My Turn in the Guest Chair: A Church Elder on Cannabis, Faith and Building Your Better Self
Friends and followers, usually I am the one asking the questions.
This time, Jeremy Rivera turned the mic around. He invited me into the guest chair on Unscripted Cannabis to talk about the man behind GUDWUDZ. I was not sure what I would say. I said more than I planned.
Community builder. Thought builder. Systems builder.
That is how I answered when Jeremy asked who I am. I have spent my life asking if there is a better way for people to live together.
A lot of everything that I put out in the world is about intentionally constructing and being the architect of your better self and your better life.
Just J
Where does that come from? Look at where I started. A young Black boy in Jackson, Mississippi, when racial tension was not hidden. It was out in the open. Social systems I was born into that did not serve anybody. Then church. A congregation of a thousand members or more. I could look at the families around me and see it was not working. And I was being told to adopt it anyway.
Here is what I believe now. If people really focused on fixing themselves, one at a time, a lot of the gloom and doom we were promised would not have to happen.
An intersection with a lot of accidents
Jeremy asked the question everybody asks. How does a church elder run a company that makes smoking accessories?
I told him it is an intersection with a lot of vehicular accidents. Then I told him the truth.
I did not smoke anything until my freshman year of college. Then, a few years ago, in my forties, I was diagnosed with ADHD. My brain never stops. For me, cannabis quiets the noise and narrows the focus. So I had to choose. Adopt the values of a group, or the values that line up with my own life.
Here is the scripture that settled it for me. The path to hell is wide. The path to heaven is straight and narrow. If we are all walking arm in arm in group think, that is a pretty wide path. But if I am on my own journey, trying to know God not just as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob but as the God of Justin, that looks a lot more narrow to me than hoping we all get into heaven on a group discount.
Where GUDWUDZ came from
2003. Friends using an empty ink pen tube to hold the end of a joint. I thought, there is something here. But it is plastic. It is going to burn. So I started working with bamboo, and later moved to walnut so it could hold any roll, any roller.
My first wife did not want me to build it. We were in the church, and to her it was wrong. Seven years into our marriage, after a two-year fight with cancer, she passed. After that, I decided this was something God gave me, and I was going to use it to take care of the people He put in my life.
I spent thirteen or fourteen years teaching middle school math and science, and GUDWUDZ stayed a side project. My father died of a heart attack at 38, and I always felt like I was on a clock. I am past that now. I do not want to die with what is in me still in me.
Ideas outlast everything
I wrote my first book, Keys to the Kingdom, around 2005. I drafted it in months. Then I spent twenty years revising it, until my eyes went numb to the page. Writing is easy. Writing to be published is hard. AI finally helped me finish, working like an editor, and that led to The Point of Life and my latest, Eternity in Real Time.
Jeremy asked me about legacy. Here is what I told him.
My legacy looks more like ideas than it does look like houses or land or money.
Just J
Everything else can be taken. Your body. Your house. I watched cancer take my wife’s hair and her strength. What stays is what is inside. So stop looking outward for your reality. Turn the scope inward. That is the next dimension.
The problem I still have not solved
Jeremy closed by asking for one business problem I have not cracked. Here it is. GUDWUDZ is an experience. You do not know you could have been enjoying this better until you have. And anything smoking related is unwelcome on almost every social platform except X.
So how do you get an experience into people’s hands? I am still working on it. I have been asking guests ever since, on my own episodes. And the circle keeps getting wider. I recently sat down with Farmer Tom Lauerman, who has been fighting for this plant since the 1999 raid on his San Diego collective and long before. You can hear that one on Unscripted Cannabis now.
If you have an answer to my experience problem, I want to hear it. That is how the first domino falls.
Listen to the full episode above and read the full episode recap on Unscripted Cannabis. My longer thoughts live on my Substack, Today in Eternity, and you can find more of my work at mrgudwudz.com.
And if you want to try the experience I keep talking about, start with the GUDWUDZ Complete Ritual Bundle.
GUDWUDZ is a handcrafted walnut smoking accessory brand rooted in culture, craft and intentional living. Just J, also known as Mr. Gudwudz, hosts conversations on Unscripted Cannabis. This episode was hosted by Jeremy Rivera.
