Reconcile’s story is not a before-and-after photo. It is a long walk from a hard childhood in Fort Myers, Florida, through faith that was tested in public housing in Houston, to the juvenile facilities in Miami where he now spends his weeks. Jesus and rap are both part of how he got here.
Where it started
Ronnie Lillard was born to a teenage mother who was mostly not there. He grew up in and out of his father’s care, then with his grandparents, where stability finally came, along with loss. Money was scarce in every house. He lived in a trailer park and in neighborhoods next to housing projects, and he learned early what it meant to carry consequences before he fully understood choices. As a teenager he was on probation with a curfew, balancing school and football while going to court, often with his grandmother next to him.
A way out, and a choice to go back
Football earned him a full scholarship to Rice University in Houston in 2008. He played linebacker and graduated with a triple major in Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Sociology. He could have used that degree to leave the kind of neighborhood he grew up in for good. Instead he moved toward it.
In Houston’s Third Ward he began working with young people involved in gangs and the courts. He launched Church in the Bricks in the Cuney Homes and, in 2012, founded his first nonprofit. His faith grew there, not in comfort but in the middle of the pressure. Hip hop was the bridge. It let him speak the language of the young men he was trying to reach, and it gave him a way to tell the truth about God without cleaning up the setting.
Why the name is Reconcile
To reconcile is to bring back together what was broken: people and God, people and each other, a young man and the future he was told he did not have. That is the thread through all eight albums, from Abandoned Hope in 2012 to Baptized in Mud in 2025, an album about grace that meets you in the mud, not after you climb out of it.
What the changed life looks like now
Today he is a husband and father in Miami and the CEO of We The Revolt, a nonprofit doing juvenile justice re-entry work with young people in Miami-Dade and Broward. He earned a Master’s in Public Administration, has advocated in the Florida legislature for juvenile justice improvements, and gave a TEDx talk in Miami in 2022. Fifteen years after Houston, he is still in the rooms where young lives get decided.
If his story speaks to where you are, start with today’s daily devotional. If you want him to tell it to your church, school, or youth group, book him to speak.