Episode 96: Justin Wren
When you meet Justin in person, he takes up space.
With his professional athlete’s frame and his long blond hair, you don’t just see him.
You feel him.
He has presence — the kind that comes from a life lived in extremes: extreme pain, extreme discipline, extreme redemption.
What’s remarkable, though, is that beneath that larger-than-life exterior lives someone disarmingly gentle, with a radiating kindness. Someone whose eyes still carry the remembrance of the boy he once was — the boy who spent years being tormented, bullied, and made to feel his life was not valuable. In his book Fight for the Forgotten, Justin writes with raw honesty about how those early wounds shaped him. How the pain he felt became fuel, pushing him into the world of professional MMA where he became a champion. Found money, recognition, and a sense of belonging he desperately craved.
But the climb to becoming a champion came at a cost.
Behind the successes and the victories, he fell into addiction, spiraled into despair and eventually attempted suicide.
Somehow, in the haze of all that turmoil, a vision—a single Bible verse from Isaiah—became the thread that pulled him toward Africa,
Toward his purpose.
Toward a people he felt called to serve; he forgotten ones.
People living in modern-day slavery.
People drinking water that, as Justin says, we would hesitate to give to our dogs.
People whose dignity had been stripped away by broken systems and by history.
What followed became a symbiotic story of redemption.
Justin — who never had a champion fighting for him as a child — has become a dragon slayer for these forgotten communities who need protection, dignity, and a friend in their midst. And as he brings them life-saving clean water, they give him something just as life-saving: acceptance, belonging, and a deeper understanding of what family truly is.
In many ways,
they are fighting for each other.
