Playing a part of the Baltimore Ravens’ success, Johnny Shelton is one of very few team chaplains who is full time.
“Things just come up where people need to talk or they want advice,” Shelton says on a Today News video report. “They come to me with football pressure, family pressure, and relationship issues. Life is hard enough, and at the flip side of that, football is hard enough. So when you put those together, it’s just crazy.”
For the last decade, Shelton has held Bible studies and motivational pep talks for the Baltimore Ravens, whether players, staff or family members. Players are welcome before and during practice to come and pray, and during games he’s on the sidelines cheering on the guys.
Before every practice, Shelton walks the field praying for everybody’s safety. “I would pray for their hearts and minds to be clear, to be able to focus on the task at hand.”
Top athletes, like C-suite executives, dominate. But being at the pinnacle of athletic competition comes with the intense pressure to perform. Out of view of the public, the winners have life coaches, psychologists and pastors to help them cope.
Asst Coach Anthony Weaver appreciates Shelton’s role with the team. “We assume we’re alphas, right? We can solve and we can figure out everything. We’re players and coaches. And it’s not natural to turn to somebody for support and for guidance. He makes it easy.”
Shelton has also stated that he prays for and loves people of other faiths and religions, just as Jesus did.
All NFL teams have chaplains who don’t discriminate based on religion. They receive anyone and everyone of every… Read the rest: Fulltime chaplain at Ravens
Ordinarily, an Iranian agent in Israel would set off alarms, but THIS Iranian, an agent of Christ, is welcomed warmly.
Ramin Parsa, now an American citizen married to an Israeli, is cooking daily for 1,500 internally displaced Israelis and IDF soldiers, to whom he shares his testimony.
“We go to the military bases and tell them how much we love them and comfort them. We bring them special food,” Ramin told God Reports. “When they find out I’m Iranian, they really pay attention. That’s the reason God is really using my testimony.”
Ramin has never been an undercover Christian. Since converting to Christ inside Iran in 2005, Ramin has been a visible evangelizer of Muslims.
After being stabbed in Iran, arrested in Turkey, and even arrested in America for his faith, the persecuted pastor knows no fear. Defying Iran’s terror regime, he posed for photos with IDF soldiers.
“I want to send a message to the Islamists that hey we are here for Israel no matter what,” he says.
The current Hamas conflict is a proxy war supported by Iran. On Oct. 7, 3,000 Palestinian militants invaded Israel, killing 1,139 and taking 240 hostages back into Gaza.
As a result, 500,000 Israelis have been internally displaced. Israel struck back in an attempt to neutralize the extremist Hamas leadership which launched the attack, Gaza’s fifth war in its unceasing attempt to wipe Israel off the face of the map.
Born in Iran, Ramin began to question his Islamic faith when his father died. He converted after he… Read the rest: Ramin Parsa, an Iranian in Israel
SANTA CLARA, CALIFORNIA – NOVEMBER 19: Brock Purdy #13 of the San Francisco 49ers warms up prior to a game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Levi’s Stadium on November 19, 2023 in Santa Clara, California. (Photo by Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images)
Called “Mr. Irrelevant” as the absolute last pick of the last round of the 2022 NFL draft, Brock Purdy is poised – just one year later – to lead the San Francisco 49ers into the Super Bowl.
“I’m all about living set apart from the world. People can say whatever about me. My identity is in Jesus,” Purdy said on CBN News. His Twitter profiles says he’s a believer in Christ and quotes Col 3:23: “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men.”
Brock Purdy got his start in football taking the humble Perry High School in Gilroy, Arizona to the state championship twice.
Even though he did well, his high school was unknown and he was shorter than most elite quarterbacks, so recruiters panned him. He was given an unspectacular three stars on scout reports.
He got an offer to the mighty University of Alabama, but Coach Nick Saban said his accuracy was mediocre. Purdy felt pretty sure Saban hadn’t even watched his videos. Accuracy was and is his strong point.
Feeling he wouldn’t be given a chance at the Crimson Tide, Purdy opted for Iowa State University. Once again, he was at a lesser-known program – and he lifted the Cyclones to consecutive winning seasons and a Fiesta Bowl win after beginning as the third string quarterback.
Purdy’s strength was accurate passing, but the play that made him stand out with his team was the time he scrambled for yards, having no passing or handoff option. Purdy needed more yards and instead of skidding to a self-protecting down like most quarterbacks, he dropped his shoulder and smashed into two defenders.
Seeing his gutsiness, his teammates went wild. Purdy’s willingness to sacrifice for his players galvanized his team, demonstrating his leadership.
Despite his feats, once again Purdy wasn’t highly regarded by recruiters, now at the NFL level. He was dismissed for being shorter than the upper echelon QBs.
Round after round of draft passed agonizingly with no one showing interest in the Iowa star. Purdy was resigning himself to the alternatives: either give up football or try out at a “walk on” for the team of his choosing.
Fortunately for Purdy, he got the call before San Francisco exercised their last pick. Again, Purdy was the backup plan, a third string QB for the 49ers.
It didn’t matter. He was used to being underrated, and Purdy did what he always did when he was overlooked. He worked extra hard, learning the playbook forwards and backwards so that if ever got the callup, he’d be ready.
Coaches and players were watching, seeing the commitment, assurance, and readiness. In 2002, Trey Lance was the starter and Jimmy Garoppolo was the backup man. In week two, Lance was injured for the season. In week 13, Garoppolo suffered a foot injury.
For Jared Tourse who got saved at 17, substituting the video game Call of Duty for pot-smoking was a smart way to fill his down time and not fall back into sin.
But what started innocuously enough – even appearing to be a healthy hobby – turned sinister a few years later when he got kicked out of college for poor grades in Cal Poly Pomona’s engineering program.
“That was a wakeup call,” Jared says. “I was throwing away the maturity and responsibility part of life. I was a boy. I liked being a boy even though I was in my 20s.”
For Jared, as for many American young men, video-gaming became an addiction, uncannily similar to drugs. He played obsessively from 9:00 p.m. to 4:30 a.m. while his life floated downriver without achieving anything notable. He was still a junkie, a video game junkie.
Today, Jared has kicked the habit. He is married, has four kids and pastors a church in Victorville, California. How he exorcized the bewitchment of video games from his life is a story that starts with a pair of lovely brown eyes.
When Karina walked into the church, Jared was mesmerized. He waited for nine months before asking her on a date. As they got to know each other, it became obvious that Karina was his soulmate.
Jared gave her a promise ring and, after months, started looking for an engagement ring.
Somehow, Karina got wind of it – and she gave him an ultimatum: “I’m not going to marry someone who sits on their butt and plays video games all day,” she told him. “If you’re serious about this, you need to sell your Xbox.”
Her words were piercing, confrontative but also lovingly truthful.
Ever since Call of Duty distracted him from the call to engineering, Jared was binge-playing.
He worked a “bum job” delivering Chinese food from 4:00 to 9:00 p.m. He munched free egg rolls and sipped Chinese tea between deliveries. His tips covered his energy drinks, a bag of Doritos and the Xbox live card for each night’s activity.
“I was content,” he says. “I was saved and serving God in some capacity, but I floated in life. When I got off work, that’s when my day started. I played video games at night every day until I heard my mom wake up and go to work at 5:30 a.m.
“I was respected on Call of Duty,” he adds.
He was close to earning the coveted Golden Dragunov sniper rifle that Call of Duty awards to gamers who achieve 150 kills by shooting the head of enemies.
“When you’re in the video game world, you feel you’re becoming something,” he says. “You feel like… Read the rest: video game addiction
His dad was a murderer, convicted and sent to prison from the time Antonio Francis was in the womb. In high school, a voice told him that one day he too would become a killer.
Antonio was raised in a one-bedroom shack in Belle Glade, FL. “As soon as you came in, you could see the back door,” he says on a Delafe video. His mom didn’t take him to church but prayed with Antonio and his brother every night.
To visit their cousins, they had to go to church. At church, he learned about Jesus, but he never received him into his heart.
Next to their house was an abandoned building where addicts lived and used illegal drugs.
A “friend” of his mom involved in witchcraft cursed their family, blaming Antonio’s mom for a broken cell phone. She cast a spell on her, saying she would lose her car and children all at once.
Strangely, it happened to a certain extent. Rain came through the roof, forcing them to move. The car wouldn’t start. The kids had to stay at another place.
In high school, Antonio fell into selling drugs, stealing and violence.
Once, he robbed someone. Ten months later, three guys robbed him of $1,000. “Sometimes the stuff you do to people comes back to you and you don’t handle it so well,” he says.
Antonio swore revenge, vowing to kill the perpetrators.
But when he made up his mind to avenge his loss, he heard an audible voice, If you do it, you’re going to die or go to prison for the rest of your life.
Most of his buddies carried guns. Some even offered to do the dirty job for him. But Antonio’s manly pride made him think he would do it himself.
Sometime later, he again resolved to commit the triple homicide in retaliation for the robbery. A second time, he heard the voice, If you do it, you’re going to die or go to prison for the rest of your life.
In his dream, little Kamal Saleem brandished double-edged swords in both hands to behead multitudes of Christians and Jews. When he came before the throne of Allah, he laughed and said, “Only my crazy Kamal could do this.”
“My mother taught me that Muslims had conquered the world and would do it again,” Kamal says in the April 2022 Decision magazine. “I was taught that if we conquered America, we could conquer the world for Islam.”
Born into a Sunni Muslim family, Kamal Saleem was inculcated in the extremist form of Islam – they thought it was the purest form. You earn Heaven by doing good deeds, and martyrdom was the surest path to Paradise.
Taken out of school at age 7 and forced to work for money for the family, Kamal spent all his free time at the mosques learning Muslim zeal. When the radical Muslim Brotherhood showed up, all the members of the mosque joined the crusade.
He was still only 7, but he reported to a war training camp with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. With ropes to swing across pits and walls to scale, the camp seemed a playground to Kamal, but its mission was anything but play.
“You cannot be a warrior unless you know how to use a weapon,” his trainer said, handing him a military rifle. Kamal eagerly fired off 30 rounds into the air from the AK-47.
“I am a warrior!” he boasted, slapping his chest proudly with his hand. “The gun became my friend, and the smell of gunpowder became my addiction.”
After months of training, Kamal was entrusted with a mission to smuggle duffle bags of TNT and munitions through tunnels in the Golan Heights into Israel to be entrusted to shepherds at a designated drop point. Those explosives were to be used by fedayeen (Arab commandos) to kill Jews.
When he returned, his exploits were celebrated by hundreds at the base who shouted “Allahu Akbar” (god is greater). Kamal even got the chance to meet PLO leader Yasser Arafat, who declared, “Children like you will change the future. You are the future.”
Kamal continued executing… Read the rest: Kamal Saleem
Blockbuster podcaster Andrew Huberman – who brandishes a PhD to make brain science accessible to the general public – has reaffirmed his faith in God recently, though he came up short on clarifying which religion he subscribes to.
“I’ll go on record, I’m very comfortable saying I believe in God,” said the associate professor of Stanford University on a Cameron Hanes podcast. “There are many things science can explain and many things science can’t explain. All the elements of science are entirely compatible with the idea of there being a God.”
Huberman hinted that he follows and believes in the God of Christianity when he affirmed that he’s studying the Bible: “I’ve actually started reading the Bible recently,” he says. “I feel like it’s my duty to learn and compare the Old Testament with the New Testament.”
He discreetly danced around the question of which God he prays to, probably because he was afraid to scare off listeners (on whom his livelihood depends), whether Christian or otherwise. His circle of friends, fitness, and growth podcasters, tends to believe in an ill-defined “higher power.”
But his faith affirmation is still significant because of his bonafide scientific credentials (so many PhD-holders in the last three decades held that science undermined faith) and because of his sway over a vast swathe of worldwide listeners (Huberman has 4.38 million subscribers on YouTube alone).
Andrew Huberman says he grew up in a religiously diverse home. But the different faiths in his home, or lack thereof, did nothing to discourage him from praying “secretly.” In his late teens, he jogged down to Sands Beach in Santa Barbara, where he prayed.
His prayer life has picked up steam more recently because of friends who encouraged him to up his game.
“I absolutely pray. We can’t control everything,” he says. “I pray out loud in the morning and sometimes again in the middle of the night… Prayer has given me peace. And this is going to sound weird and people are going to say ‘What are you talking about?’ but it works. There were certain things I was grappling with that I couldn’t resolve.”
Smuggling drugs into Australia, Richard Brooks didn’t realize the taxicab driver he got from the airport was actually an undercover cop who had been tipped off about him.
Richard was convicted and sentenced to a prison term. In jail, a guard gave him a Bible and a Christian book We Can Take the Land from an incipient church-planting movement called Christian Fellowship Ministries.
Richard got saved and became enthralled with the idea of evangelism, discipleship and church planting, concepts described in the CFM book.
When he was released from prison, Richard was deported to America. It was the days before the Internet, so Richard couldn’t find one of the CFM churches and attended a Calvary Chapel in Palmdale, CA.
He joined a missions trip to Romania, where he locked eyes with Anita in Brasov. They married, and Richard, living in Brasov, started a Bible study prompted by his unbridled enthusiasm for his Christian faith.
It was soon after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and Romania had just opened up to the gospel along with all the other nations of the Eastern Bloc.
Taught communistic atheism all their lives but seeing the futility of communism, endless streams of young people were looking for a real hope and wound up attending his Bible studies. Richard used “We Can Take the Land” along with the Bible but missed some of the finer points of church-planting.
“People were getting saved, but Richard didn’t really know what to do with them,” says Greg Mitchell, head pastor for CFM.
In 1991, Richard and his wife came to America to take care of paperwork in America and visited churches seeking help and direction for his burgeoning ministry. Renewing his license at the DMV in Palmdale, Richard spotted a “Potter’s House Church,” one of the names of CFM churches.
Begging to be healed, Vani Marshall dared to touch an idol and got chased off by a priest.
“You are a sinner! You will never be able to touch god!” he shouted behind her. “There will always be a wall between you and god.”
Vani descended from a family of Brahmin chief priests, but none of the 3.3 million Hindu gods to whom she prayed could cure her disease. The condition baffled doctors, ravaged her with pain, and caused Vani to collapse randomly in public.
Her family made a pilgrimage from their native Malaysia to the center of Hinduism, India, in search of a miraculous cure.
Vani, 18 at the time, ascended a spiral staircase, thinking she could find god. Arriving at an upper level, she spied the heavy curtains keeping out the general public. Thinking the coast was clear, she pulled the curtains back, slipped in, and lay ahold of the myriad-eyed, multiple-armed idol to plead for mercy.
Out of nowhere, an outraged Hindu priest stormed in with his arms raised as if ready to strike the hapless teen. She quickly ran, with the angry priest in pursuit.
What she had done was a sacrilege in Hinduism. For two reasons, she was unequivocally prohibited from the inner sanctum behind the curtain: she was not a priest; she was a woman.
Moreover, she had desecrated the idol by touching the “holy” with human hands.
But for Vani, none of these rules mattered. What mattered was getting a cure that human doctors could not provide.
So when the Hindus ran her off, Vani surmised grimly: “I’m sunk for now. My pilgrimage to search for god was over. My sickness was still in my body.”
Vani had always had an atypical hunger to know about God. She sneaked the Hindu holy books out of her grandpa’s library to read, something prohibited for Hindu girls.
With the onset of a disease that doctors thought might be caused by a cancer in her brain (but never found in a cat scan), her search for truth intensified. When the pilgrimage to India ended only with frustration, she began to think other thoughts.
Since doctors couldn’t find a cure, they prescribed pain pills to “manage” the pain. Desperate, Vani considered suicide by consuming the whole bottle at once. But on the day she planned to end her life, she was sitting in her room remembering years before how people had knocked on her door and given her a Christian tract. Also, some friend had sent her a Christmas card.
Since she had basically exhausted the 3.3 million gods of Hinduism, she thought it would do no harm to ask Jesus for healing.
“What have I got to lose? Nobody will find out… Read the rest: Vani Marshall
A pious and proud Brahmin Hindu, Uma Moorthy worshiped idols at the temple every day, and the fact that she went to a Catholic school did nothing to change her convictions. But one day in the 12th grade, she heard a teaching from Isaiah 44, when God points out that part of the log gets used to make an idol and the other part gets used to cook food.
“If you have a brain, think and see,” the sister said to the group at the Scripture Union Bible camp to which Uma went for fun with friends.
The message was confrontational and rattled her.
“That night was a sleepless night because as a teenager I felt so bad in front of all my friends,” Uma says on a StrongTower27 video. She hadn’t been singled out from the crowd by the sister. But the Spirit went to work.
“Just out of curiosity and also to go and fight with that sister, I opened the Bible to the Book of Isaiah and started reading. I was reading just to fight with the sister the next day, but as I was reading, I don’t know what happened. The Holy Spirit just transformed me. For the first time in my life, I got to know that the true living God hates idol worship.”
Uma Moorthy was raised in a staunch Hindu family in Chennai, India. She was proud of her heritage and diligent with her duties. She never missed prayers at the temple. She always had the vermilion “third eye” pasted on her forehead. She washed in the Ganges River and planned to go to the Himalayas.
But the religious strivings collapsed upon reading the word of God.
“I cannot compress this omnipresent god to (the confines of) a statue,” Uma says. “This God of the Bible wants to have a relationship with me. When I was a Hindu, I used to worship a thousand gods. But none of those gods wanted to have a relationship with me. But the God of the Bible wanted to have a personal relationship with me. I can call this God Abba Father, my dad.”
As she read the scriptures, Uma also learned that Jesus’ sacrifice was enough for humanity to be forgiven, thereby making all religious striving pointless.
“I used to do a lot of ritualistic sacrifices,” she says. “This God sacrificed himself on the cross of Calvary while I was yet a sinner.”
Intending to stand up for her faith against the sister, she wound up bending her knee to the Savior.
Ronaldo’s drunken father shoved his face into the mattress so the neighbors would not hear him scream as he beat him savagely.
“When I grow up, I’m going to become a criminal and I’m going to come back here and kill you,” the 5-year-old threatened his father, who beat his mom too.
Of course, Dad only beat him more. So little Ronaldo ran away one night. He ran and ran and ran. He could hear his dad calling after him, but he never turned back.
When he could no longer run, he traversed 12 miles of jungles until he came to the Brazilian city of Bello Horizonte. On the streets, homeless and hungry, Ronaldo got picked up by a police officer who took him to a rehabilitation center for children.
It was supposed to be a safe place for children, but the types of kids who were taken there and the negligence of the staff made it essentially a criminal factory, Ronaldo says.
“They got a lot of money from the government to take care of children,” Ronaldo says on a Manna Testimonies video on Youtube. “That project does not exist anymore because it was a failure. They were just creating new criminals.”
Ashish swore he’d never be an alcoholic like his dad, who abandoned the family. But when he became a highly successful DJ in Nagpur, India, friends pestered him to try until he broke down.
“Come on, man, let’s go. Let’s have some drink. Nothing will happen,” they cajoled him. One drink became two became three, then weed. Ashish no longer gave money to his poverty-stricken mom because all his money went to alcohol.
Ashish’s degeneration led him to contemplate suicide, only to be interrupted by Jesus.
When he was a young boy, Ashish’s father worshiped snakes as part of Hinduism. His mother was given up to an orphanage because her father was a poor rickshaw driver.
Worship on snakes in Hinduism is common in Nagpur.
The alcoholism became so bad that Ashish’s father eventually left him and his mother for good. When his mother realized he was completely irresponsible, she shouldered the burden of providing for her kids. She worked cleaning houses.
But noticing she had a beautiful singing voice, somebody recommended she join choirs and orchestras, so she began performing. It was in that setting that Ashish, only a child, sat next to the sound booth and watched the masters of mixing perform their magic.
He was fascinated.
Simply by watching soundmen and DJ’s he learned the tricks of the trade. Ashish started deejaying at private parties. Then he got invited to run the music at clubs and parties of the rich of Nagpur. He was a trance DJ.
Nagpur at night
“I became a very well-known DJ in my town,” Ashish remembers on a Manna Testimonies video on Youtube. The fame brought friends, and the friends brought vice. He had never drunk alcohol, but they broke him down. The introduced him to weed also.
“In the beginning, it feels like heaven,” he says. “It feels so good: party with friends, club, night, disco, girls. But slowly, slowly… Read the rest: Hindu Trance DJ saved from drowning
Dee-1, who slips seamlessly in and out of the label “Christian rapper,” has detonated a powder keg of controversy by calling out millionaire rapper Rick Ross, whom he accuses of making a career of inciting violence and crime in the black community with his lyrics.
“I love you too much to not be honest with you,” Dee-1 addressed Rick Ross on his IG. “I was talking about you as a hip hop OG still glorifying murder and drug-dealing in your music… Ultimately I’m just trying to do God’s work in this industry… I’ve been successful for quite a while and not having to glorify the things that are harmful to our community. Could you do that? As black men, let’s do our best to do God’s work and now what’s holding us down.”
Dee-1 is a Louisiana-based Christian rapper who commands the respect of the hip hop community at large. He made his incendiary remarks on Sway in the Morning, a show that’s a cornerstone in the industry. He called out not only industry giant Rick Ross but also Meek Mill and Jim Jones for churning out lyrics that extol the gangster life.
In recent years, a number of hip hop artists, especially those in the extreme “drill rap,” have been gunned down, including a friend rapper of Dee-1. The problem is not limited to the celebrities but can be seen as part of the cause of hood violence and drug addiction.
“It’s the OG’s who l like to call DG’s — Disappointing Grownups — these 40-somthing-year-olds, men. I hate to see these gray-head clout-chasers who still talking about ‘and I sent my young boys to wet your whole block up’” Dee said on Sway. “This man glorifying getting people killed. Like, what are you doing, bro?”
Never mind that Richard Lorenzo Jr. wallowed in money. He still felt empty. To find fulfillment, he trained to be a warlock.
“I was making a hundred grand a month. I had the traveling, the women. I bought two properties,” Richard says on a Delafe video on YouTube. “But I was depressed. I had all this money, but the money was not answering it either.
“I stopped caring about the money. Now what I cared about was finding out what’s real? The witches were telling me real things. They told me true things about my past. They were telling me I was called to be a warlock.”
Richard’s descent into drug trafficking and witchcraft began with rejection in his childhood. He was raised in Fort Lauderdale to Puerto Rican parents. His mom took him to Catholic masses, but the violence of his neighborhood pulled him down.
“I loved women, I loved partying, I loved drinking and smoking. I loved robbing,” he says. “It wasn’t because I needed the money. It was because I wanted acceptance from my peers. I’m a product of my environment. If you do these things, you’re accepted and they look at you like you’re more of a man.”
While he was flexing worldly impulses, he also did well enough in his studies to get into Broward College and later the University of Central Florida, where he fell into fraternity party life at age 17.
He and his friends were doing crazy things; some even got shot. At his ex-girlfriend’s apartment, he had an experience in his sleep in which he fought off a demon by reciting the Lord’s Prayer. He remembered the prayer from his childhood.
Thinking he needed a “change of scenery,” he moved at age 21 to New York City, becoming a bouncer at clubs in Manhattan. The change of scenery didn’t bring a change of heart.
“I was still robbing, finessing anything – clothing from department stores. I was credit-card-scamming. It was an adrenaline rush,” Richard explains. “I was good at it. I had this strategy. I had demons in me.”
But after the rush came guilt, depression and suicidal broodings.
“I cut off everybody in my life because I was so depressed,” he says. “I had so much paranoia and lived in so much chaos that I just cut everybody off. I thought it was better to die.”
Despondent one day in his apartment, he heard a supernatural voice break through the darkness. “It brought so much life to my spirit,” he says. But Richard didn’t know Jesus yet, so he mistook the voice as belonging to his dead uncle.
Even though he didn’t recognize the voice, it encouraged him. Friends were going to jail and getting killed in New York, so Richard decided to flee the city and join the Navy as an air traffic controller. A lot of his deployment he spent in Greece.
In the military, Richard didn’t reform. As a matter of fact, he began selling marijuana. Reveling in vices again eventually landed him in depression, so one day on a beach in Crete, while his friends were in the club, he went alone to the beach to cry out to whatever Higher Power might be out there.
“I didn’t know anything about the Bible. I was crying profusely, just screaming, ‘Who are you? What’s the purpose of life?” he recalls.
He sought Haitian voodoo. He found God.
He heard a voice, the same voice he heard in New York. “I’m going to show you now.”
He was stunned.
Still, Jesus didn’t immediately show him. Though the supernatural encounter was overwhelming, he was still very lost. Instead of coming to Christ, Richard fell into even greater sin. It got darker before it became lighter.
He diversified his trafficking to cocaine, ecstasy, pill and “lean,” codeine cough syrup mixed with soda. Read the rest: Warlock Richard Lorenzo now a pastor
At first, Dan had no qualms about paying for his girlfriend’s abortion. Only afterwards did a sense of guilt creep over him.
“Without even thinking about it, without hesitation, I paid for her abortion,” Dan says. “I didn’t even feel guilty about it until a little later. It became one of the things that made me aware of my sinfulness later on. Up until this point, I didn’t have a conscience about what I did. But when I did that, I knew that I had done something wrong. It was a terrible choice.”
He ultimately became aware of his moral responsibility. “Guilt and condemnation are very powerful emotions,” Dan says. “The blood of Jesus is able to cleanse our conscience from dead works so that we can serve the living God. When you cross certain lines in your life, there’s a lot of guilt that is carried with it. It can lead to self-hate. Jesus is that scapegoat that took the blood and cleansed us from the guilt of the past.
“It’s pretty plain and obvious that you’re involved in a murder,” he adds. “But the blood of Jesus is so powerful and is able to cleanse your mind and your conscience of any person who has crossed these lines. You can experience God’s love, knowing that his blood was shed for that purpose.”
Dan saw Melissa at a car dealership and, instantly attracted, started asking her out on a date.
At the time, Melissa had two kids and was going through a divorce.
Melissa grew up in a heroin-running and heroin-abusing family that often moved between Texas and California. Her dad was the black sheep of a Christian family, and at times they attended church.
“When we were in church, my family was ok,” Melissa says. “When we weren’t in church, my family was crazy.”
Because of the fast living at home, Mellssa started hanging out at bars when she was 12. She started drinking and doing drugs at 15. She was pregnant at 16 and married at 17. She got into fist fights with her husband, trying to get him to work. She divorced at 20.
For his part, Dan, the youngest of six, suffered trauma at 8 when his parents separated in Galveston, TX. Dan and his brothers suffered a car accident. One of the brothers flew through the windshield. Dan woke up in a ditch.
Iran is no longer a Muslim nation, declares former Iranian Muslim Dr. Hormoz Shariat, who has broadcast the gospel into Iran for 23 years.
“I’m working with the people of Iran daily. I am in touch with them. I evangelize them. I answer their questions,” Dr. Hormoz says on a Voice of the Martyrs video on YouTube. “Iran is no longer an Islamic nation.”
Dr. Hormoz’s audacious statement contradicts Iran’s official census data (which says the nation is 98% Muslim) but coincides with an online scientific survey which pegs the Muslim believers at 37 % (32.2% Shi’ite and 5% Sunni branches of Islam).
His declaration also runs counter to the perception of outsiders that Iran is a hostile extremist nation whipped into a furor to carry out the wrath of Allah.
But his observations are significant. As someone who interacts online daily with common people in Iran, he’s a man with his ear to the ground.
For years, Christian observers have speculated about wide scale revival in Iran based on scant data that emerges from Iran.
Dr. Hormoz’s assessment goes well beyond what has been previously reported and upends the way many view Iran. His observations may be useful when Christians pray for Iran.
However, his hopeful appraisal doesn’t necessarily mean there will be a change of government. The Iranian authorities suppress the population with an ironclad fist. The case of Syria is illustrative: while many heralded the downfall of the Syrian autocrat during the so-called “Arab Spring uprising” of the early 2010s, the dictator clung to power through brutal military repression.
Nor does the decline of Islam in Iran mean everyone is turning to Christ. According to the scientific survey only 1.5% of the current population identifies as Christian. Meanwhile, a whopping 22.2% say they adhere to no religion, while 8.8% classify themselves as atheist.
All caveats aside, the news is heartening. Iran is far from the Islamic monolith of the Iranian propaganda.
“One-third said either God is not relevant to my life, is not important, or there is no God,” Dr. Hormoz says. “The last one-third were looking all over the place. They were looking at New Age religions, Eastern religions, all kinds, and Christianity, of course. But everything but Islam; they are not looking for Islam.”
After 40 years of repressive Shariah law-rule, Iranians are disillusioned with the government’s decades-old failure to solve the problems that existed under the Shah.
“Iran is the only nation in the world led by Islamic clerics. They implemented Islam in every aspect of life. They have laws for your bedroom, your bathroom. They invade every area of your life,” Dr. Hormoz says. “Iran will never be an Islamic nation. The hatred, the rejection of Islam is so wide and deep, people are no longer coming back to it.”
Incensed, Jeremiah Wacker stood up and walked out of church.
“When I heard the preacher say, Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life and that no one can enter Eternal Life without Christ, I was agitated, I was bothered,” Jeremiah says on a Lacy B channel YouTube video. “I left in the middle of church service. I was offended.”
Jeremiah Wacker had been raised with New Age teaching. He was taught the Bible was merely men’s thoughts and not absolute truth.
Jeremiah’s parents instilled him with pure New Age doctrine, that all religions have some element of truth and you can pick and choose what you like as if it were food on a buffet.
No religion alone was the truth, he had been told.
But in high school, a friend’s parents invited him to church. He acceded because of their kindness, not because he was on a quest for truth.
The preaching of the Word of God grated against his inner worldview.
“I was taught that the Bible was written by men and used by religion to manipulate people,” Jeremiah says. “I didn’t believe in sin, and I didn’t believe I was a sinner.”
Nevertheless, the conviction of the Holy Spirit fell on him when he heard the Word preached.
“When I was challenged by the message of the gospel, it was diametrically opposed to anything I believed,” he acknowledges. “But I felt conviction. Something was telling me I was not right with God.”
According to the New Age teaching he had learned as a child, he was his own god.
After training intensely for six months and getting into the best shape of my life, I submitted to the MDK Project, a 75-hour men’s boot camp, and failed catastrophically. I didn’t last two hours.
The MDK Project is a rigorous testing of physical, mental and emotional strength that tantalizes with the promise of breakthrough in your fitness, finance, family and faith. Though Christianity is a component, the California-based program is a far cry from a Christian men’s retreat. The motivational speeches are given by ex-military guys and entrepreneurs who spike their speech with cuss words.
I was at a stage in my life where I wanted something very different. I wanted a challenge, not the circle of empaths I had hung out with for my 56 years.
I even went to the extreme of thinking about why the camp appealed to me: I wanted an “initiation into manhood.” Our modern American society, in my opinion, has substituted the paltry college degree for making a kill hunting or fighting in war, historical rites of passage for men. My dad didn’t let me play football, a chance to learn through toughness and adversity. My last fight was in the eighth grade; I lost.
John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart resonated with me. We have feminized men, made them into Nice Guys who let themselves get walked over, who run away from danger, who cow to the demands of the anti-God Cultural Elites. Because Christianity is compassionate, this confusion has crept over us.
Where’s the balance? David was a warrior who downed Goliath. Jesus stood up to the reigning elites of his day.
I’m a strange mix of fear and bravery, a guy who alternatively runs into and runs away from adventure. I was a missionary for almost 16 years in Guatemala. Then I came back and settled into stagnation for 12 years. The stagnation was restful, but it was boring and toxic. The old adage that an unoccupied mind is the devil’s playground proved true for me.
So I signed up. It was about as expensive as a Tony Robbins seminar. I wanted to breakthrough in my physique and my business. I thought this outside-of-the-box approach would revolutionize my ministry as well. It has.
The trainerize-guided workouts combined with MyFitnessPal-nutriiton plan whittled my body down 30 pounds. Abs began protruding, a secret longing of mine what remained quixotically beyond possibility.
I ministered in Pakistan. The pastor leading that trip, a former Army Ranger, remarked about me that I was “absolutely fearless.” Don’t most us men fantasize about being courageous?
Unmistakably, there are health benefits to having an 15% BMI. The fit pastor won’t die early, depriving the world of his usefulness. I feel younger and more zestful in life. I’ve gotten breakthroughs on my bum knee and shoulder injuries.
But when I submitted to the ultimate test, I flunked. In the October iteration, I was among the first to tap out. To quit the Project, you have to ring a brass bell three times just like the Navy Seals. I was loath to quit. But on some bear crawls, my shoulders were burning. I was lagging way behind the 13 other guys.
Shame, fear and fatigue descended on me. I had visualized all sorts of mental strategies to deal with the barking drill sergeants, foreseen army crawls, and surf torture. But suddenly I found myself resourceless against coming in dead last. (I had hoped I would be in the middle of the pack).
With muscles burning, out of the bear crawl posture, I stood up. My coach screamed at me: “Mike, get down and crawl!” I signaled for the bell to be brought close. With cameras filming, I rang the bell. I felt shame, but I think I also realized I wasn’t going to make it, and I didn’t want the instructors to descend on me.
Men who complete the Project are given a cool hatchet to hang on the wall. They are inducted into an elite society – numbering about 200 so far – of guys who survived a sleep-deprived, food-deprived 3-day ordeal that’s a taste of Navy Seals Hell Week. It’s heady stuff.
It’s also entry into a network of entrepreneurs and coaching that offers to 10X or 100X your business.
To deal with the disappointment, I headed immediately to Yosemite. I wanted to hike to the top of Upper Yosemite Falls, get in nature and gather my thoughts in prayer and communion with God. I didn’t want to descend into a loser mentality that has befuddled me in the past.
I surveyed my wins: I hadn’t run away, like I did in college when I turned down the editor’s job. About half the guys who sign up for the Project don’t even show up. Is it better to try and fail or to not even try?
I got breakthrough on my physique. My fitness leveled up beyond my prior do-three-exercises-and-go-home, easy-on-myself gym routine.
To my surprise, I found… Read the rest: MDK Project
Even through his PlayStation Portable, Lacy Brunson got access to the internet and porn growing up.
He was being raised by his grandparents, which saved him from the distressing chaos of his parents’ life: Mom was an alcoholic and drug addict. Dad came in and out of his life constantly.
“I’m grateful that my grandparents raised me because they took me out of what could have been an even worse situation,” Lacy says his YouTube channel Lacy B. “They raised me the right way. I was raised in church. I knew about God; I knew about Jesus.
“But I didn’t want that. I didn’t want anything to do with that because I saw the hypocrisy. I saw the pastors that were sleeping around with members of the church or in the same clubs that I went to. I saw people in leadership drinking.”
His troubles arose in Middle School when kids showed him pictures of pornography. At that time, the Internet was just starting, and with it free and easy access to lustful images. His PSP became just one more device to let sewage into his brain.
“There I was in my room secretly looking at porno and downloading it to my PSP and eventually my cellphone,” he remembers. “My mind became so warped when it came to this issue because all I now saw was women as sex objects. I didn’t even care.”
Early on, he began sleeping around.
“I had my first kid even before I left high school,” he says.
Add to the mix weed, alcohol and parties. Lacy was becoming a full-fledged sewer rat wallowing in the noxious offerings of Satan.
“I was never satisfied,” he recognizes. “They were only momentary pleasures, but I kept doing them. It was a habit.
With admirable baller skills, Lacy contemplated a college basketball scholarship.
“If I take this serious,” he thought at the time, “I can play ball, I can graduate and I can do something with my life.”
After the walk-on tryout for the university team, the coach called him to the office. “He told me how impressed he was.”
But Lacy didn’t lay off the drugs. “I was going to class high. I wasn’t doing any of my homework. I wasn’t studying,” he explains. “I was partying on Tuesdays. It was crazy. I was reckless in college.”
Today Sean Corcoran’s life has been transformed. But in 2005, he was a drug addict dying in a hotel room he snagged from FEMA after Hurricane Rita.
“I lay on the floor, alone in the dark, dying,” Sean recalled on a Facebook post in 2018. “My breathing was shallow and purposeful and took all of my energy and focus. With each breath I silently repeated the same prayer I had said dozens if not hundreds of times before – ‘God, please pull me out of this one last time.’”
As he came out of the meth-induced stupor, he remembered a pamphlet in his run-down truck for a rehab facility. He rummaged through all his belongings stuffed in his Ford. That flier, and Jesus, were his ticket not only to a turnaround but to wild success.
Unlike many drug addicts, Sean Corcoran had an idyllic family in Louisiana. His problem was his brain. It always seemed to be racing with tremendous intelligence and curiosity but was easily bored.
He turned to drugs to stay entertained.
“My childhood was as good as it gets. I was raised by devoted parents,” Sean tells. “I attended the best schools, learned musical instruments, played team and individual sports, was a Boy Scout.”
Amid all the blessings, a friend turned him on to Adderall, an amphetamine-based stimulant for ADHD patients that helps them focus.
“I couldn’t get enjoyment out of anything that slowed my mind,” he says. “For me the hook was Adderall. With amphetamines, I was awake, alert, and hyper focused on whatever I wanted to do.”
A voracious learner, he took advantage of Adderall to master stuff. He broke things just so he could fix them and understand their inner workings.
After discovering Adderall (which a friend gave him), he researched at the library the symptoms of true ADHD patients to give the right answers to his doctor to get his own prescription. At his worst, he was taking 10 Adderall pills of 30 mg a day and barely slept.
Problems arose at 2:00 a.m. when he was awake – and no one else was awake – and he was looking for things to do to entertain his mind.
“Nothing good ever happens after 2:00 a.m.,” he says.
As he grew older, he was introduced to cocaine by a friend while watching a movie in 1999.
“I remember everything about that night. It was nineteen years ago and I remember it much better than I remember yesterday. That was the greatest high of my life. Though I tried for years, I never was able to get to that point again.”
Then he tried ecstasy.
“Once I had done cocaine, and was seeking it out on a regular basis, there was really no reason to hold back. Ecstasy was next, and before long I was taking 5 or 6 ecstasy pills every Thursday, every Friday, and every Saturday night.”
While doing this, Sean held down a job. He made sure to take his drugs at parties with other people – never alone. In his mind, he wasn’t a drug addict if he took drugs with others. True addicts took drugs alone, he thought, so he refrained.
He also refrained from taking more drugs to not embarrass his family. Bringing shame to his family was something he never wanted to do.
“When meth came around it was even better because the high lasted so long and was undetectable unless someone noticed my 80-pound weight loss, huge dark circles under my eyes, or my newfound ability to clean and organize irrelevant things for hours at a time,” he says.
The downward spiral, however, was devastating. He became paranoid, peeking out the curtains to guard against “someone out there who knew what I was doing and was getting ready to bust me,” Sean says.
He worked 8-20 hours a day just to pay for his addiction. For six years, he “systematically tore apart every relationship I had with friends and with family.” he explains. “I lost jobs and I lost homes.”
Meanwhile, he had ceased to experience the euphoria of the drug. “I was not continuing because I enjoyed the rush,” Sean says. “I was continuing because I could not stop even though it was killing me. I was very aware that it was killing me.”
When Hurricane Rita hit Louisiana, Sean availed himself of the free hotel rooms offered by FEMA. This is where the end came.
He smoked his meth pipe under a single light (he had turned all the other lights into meth pipes).
“I was dying of an overdose. I wasn’t scared to die. I truly believed I had no reason left to live. I was worthless. I was hopeless,” Sean says. “I was stuck in a cycle of living just long enough to bring myself a little closer to death than the last time. My prayers for salvation were solely based in the fear of disappointing my family one more time, of giving them a lifetime of a last memory of my complete failure.”
Sean couldn’t move or breathe. The curtains were closed, and he had hung the “do not disturb” sign on the doorknob. No one was looking for him. No one was going to find him.
Then he lost consciousness.
“I don’t know how long I was out. I don’t know what happened or… read the rest: Adderall addiction
A congressman blasted the Biden Administration for “persecuting” Danish Evangelist Torben Sondergaard, who when applying for refugee status suddenly found himself arrested and incarcerated in an ICE prison.
Clay Higgins (R-Louisiana)’s statement, entered officially into the congressional record, is important because he is a member of the Homeland Security commission, the body that oversees ICE (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement).
“Torben Sondergaard is a legal immigrant from Denmark,” Higgins read about a week ago before the Border Security, Facilitation and Operations subcommittee, which he chairs. “He came to our country legally and applied for asylum properly. He has no criminal charges. He was arrested … and has been incarcerated … for over one year.
“He’s been persecuted by this administration and targeted, we believe, because he’s an evangelical minister.”
Congressman Higgins’ incendiary accusation gives powerful support to Sondergaard’s argument that he is a victim of sinister persecution.
The iconoclastic preacher – who emphasizes evangelism, baptism, Holy Spirit power and exorcism – was persecuted in Denmark, which leans heavily to the secular Left. A T.V. crew contrived a hit piece on him that purported to show child abuse in his ranks. Almost immediately, Danish government officials, citing the T.V. report, passed a law specifically prohibiting exorcism.
Sondergaard saw the one-two punch as a devastating blow to his ministry, The Last Reformation. Thinking that he would no longer be able to evangelize freely in his native land, he fled to America and applied for refugee status under the religious persecution protections.
Sondergaard’s team thought the case would be a slam dunk: he was personally decried nationally and threatened with imprisonment for doing what he says all Christian should do, fighting the forces of Satan.
He was shunned as a boy because he liked “girlish” things: flowers, animals, women’s clothes, dolls and movies with strong female leads.
“I remember thinking that if I was a female, then I felt people would then accept me,” Dane Erik says. “It was my distorted thinking that I would be accepted.”
Because certain people bombarded him with the message that he was born LGBTQ and that he should embrace it fully, Dane passed from gender-confused to gay to transgender.
Dane when he became transgender.
Embracing sin did not bring the touted happiness, he says.
Today, Dane, 38, from Wisconsin, is a “man of God,” he says.
“I accepted what other people identified me as. I started to believe lies about God until I started reading scriptures for myself. It showed me He loved me and sought me out even in my confusion,” he says. “Even as I struggled to understand my identity, until I saw myself as God created me.”
His childhood was typical of someone who slips into LGBTQ. He was bullied and ostracized.
Dane today.
“I was made fun of regularly and excluded from groups,” he says. “Some girls didn’t want to be around me because I was a boy and boys didn’t like me because I was too ‘effeminate.’ I was fascinated with women and girls, they also gave me comfort and nurturing that men or boys didn’t.
“It made me cry and felt very alone as both boys and girls would bully or shun me.”
Wanting desperately to fit in and be accepted, Dane fell in with other misfits: disable kids, outcast kids and minorities.
Not everything pointed in one direction though. He liked swimming, hiking, wrestling, baseball, soccer and “getting out into nature without fear of getting dirty.”
In high school, he tried to project a masculine image and even bragged about a girlfriend who didn’t exist, “so people would stop harassing me,” he says.
To escape the loneliness and rejection, he took refuge in singing, music, art and movies.
Later, he took an interest in psychology. “I loved learning about people and their experiences,” he says.
The last scare was his wife. After being shot up with eight rounds at close range in Iraq, Navy SEAL Jason Redman survived but was disfigured. He had tubes going in and out of his body. What would be the reaction of his wife of just six years?
“There are stories of spouses showing up at Walter Reed (National Military Medical Center), walking into the room of severely wounded warrior and saying, ‘Nope. I didn’t sign up for this,’” Jason says on a Real Ones video.“ They take their rings off, leave them on the table and walk out.
“I was really terrified of how she was going to handle it.”
Jason Redman grew up in a Christian family, but he wandered as he grew up. He became a Navy Seal, the toughest and elitist soldiers on the planet, and battled terrorists in Iraq. He was living the dream embodied by his nickname “Rambo Redman.”
But the killer soldier feared by terrorists got shot up.
First, he almost was stripped of his trident, the Navy SEAL pin and badge of supreme honor.
As a standout Navy SEAL he earned promotions, but became cocky.
“I started to get a little bit of ego,” he acknowledges. “I started to think I was the man of danger, that I was better than other people.”
Now he recognizes that he became too prideful to listen. At the time, he was in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban.
As the war evolved, Jason was falling behind on his tactics and strategies. The new guys actually had more up-to-date knowledge about how to deal with the enemy.
“A lot of the older tactics I had learned weren’t the same as the ones our guys were running with now,” he says.
But Jason was too proud to ask for help from rookies. “I was insecure,” he says. “I was unwilling to say to the young guys, ‘Hey man, I don’t know how to do that. Can you help me?’”
To douse his insecurities, he turned to the bottle between battles. Jason became a hard drinker.
When a bunch of American soldiers came under Taliban ambush in an Afghan valley, Jason responded rashly. He descended into the valley to help them, even though air support was on its way.
It was gutsy to attempt with only his machine-gunner to cover for him.
It was not-well-thought-out. “I made a bad call,” he admits.
By descending from the opposite direction, air support could no longer bomb the enemy positions for fear of killing Jason also. Instead of single-handedly liberating his buddies, he single-handedly threw a wrench into the process of neutralizing the enemy.
For that foolhardy antic, Jason got called in by his commanding officer. He was informed that military personnel were upset. For endangering so many of his fellow soldiers, there were vigorous calls for him to be kicked out of the SEALs.
“Guys wanted my head on a block,” he says.
In that instant, Jason’s dreams died in disgrace. “They were going to take my trident,” he says. “My world was over.”
After the dressing down, Jason went to his room and, blaming everybody else, grabbed his pistol and stuffed the muzzle into his mouth.
As in so many fairy tales, a life-changing event hit Eric Quiles as he lingered in front of a looking glass.
Bleary-eyed in a bathroom, high on mushrooms, after another one of the endless parties, Quiles observed his unsavory appearance reflected in the mirror.
Then God spoke to his heart: Is this how you want me to see you when I return?
Raised in a church, the Utah native had become a rebel.
When he was 18, he was thrown out of the military. “It was a time of a lot of turmoil. I found out a lot of things about my real father.”
Raised by his alcoholic stepfather, the family relocated from New York hoping the change of place would bring a change of behavior for Eric. It didn’t.
What worked however was an invitation to church. At 8, Eric started attending church with his family and the change was radical.
At 17, he was pressured to join the military. A pastoral change discouraged the family, and they left church.
For his part, Eric found out his “dad” was really a “stepdad.” There’s no problem with that, but it bugged him that everyone else knew and kept the secret from him, which unleashed unexpected emotions and questions in his soul. Who was his biological father? Why did everyone keep the info from him like it was a secret?
“I felt betrayed. I decided to leave the church. It was like egg on my face. It was like everyone knew except me.” Eric says. “I felt ashamed, out of place and distraught about the whole thing, and I went to the world.”
Now Eric calls his stepfather his real father because he has processed the whole thing. And his stepfather never stopped visiting and praying for Eric while he was AWOL from God. “He never gave up on me,” Eric acknowledges.
After seven years of being lost in the abyss of drugs and partying, Eric was broken, depressed and suicidal.
“I was by myself. I was involved in all kinds of drama. I had a son out of wedlock,” he says. “I was down and out, at the bottom of the barrel.”
As misery grinded his soul, Eric became despondent of life itself.
But before he attempted suicide, he had two encounters with God.
One was in the mirror. The other was when he was trying to be the life of the party at an ATV outing. With a facade of having fun but suffering inside, Eric rode his Banshee off an embankment and rolled it.
Despite the vehicle falling on top of him, Eric was unhurt. A friend was not so lucky — he went to the hospital. Eric meditated on his brush with traumatic injury. As he lay looking skyward at the bottom of the sand dune, Eric heard the still small voice of the Lord.
Desmond Bell was not afraid to launch out as a pastor and “pioneer” a church at Wilberforce, Sierra Leone. He had already conquered his worst fear.
He had gotten married.
“I thought marriage wasn’t worth it because I was afraid I would be like my dad,” Desmond recalled. He grew up with a single mother because his dad had been unfaithful.
“But (my pastor) showed me that I could make a difference. He showed me how to love my family. It was actually Pastor who influenced us to get married because I was scared. He showed me I could be loyal to my wife.”
Three pastoral assignments later, Bell, now 41, took over a church in Marseille, France from Charlie Forman who now is an evangelist. It has been an astounding odyssey for a man born into one of the poorest nations of the world.
When Desmond was only two months old, his mom, a telephone operator, separated from his dad. Bell grew up in a middle class home in Sierra Leone’s capital city, Freetown, and integrated in 1992 into the Door Church which was exploding in the middle of a guerrilla war.
At 19 years old, Bell got caught up in the whirlwind of exciting preaching, enthusiastic outreach, commitment and loving pastoral attention that marked that early church. Pastor Alvin Smith became a father figure for Bell.
He met his wife, Matilda, another young person drawn by Holy Spirit fire, and they married only after Pastor Rob Scribner from Santa Monica pushed them forward. “It was obvious that they liked each other,” recalled Rob, whose church had help bankroll revival in Sierra Leone.
Bell, who is four years older than Matilda, pioneered a church in Wilberforce in 1998. He was among the first… Read the rest: He was afraid of getting married.
A brainiac in school, he dreamed of becoming another Thurgood Marshall, but when his mother was murdered when he was only 14, he turned to stickups with a gun on the mean streets of College Hill, Tampa Florida.
“”That’s when I changed my concept of life and became a totally different person,” David White says on a Manifestations Worldwide video. “My dreams and aspirations were totally killed. The idea that there was a God in Heaven was over for me. I declared that night that if there is a God in Heaven, then you’d better stop me because I’m going to hurt all these people.”
He went from a gifted program at school to fending for himself on the streets. Filled with rage, David “pimped” himself out to older women to have a place to sleep and food to eat. To get a little extra money for himself, he became a trigger man robbing people at gunpoint.
“I was a little stick-up kid,” he says. “I was a wicked young kid. I was known to be a shooter.”
A local drug dealer took him under his wings. Knowing that brandishing a gun would get the young man killed, the drug dealer taught David to deal drugs instead. It was a safer way to make a buck.
Because he was so dangerous, the cops wanted him off the streets, so they planted drugs on him, accused him falsely and locked him up, David says. He was labeled “a threat to society.”
“I was innocent of the charges I was in prison for, but I wasn’t innocent,” David acknowledges. “I had done a lot of worse things. They did what they had to do get me off the streets.”
A God-hater, David despised “jailhouse religion.” While Christianity turned him off, he like the white-hating religions of the Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam, or the Hebrew Israelites.
“I was trying to prove that the Bible was full of falsehoods and contradictions and that Christianity was the white man’s religion,” David says. “But then I found that the things I was taught to battle Christianity with was actually a lie. I found that Christianity was established in Ethiopia since the year 84.
“As I was reading the Bible, I was changing,” he adds. “The book changed me.”
Then he stumbled on Gideon, who put tests on God to find out his will and purpose.
It occurred to David to likewise test God – in a “weird way like a child would.”
“If God is real, send a bird to touch this window pane,” he recalls. “It was raining out. When I called on God to touch a window pane, amazingly a bird touched that square. I was an intellectual and it didn’t make sense. I thought it was coincidental. So I… Read the rest: Gideon’s test man in prison
A shotgun blast to his face left Leonard William blind.
The gun shot should have blown his head completely off. He was only 19.
“It was the grace of God that kept me alive,” Leonard says.
Leonard grew up in Yuma, Arizona, at a time when the only economic activity revolved around the military base and agriculture.
For a young man looking for excitement, there was little besides playing shuffleboard at the county center, so Leonard fell into drugs and the streets just like his older brothers.in the 1960s. He had eight brothers and four sisters.
He met the girl who is now his wife in high school and they had a child, moving in together when Leonard was 17.
He dropped out of high school because of one assignment that involved an oral report. He was terrified of public speaking, and since an oral report was required to pass the class, he dropped the entire shebang.
Ramiro Alvarez had only gone to church to cajole his “baby mama” to not leave him – he would change, he promised. But Pastor Ed Rivera kept hammering a sermon theme about personal change – as if he divined Ramiro’s personal condition.
In the middle of the sermon, Pastor Ed blurted out: “You’re scared to change; you have a bud (marijuana) pipe in your pocket.”
Ramiro did have a bud pipe in his pocket. How did the pastor know?
“I felt so convicted especially because he was preaching on change: We need to change but we don’t know how,” Ramiro remembers. “It felt like that that sermon was just for me. He was reading my mind.”
Ramiro didn’t understand it then, but the Holy Spirit was practicing archery. He hit the bullseye of Ramiro’s heart repeatedly.
How did the kid who grew up gangbanging and stealing cars survive the mean streets?
Ramiro ticked all the boxes for a life in crime. No hope and no direction offered at home, he followed his older brother’s example into the streets. As a youngster, he would sneak out of the house donning his brother’s gang clothes (his brother was almost always in jail) and watch from afar what the gangs did.
After spectating from the sidelines, he became an active gang participant in Beaumont, California.
“I was going into the world heavy,” Ramiro says. “I was breaking into houses. I was getting a reputation.”
He fought against blacks, whites, and 18th Street gangsters. Pretty much any excuse was enough for him to bang on someone (or get banged on).
Then his close buddy, Albert Estrada, got saved and started “acting weird.” He would still hang out with his friends, but he stopped partying, drinking, and getting girls, Ramiro says.
Pretty soon, the divergent paths they were taking brought them into conflict.
When an 18th Street gangster punched Albert and stole his bike, Ramiro confronted him. How could he not confront the offender? It was the rule of the street.
“I was mad. He was my roll dog,” Ramiro says. “You’re going to go over there and get down with him. Otherwise you’re going to look like a punk. You’re going to fight him. You’re not going to back down.”
Despite the coaxing, Albert demurred. He had gotten saved, he explained. He wasn’t going to obey the rule of the street anymore. He wanted to follow a higher set of rules, the rules of transformation, forgiveness, and salvation.
Ramiro was disgusted. He didn’t understand. All he knew is that his buddy had gone soft.
From there, Albert invited Ramiro to church, but Ramiro hardened his heart against the Lord.
Then Ramiro got busted for grand theft auto. He was only 14.
You are one of the men who rescues children, aren’t you? little Miguel said to Special Agent Tim Ballard while munching a burger.
Ballard couldn’t answer. The fact was that he wasn’t a child-rescuer and Miguel’s rescue was only incidental. As an officer for Homeland Security on the Mexican border, all he did was bust purveyors and predators of child sex.
Rescuing children is a noble goal, and it was within a limited scope of the law for his mission at the time.
The kids? American law didn’t adequately provide a way for rescuing them and reuniting them with their families.
As the new movie Sound of Freedom depicts, Ballard grew increasingly frustrated with being hamstrung in what he most wanted to do: rescue kids. Ultimately, he broke with Homeland Security and went rogue. He started his own non-profit specifically focused on setting kids free from sex slavery around the world.
Sound of Freedom is a riveting feature currently playing in theaters. The action-drama is not just entertaining. It’s important. It educates about the real and haunting horrors of a demonic fact that many Americans would rather know nothing about, the unsavory subject of modern human slavery.
Miguel and his sister, Rocio, got abducted by a Columbian former beauty queen under the guise of a talent search commission. Their father never saw them again after that first all-day “audition.”
Amazingly, much of Sound of Freedom is true is based on fact. The real-life hero Tim Ballard is depicted solidly by Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and portrayed Edmond Dantes in the The Count of Monte Cristo.
Miguel, Rocio and a band of other child victims are spirited away from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, by boat to Cartagena, where they are separated. Miguel – whom his owners re-christen El Oso Teddy – gets separated from his sister and is taken to Tijuana, where he is rented out to pedophiles.
When a rich American pervert “buys” him and attempts to bring him into the United States with a phony passport, he gets caught by the quick-thinking, quick-acting Tim Ballard.
Ballard can take satisfaction with a long and storied career of busting some of the worst monsters on the planet. But his frustration grows because the law restricted more interventions on behalf of such children.
Little Miguelito, wonder-eyed, looks up at the man who saved him and asks… Read the rest: Sound of Freedom movie.
The spread of the gospel is taking place in ways no one would ever expect. Recently a pastor in a Muslim country was surprised by a Muslim nurse who came to him and confessed Christ.
“I’m a sinner and he is my Lord and Savior,” Dana* told the pastor. It was startling because usually Muslims cannot go beyond calling Jesus simply a prophet. Moreover, calling yourself a sinner is shameful in the culture, the native pastor told Christian Aid Mission (CAM).
Dana had traveled 50 miles to find the church. She came to be baptized also.
After executing the mandates of Islam to perfection for years, Dana still had no peace, so she launched into a study of comparative religions, a quest that drew sharp criticisms from her Muslim friends who sternly warned her that leaving Islam was the worst sin.
She remained undaunted.
Dana showed up at the church with her hijab on, the traditional Muslim head covering. She asked the pastor if she could continue wearing it to blend in. The pastor affirmed her request and said that not denying Christ was really the only thing that mattered.
“Just don’t deny Christ Jesus,” he advised her. “Don’t continue your old ways of worship. Go as the spirit leads you, growing strong in your new faith.”
After staying a couple days, the nurse returned home. Two months later, she reported to the pastor that she had ditched the hijab. It is a symbol of extremist Islam and the… Read the rest: Muslim nurse accepts Christ, ditches hijab
Hearing Jesus talk in Turkmen made a huge impact on Silas.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, “my father got one of the first VHS players in my village. We got ahold of the movie Jesus. I heard Jesus speak my tongue. It became real, not just head knowledge.
Silas (a fake name provided on his interview on Voice of the Martyrs), of Turkmenistan, was taught atheism in school by the communist-trained teachers. He was Muslim by birth and culture. But he had serious questions about God, if there was a god at all, he says.
“As I grew up and became a teenager, I tried to find answers to my questions,” Silas says. “Why is there death? If there is Allah, why is he so far away? How can I stand before him?”
Plagued by unanswerable questions, Silas was settling on atheism. “In the communist schools, the teachers taught you that there is no god,” he says. “Since I couldn’t find the answers that satisfied my soul, I thought atheism makes sense.”
But then his brother-in-law one day shocked him by announcing he had become a Christian. Silas had no context to grasp what Christianity was. He thought it was probably connected to Eastern Orthodox churches.
“That statement really shocked me,” he says. “From my understanding Christianity was mainly practiced by the Russian and Slavic people.”
Then he watched the Jesus movie, only recently allowed into the country after communism fell. It was dubbed into his language, Turkman.
Suddenly, his questions were answered. Death had come into humanity because of the Fall of Adam and Eve, but Jesus came to remove sin. God was not far but close – he loved the world so much he sent his only son into the world, so that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but inherit eternal life.
“Very few people had a VHS player right after the fall of communism. It was a rare commodity,” Silas says. As he watched the movie about the life of Christ and everything he did, his perfect holy life, his death and resurrection, his questions were answered.
“From a very young age, I was scared of death. I was worried about my sins. How can I stand before the judgment of God? How can we solve the dilemma of death? All was answered in Jesus Christ.”
The Bible’s account of Heaven was particularly appealing because Islam offers scant hope of making it into Paradise.
“The concept in Islam is (passing to eternity) there is a bridge thinner than a hair, sharper than a sword, beneath there is a fire,” he says. “If you have enough good works, if you followed everything, maybe, maybe you make it across the bridge. There is no guarantee.
“Many people live hopeless,” he adds. “That was my condition. But Jesus answered my questions. He said you were worried about death, but I died for your sins, I conquered death through my resurrection. He gives eternal life to everyone who believes.”
Overcome by emotion, Silas received Jesus, just like his brother-in-law. “I found peace and joy like I never experienced before.”
Like the Samaritan woman who told her whole village about Jesus, Silas began to testify about the wonders of salvation to everyone in his village.
“I started talking Jesus nonstop,” he says. His mother accepted Jesus, as did many of his friends.
But others reacted negatively.
“In some cases, there was anger, there was a pushback,” he says. “They accused me of being a Russia priest and… Read the rest: Christianity in Turkmenistan
Come back victorious or dead, Kareem’s mother told him.
“My mom used to pray for me and say, Kareem, may I see you a leader one day coming with victory for Islam,” he recounts on a One For Israel video on YouTube, “or a leader who is coming back dead.”
Kareem imbibed the fanaticism.
“In the Koran, we grow up with two things. First, you should give your life to (Allah). Second, you should defeat Jews and Christians,”
Becoming a martyr was the surest way to make it into Paradise, he thought. When he came of age, Kareem wanted his shot at jihad.
“I was dreaming of that day that I would get that fantastic opportunity when America attacked Iraq in 2002 – 2003,” he says. “I said to myself, This is my moment where I will give my life to (Allah).”
Through his connections through the Muslim community, he signed up for an operation to be taken to Iraq and fight the infidels. After waiting for days, finally the call came.
“I’m sorry, Kareem, the operation has been canceled.”
Kareem felt devastated, deprived of hope and visions.
“I felt that I’d lost everything,” Kareem remembers. “I felt that I am rejected by God. God rejected me.”
He fell into depression and stopped going out with his friends.
After days, a leader in the Muslim community in his hometown (which is never identified on the video) tried to encourage Kareem.
“Kareem, why are you so sad?”
“Because God didn’t choose me to die.”
“Maybe because he chose you to live.”
Kareem now believes the words spoken by that man were inspired by the true God. He was encouraged and came out of his depression.
“I was honored to be a teacher at Koran school in India,” he told International Christian Response. “I felt so full of satisfaction in both my role and my dedication to my path.
“My dedication to Koran was all-encompassing, all-consuming.”
In his zeal to strengthen the Muslima population in India (which registers at 14%, well behind the Hindu majority of 80%), he threw himself into studying comparative religion.
Cracking open a Bible to better expose its errors (he thought), he began reading the New Testament. It was a strange sensation. What he had been told about the Bible didn’t line up with what was written in the Bible.
“I was amazed by the love and acceptance and forgiveness that I found in the pages of the Christian scriptures,” he recalls. “Jesus as God-become-man captured my attention. He became one of us in order to save us.”
Inevitably, he turned his life over to Jesus and became a Christian. He lost his job at the Koran school.
“My parents didn’t want to have anything to do with me,” he adds. “I quickly went with my friends and neighbors to share the good news, but they… Read the rest: Muslim convert to Christianity in India.
In fact, he’s just the opposite, an angel, a messenger sent from Heaven. His ride is bringing new life in Christ to tribal people lost in the jungle.
The native missionary – whose story is documented by Christian Aid Mission anonymously for his safety – rides his motorcycle into the most remote, dense jungle of Argentina to bring the gospel to native peoples largely cut off from civilization.
While the journey is daunting, the results have been spectacular.
“They worship Christ regardless of whether the heat or the cold hits them,” he is quoted as saying. “Many people, broken and crying, received Christ in their hearts after the message and evangelistic materials were delivered.”
In a previous generation, Jim Elliot lost his life attempting to reach jungle people for Christ. Today, much of that dangerous field work is being carried on by native missionaries, such as this Argentinian worker.
The evangelist works in Chaco Province of Argentina in a jungle called “El Impenetrable,” the Impenetrable. He puts his motorcycle on a canoe and navigates the Bermejo River. It’s no small feat to avoid capsizing in the rough currents.
After navigating the river, he disembarks for a journey of another 10 hours. The road narrows to a trail – too slender for a 4×4. You could walk it, but it would take a long time and expose you to other dangers.
“It’s wild and has dense vegetation,” the evangelist says. “It’s a risky journey. The abundance of cacti, bushes and animals like jaguars, pumas and vipers are a threat to anyone who walks.”
His journey through the jungle evokes 100 Years of Solitude, in which Jose Arcadio Buendia forays through the dense undergrowth. As he and his fellow explorers hack their way forward with machetes, they can see the foliage growing behind them, enclosing them in a bubble.
The Argentinian started reaching out to tribes in El Impenetrable simply because he believed no one else could or would. A small congregation with one tribe has been established. They have hewn benches they set up under trees to receive the preaching of the Word.
Through rainstorms and intense heat, the evangelist trudges on, reaching groups scattered throughout. They eke out a subsistence existence, waging war with the wild animals, the insects and disease.
When his cellmate overdosed and chaplain Gina arrived at their cell praying and weeping, Isaiah Blancas was floored.
“It really blew my mind because I never had seen love like that,” Isaiah says on a 700 Club video. “Gina showed up. She was hugging this guy, crying, praying. It was a genuine love.”
There are solid reasons why Isaiah never knew love. His father abandoned the El Paso family for another woman in 1991. Then Mom kicked out Isaiah when he was only nine.
He had nowhere to go. He had to fend for himself, sleeping in abandoned buildings and scavenging food from trash cans. He steered clear of gangs until one day they confronted him and beat him severely with a baseball bat. The gangsters dumped him bleeding and broken at a hospital.
That’s when Isaiah, then 14, resolved to become the most violent and feared gangster in El Paso.
Ironically, he joined the same gang that beat him. He worked his way up by fighting and spearheading robberies and drug sales. Read the rest: Isaiah Blancas Christian
Canada now leads the world in organ donation from assisted suicide.
This may appear to be a good thing since there are terminally-ill patients who are desperate for an organ, and other humans who believe that their life is not worth living and want to make the decision to end it all.
But a new investigative study in Canada raises a horrifying specter: Are patients being urged to resort to suicide so doctors can harvest their organs?
One hospitalized woman said she was “pestered, pressured and discouraged at a time when she needed all her strength to recover,” as reported by Live Action. They based their report on an investigation conducted by the Vancouver-based Catholic newspaper “The B.C. Catholic.”
Dr. Willard Johnson, head of the British Columbia branch of Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, accuses the Fraser Hospital system of “pushing euthanasia quite aggressively in every corner.”
Euthanasia, the name given to assisted suicide, was legalized in Canada in 2016. The euthanasia movement purports to offer a merciful exit from life to people who are miserable.
But the lines can be blurred between “helping” a chronically ill patient in pain during the final dying months of life and overzealously pressuring people at a moment when they are vulnerable.
By contrast, Christians generally hold life to be sacred – more sacred than “choice,” whether the choice be abortion or assisted suicide. Christians see a disturbing similarity to the dark history of governments deciding which people are better off dead for the supposed “good of society,” whether the Nazis, Soviets, or the killing fields of Cambodia.
When does a doctor essentially working for the Canadian government in socialized medicine represent his own good judgment or that of his government? Facing the staggering costs of medical attention with chronic patients, socialized medicine often allows patients to die instead of helping them recover.
When a Kentucky-born Amish leader dared to listen to a gospel preacher on the radio (in violation of Amish rules), he was astounded by the simple message of grace and forgiveness by faith that conflicted with his ideas that “God love you, but he loved you so much he would punish you.”
“I never knew that you could know that you are going to Heaven,” Vern Yoder says on a 700 Club video. “I couldn’t wrap my head around a warm, hug-type love.”
Vern was born to a well-respected deacon of the Amish, an American East Coast religious group that have strict rules for dress and behavior, which includes not using automobiles. The Amish are considered Christian, but their application of scriptures can be seen as legalistic.
Vern struggled through his teen years to maintain the standards of his church.
His constant thought: What can I do to be a better person? What can I do to have a better shot to make it into Heaven? “It would drive me down into this pit of despair.”
The overemphasis on rules and laws weighed on his soul.
“I was so miserable,” Vern says. “I didn’t know (if I would make it to Heaven), so I would work and work and work at trying to be the best Amish.”
He married and had children, but carried the pharisaical spirit into his roles as husband and father. He went overboard as a disciplinarian and his marriage was strained, he says.
Reflecting on the frustration of his brand of Christianity, Vern pleaded with God: “God, I can’t do this any longer. You’re going to have to help me with this.”
One day he got a job as a tractor driver. That day he listened to a radio preacher expound the doctrines of the simple gospel. It challenged everything he knew about God.
“He was going through a series about faith, about grace, about mercy,” Vern says. “He was telling me things I had never… Read the rest: Amish
All the Merritts wanted was to enjoy boating on the lake after several days of rain. What they didn’t take into account was that the floodgates on the dam were open and the undertow would suck their boat onto the dam where it would be smashed, their family thrown into peril.
“The water was very calm on the surface,” Kelly Merritt says on a 700 Club video. “Our boat was being pulled without us realizing.”
But all the extra water was the reason authorities, unbeknownst to the Merritts, had opened the gates to allow the overflow to run off down the spillway. It created an unseen undertow that sucked the Merritts toward danger.
Three days of rain had left the family stir crazy. So when the rains abated, the family of four thought to get out and relax on the lake, which was glorious and serene.
The closer the Merritts got to the dam, the stronger the undertow. When the family finally realized what was happening, it was too late. The current was stronger than the boat’s motor. Try as they might, they could not escape.
“We had lost control of the boat,” Kelly says. “The motor didn’t seem to matter anymore.”
With mounting fear overwhelming them, the boat struck the concrete barrier on the lakeside of the spillway, quickly fracturing and coming apart.
“All of a sudden, my (teenage) son jumped out of the boat and began swimming as hard as he could,” Kelly relates. “I watched him get sucked underneath the boat.”
Kelly grabbed her daughter and hugged her impulsively, but as they were pushed over the dam, her daughter was ripped from her arms by the force of the water.
“It was very much like I was dead,” Kelly says. “I dropped for what felt like an eternity. I reached up and felt the carpet on the bottom of the boat, and then behind me I could feel the concrete. I was pinned there. It was a horrifying feeling.”
When Amir Bazmjou found out he nearly died in a car accident as a baby, he wanted to know more about God, thank God, and live for God.
But growing up in Iran, he only heard about Allah.
“I was looking to find God, and come to him, find him, and have a personal relationship with him,” Amir says on a Voice of the Martyrs video. “But I couldn’t find God in Islam to be honest.”
Amir was born in Isfahan, Iran, and brought up in the Shiite branch of Islam prevalent there. But because he was dissatisfied with the empty rituals and obligatory prayer five times a day, he turned to a mystic offshoot of Islam that promises closeness to Allah… Read the rest: Amir Bazmjou
All the astral projection stopped when Mike – strangely – grabbed a seemingly kind old man by the lapels and demanded he confess Christ as the Son of God. Instead, the man hissed at him in a hideous manner.
“I realized the Bible was true,” Mike says on his YouTube channel, Shofar War Lamb. “First John says every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. That’s the day I really started to walk with Jesus.”
Today, Mike has completely quit New Age. But for many years he wavered between Jesus and astral projection, a phenomenon in which people leave their body during sleep and fly around in the spirit realm and interact with people.
When he was a kid, a relative gave him a book about Jesus, and he accepted the Lord.
But as the years passed, he forgot about Jesus and got into marijuana, mushrooms, and ecstasy with his neighborhood buddies in Illinois. Riding BMX bikes around, they searched for hallucinogenic mushrooms in the wild.
They found one, and Mike, then 16, decided to consume it even though he realized it wasn’t hallucinogenic and he didn’t worry that it might be poisonous. It was.
“All of a sudden from my stomach I feel these shocks. The shocks went down my legs and down my arms. I could feel the poison coursing through my veins with every beat of my heart,” Mike says. “Eventually it subsided. But it scared me.”
Despite the danger, Mike consumed it anyhow to impress his friends. “Being the young punk that I was, I wanted bragging rights,” he says. “How stupid is that?”
The next day, he felt much better. While smoking blunts the next day, one buddy, induced by the drug, was talking gibberish, mostly “rambling stupid nonsense,” Mike remembers. But one thing the friend uttered hit like a thunderbolt:
“What happens when you die?”
The question echoed over and over through his mind. “I could not stop thinking about it. I entered a thought loop.”
Like many of his generation, he looked it up on Google. The search engine led him to a Near Death Experience website. The hodgepodge of testimonials ranged from Christian to Islamic and Buddhist.
“They had people who had died and had seen the light,” Mike summarizes. “Some said they talked to God, some to Buddha. Some people saw Jesus, some people saw Allah. The message that was clear was that God was love.
“What I read was made-up garbage from witches trying to usher in the New Age,” he adds.
But at the time, the eclectic approach appealed to him. Forgetting that he had committed his life to Jesus as a child and that he had cried out to Jesus when he consumed the mushroom, Mike adopted the New Age idea that Jesus was merely one of many “ascended masters.”
On the NDE website, he met in a chatroom “Amused Maya,” who provided an explanation for his sleep paralysis: “You have an advanced soul. You have the ability to astral project.”
“The next time that happens, stay calm, don’t freak out, and you will float out of your body,” Maya told him, “You can float through walls, travel other dimensions, talk to spirits.”
Honestly, Mike thought she was nuts but decided to find out if it was true for himself.
Sure enough, the next time he experienced sleep paralysis, he floated out of his body and began to fly around at will.
That’s how it started. For the next months and years, Mike was astral projecting, which he now classifies as “evil veiled in a cloak.”
“I did float through walls,” he says. “I did talk to spirits. I had sex with demons. I didn’t know they were demons at the time. I tried to do it every night, but it didn’t happen every night.”
Distinctly, Wes Bentley heard God say to remain in a South Sudanese village after he contracted malaria and not fly out to seek help from a Western hospital.
As a result of his “foolhardy” obedience to the voice of God, two generals – one known as the Butcher of Sudan – came to know Christ.
“When I got sick, had I disobeyed the Lord and said I don’t want to be uncomfortable and gotten on that airplane and flown out, would these two men ever come to know Christ as their personal Savior?” Wes says on a Calvary Chapel Chino Hills video. “I doubt it.”
How did Wes Bentley go from being a high-flying salesman who dreamed of a Maserati to a high-risk missionary working in South Sudan for 26 years, supporting missionaries in 38 countries?
Originally, he was a U.S. Marines sharpshooter who gave up Olympics competition to kill people in Vietnam. Upon leaving the Marines, he wanted to become a soldier of fortune in Rhodesia, but God got ahold of his heart and redirected his steps.
Saved at Camp Pendleton, Wes was thrown in with the hippies of the Jesus Movement harnessed by Chuck Smith. For the clean-cut and disciplined Marine, it was strange to see hippies who bathed and he wondered at their sincere love for each other, a pure affection that manifested in ladies giving a guileless kiss on the cheek to the guys.
Instead of becoming a mercenary, Wes threw himself into business and was making a salary equivalent to $250,000 a year in today’s money, he says. All the other young guys had Porches, Rolls Royces and fancy cars, so Wes entertained the notion of getting himself a Maserati, which he could well afford.
Fortunately, he consulted a sister in the Lord who had a knack for prophetic revelations. Without him explaining what exactly he was contemplating, he requested she pray for him. After prayer, she said, “The answer is no and I again I say no.”
It probably wouldn’t have been a good idea to pull up in a Maserati at L.A.’s Skid row to hand out sandwiches to the homeless, a ministry he liked to participate in.
Through the years of ministry, Wes started to feel the missionary call for Russia, which after communism collapsed became open to the gospel for the first time in almost three-quarters of a century.
In Russia, Wes ministered mostly in the jails and packed theaters as people who were hungry for truth after being denied the Gospel by a series of repressive governments.
“Russia was my first love,” Wes says. “Russia was incredibly open to the gospel back then.”
It was in Russia that Wes fell in love with a Russian sister and nearly married her, had it not been for the unmistakable voice of God. At the time it seemed strange to tell the sister to not entertain romantic ideas toward him.
But years later when God called him to transfer his ministry to then war-torn South Sudan, it proved spot on. The sister confessed she wouldn’t have been willing to accompany him to the sweltering heat of the jungles of South Sudan. (There he married Vicky, who held 13 separate Bible weekly studies with South Sudanese women and served alongside Wes for 23 years,)
After five years in Russia, he moved to South Sudan, which gained its independence in 2011, making it the youngest internationally recognized nation in the world.
“Sudan is an extremely hot country. It’s not only hot, it’s very humid. You sleep out of exhaustion,” Wes says. “You don’t sleep because you’re comfortable. You literally sweat all night long.”
Heat is not the only thing to make you feel uncomfortable.
“When you’re out among the tribes, sometimes they bring you food that’s cooked and dead, and sometimes they bring you food that’s not dead,” Wes explains. One time, he and five visiting pastors from Calvary Chapels were brought live insects for dinner. The visiting pastors all felt called to “pray and fast” that night, Wes says.
If she married Dave Eubank, Karen could expect a life of tramping through the tropical jungle among whizzing mosquitoes and bullets. She would carry her babies in a sling as she forded rivers and trudged through mud. Malaria, dysentery and typhus would stalk them.
No white picket fence?
“I’m not GI Jane,” Karen told God Reports, reflecting on 20 years of helping people flee the Burmese army in northern Myanmar. “I didn’t necessarily love every minute of it. I don’t like cold baths. But this is what God has for us. God knows the things that are important to your heart.”
Karen Eubank is not your typical missionary wife. Married to the “godfather of high-risk missions,” Karen raised three kids on the front lines of some of the world’s fiercest combat zones. Ultimately, the decision to renounce little league and submerge herself in the sweltering jungle wasn’t that hard to make.
Raised in a strong Christian church in Walla Walla, Washington State, Karen was dissatisfied with her ideal job in the public school as a special ed teacher. When she met Dave, a former U.S. Army Ranger, he invited her on a first date to hike Mt. Shuksan. It included a strenuous ascent and scaling sheer-face ice with crampons, an ice pick, while on-belay.
When she summited, Dave realized she was the woman for him. For her part, Karen wasn’t sure about him.
Marriage was bound to be, to say the least, unconventional.
But she didn’t have time to ponder the double nature of Dave, who was equal parts Charles Spurgeon and Indiana Jones. A telephone call forced Karen to make a quick decision.
Dave’s parents, longtime missionaries in Thailand, got a call from the foreign minister of the Wa people in Northern Myanmar. He was a lone Christian among animists and had heard Dave had elite military training. Could he come and help the Wa?
The Wa people were one of 56 ethnic minorities in the mountains surrounding Myanmar that were being hunted down and massacred by the Burmese Army. The Burmese people, representing 68% of the population, had waged a scorched-earth war against the minority populations. It’s now the longest running civil war on the planet – more than 70 years.
In terms of reaching unreached populations with the gospel, the Wa and other ethnic minorities were a holy grail. Because of the dangers, because of the arduous lifestyle, the number of willing missionaries was close to zero.
Dave was the right man for the job, and he immediately felt an intense longing to bring Jesus to Myanmar. How could he pass up the extraordinary invitation? Read the rest: Karen Eubank raised her kids in the jungles of Myanmar
By the time his family found him locked in an outdoor freezer on a Mississippi farm, Victor Marx was unconscious, clutched up in a ball, where his molester had left him to die because he realized the 5-year-old wouldn’t keep quiet about the rape.
Today, Victor ministers to kids in juvenile hall. He’s a 7th-degree black belt in martial arts and trains cops and military. He ministers in war zones in what he calls “high risk mission work.”
“The closer we are to danger, the more we’re helping people,” he says on his podcast. “I minister to these kids because I know where many of them have been. I know where God wants to take them. That which was meant for evil in my life has actually turned for good.”
How did Victor Marx heal the innumerable childhood traumas and become an effective minister of the gospel?
His biological father became involved in the Louisiana mafia, pimping women in honky-tonk bars and selling drugs. Dad didn’t cut or shoot up people like the Italian mafia in New York; he fed them to the alligators in the swamp, he says on the self-made documentary of his testimony.
Because Dad was splitting with Mom around the time of Victor’s conception, he never acknowledged him as his own child.
At five, Victor was taken advantage of by a neighbor who invited him into a room between two chicken houses where he threatened him with death if ever told. Since the neighbor got the idea that Victor would tell, he locked him in the commercial cooler to die.
“I remember being unbelievably terrified,” Victor says.
Victor kicked against the door and screamed until he succumbed to the pain, the horror and the intense cold. He curled up in a ball and passed out.
Meanwhile, his family began to miss him and began to search about. They looked around the pond and woods and checked the chicken houses, the building, and finally the freezer.
“Thank God they checked the freezer,” he says.
When Victor regained consciousness, he told them what happened. His family administered “country justice.”
“They kicked down his door and beat him in front of his family,” Victor relates. “They took him outside and hogtied him to the tractor and they drug him outside the house. They drug him all the way around. There was this one big pecan tree. They made a noose and threw it over this limb. They hooked it to the back of the tractor.
“They pulled the tractor, and he started going up, choking, trying to grab. They waited for him to go limp, and they cut him down and left him. They didn’t want to kill him and go to prison. They just wanted to put fear in him.”
His family’s crude justice did nothing to free Victor from the PTSD. Nor did it free him further trauma… Read the rest: Overcoming trauma Victor Marx
When ISIS overran Sinjar, newlywed Sousan was captured and forced to become a sex slave for the extremists, being passed from jihadist to jihadist until she made her harrowing escape and was restored to her mother, thanks to the prayers of a former U.S. Army Ranger.
That Ranger was Dave Eubank, an ex-special forces operator turned missionary, who scrapes with death regularly to minister to war-oppressed people from Myanmar to the Middle East. He knows no fear.
Dave became aware of Sousan’s captivity when he met her husband Fouzi in 2015 in the Sinjar mountains that overlooked the city held by ISIS. A Yazidi, Fouzi pleaded for prayers for the restoration of his wife, as related on the website of Free Burma Rangers, the group Dave leads to give immediate aid to people living in extremely dangerous war-torn areas.
While his team ministered medical and dental care to the refugees in the mountains, Dave would sneak down to the frontlines to treat Peshmerga and Kurdish soldiers who were fighting to liberate the city. From the trenches, Dave would gaze at ISIS positions and wonder about Sousan. Was she alive? Would she be freed? He prayed for her and for his new friend Fouzi.
Inside the ISIS stronghold, Sousan was being repeatedly beaten, raped, humiliated and intimidated. She was bought and resold according to the whim of every extremist, who held it perfectly acceptable to exploit and mistreat people based on the Koranic idea that it’s what infidels deserve.
Sousan was Zoroastrian, a minority faith in the Middle East that combines elements of Christianity with Islam. Muslims find this religion particularly abhorrent and subject its adherents to the worst abuse.
When they took over Sinjar, ISIS summarily executed the men from this group and employed their boys for suicide missions. Women became the spoils of war, objects for sexual exploitation.
Sousan’s father is presumed dead. The family has no knowledge of her brother. Her mother and sisters were separated and sold for sex. Sousan was handed off numerous times across Western Iraq until finally she was auctioned off in a stadium in Raqqa, which ISIS adopted as its capitol.
While ISIS retained its grip on the land it seized from Iraq and Syria, Sousan’s fate was sealed.
But outside, the Iraqi and Syrian forces, aided by American and British air bombardments and technical aid, were pounding away at the self-declared Caliphate.
What could possibly go wrong? BEFORE going to a Bible conference to reconcile with God, Albert Berkley wanted to score just one more poker haul at the casino.
On the way to the casino, he crashed and seriously injured himself and his wife.
“God broke me physically to restore me spiritually,” he says.
As he was helicoptered to the hospital, he pleaded with God: If you heal me, I’ll serve you forever.
Today, Albert is a pastor evangelist based near San Antonio, Texas.
Growing up in Edinburg Texas, Albert Berkley fell off the cliff of life into the abyss of sin after his dad contracted Ankylosing Spondylitis, a crippling arthritic condition that turns patients into hunchbacks.
As the paralyzing disease progressed, he grew angry and abusive, lashing out physically and emotionally against Albert.
“The sicker he got, the more I ran away from God,” Albert says. Starting with smoking, he fell into alcohol and drugs in high school. By 19, he smoked crack cocaine. He rationalized his spiral: “God, if you’re real, how come my dad got sick?”
He lived with friends and burned bridges.
He was harvesting watermelons in the farms of New Mexico when he got run over by a car and relegated to the packing sheds. Once while working in a packing shed in Texas, he ran out of drugs in his on-site trailer and stole two of the company’s generators to sell to his dealer.
With hands clasped interlaced by a strip of otter skin and a strip of rabbit skin, bride Christy Villaseñor and Alex Loera received blessing on their marriage through Tongva tradition Saturday on the southwest edge of University High at their sacred site in West Los Angeles.
While water gurgled out of the idyllic springs under the shade of a Mexican Cypress tree, Andrew “Guiding Young Cloud” Morales burned incense, danced a traditional dance, sang in native tongue and performed symbolic rituals for the newly united couple.
The Tongva lost their land and freedom to the Spanish colonizers, who forced them into the equivalent of plantation slave labor and “eliminated Indians with the effectiveness of Nazis operating concentration camps,” according to author lawyer Carey McWilliams.
Originally spread out in villages around the Los Angeles basin, the Tongva lived off the richness of the land until Gaspar de Portola with Junipero Serra established Spanish presence in the area. The springs, which gush about 25,000 gallons of fresh water daily, were a center for existence and gave rise to the name of “Santa Monica” because the Spaniards, seeing the water flow, were reminded of the tears Monica cried for her errant son Augustine.
Today, the Tongva, who number around 3,900, are deeply divided over those who favor establishing a reservation casino and those who oppose it. The Tongva were never federally recognized or never granted land like other tribes.
Instead, California has conceded a smattering of sites for the Tongva, including one on the California State University Long Beach campus and one on Uni High. The Santa Monica contingent of Tongva, numbering 500, oppose the gambling ambitions of their fellows, believing the disadvantages outweigh the supposed benefits of generating income each tribe member.
While competing petitions for federal recognition from different contingents wend their way through federal bureaucracy, self-identifying tribes people keep alive their traditions at the sacred sites.
The springs are a charming oasis in the wearisome development of concrete and materialism just 100 yards away on Barrington and Ohio Avenues. It would make an enticing wedding venue but is not open as such to the public.
With the help of a computer savvy friend, drug-addicted David V. wrote his own prescriptions for the pharmacy. One day, two undercover narcotics agents met him at the door.
“I resisted arrest. We tore up the store,” David says on a CBN video. “I was charged with 18 felonies and three misdemeanors. I was facing 45 years to life.”
David’s decline began when his parents divorced. He was only nine and facing parents who told him to choose whom to live with.
The unfairness of a broken home led him to juvenile hall on multiple occasions.
“I got into a lot of fights,” he says. “I was angry at the world and confused and rebellious. I went from one foolish act to another.”
Weightlifting and football became an outlet. He barely graduated high school and walked on to Division 1 football at Middle State Tennessee University where partying pushed him over the edge.
Injuries introduced him to painkillers, and he became addicted.
“I became totally enslaved to drugs, anything that would numb the pain,” David recalls.
That’s when he got arrested at the pharmacy. The counts were reduced to one, and he served only nine months. But his dreams of college football were dashed.
In his 20s, David consumed a lot of cocaine.
“It was a miserable existence completely devoid of meaning,” he surmises. “My 20s are essentially a lost decade.”
SANTA MARIA DE JESUS, GUATEMALA — For a stray dog here, Canela — as we called her for her cinnamon color — seemed family friendly.
I reached down and scratched her head as we registered and paid to ascend Agua Volcano. I was used to stray dogs being mostly hostile, snarling barking curs that you had a stone ready to throw at (sorry, the dogs in Guatemala were rough 12 years ago when I was a missionary).
But I didn’t understand what was happening when the dog attached herself to us and accompanied us up the volcano, classified in the guidebooks as a “strenuous” climb.
All the while Canela wagged her tail and played, hunted wild animals, accepted snacks and water from us. As we descended, we came across a French tourist, also accompanied by a dog. “Is this your dog?” I asked. No, he said, they are the guide dogs who go with you for a little food and water.
Then I realized what was going on. Canela was a guide dog. But she was more than just that. She had found a family for the day and wagged her tail unceasingly. Of course, my heart broke and love swelled up.
Canela had adopted us.
I charged off ahead of my group of 10 friends from Guatemala City, determined to bag the peak. As I descended I really began to struggle. On the one hand, my muscles had burned out. On the other, the soles of sneakers lacked adequate grip, causing me to slip and fall nine times until Pastor Ludving fashioned me two walking sticks from branches using his machete.
I was struggling. But the dog shared no such similar tiredness. Instead, she charged off into the overgrowth looking for prey. She would always pop back… Read the rest: This dog adopted her own family
Mustard Seed Budget 