel reborn," said Jolinda Wade, who arrived for Sunday's service head-to-toe in purple, matching the newly redesigned décor of the sanctuary of the church.
Her church was formed in October with just 47 original members, Sunday she welcomed hundreds to service, including the mothers of Shaquille O'Neal and Magic Johnson.
Since becoming a Baptist pastor, Jolinda Wade's following – she shares the title of pastor with LaDell Jones, whom she befriended when they began minister training together in 2004 – had to meet in a small rented room, one that didn't give the NBA star's mother space to move around while delivering her testimony. The new facility has plenty of room for everyone to dance and rejoicing.
-Source: Eurweb
