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
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
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.
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.”
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?”
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
The moment Chad Williams knew he wanted to be a SEAL was outside the college classroom, in the parking lot, where he was doing donuts in his jeep and smoking weed. He didn’t want to go into class because he hadn’t studied for the final exam.
Nevertheless, he was incensed that Mom and Dad questioned his tenacity. He had already given up on baseball, skateboarding and professional fishing. How could he make it as a SEAL? they wondered. Still, Chad’s father went to the effort to hook Chad up with a real SEAL to try some grueling trainings — hoping to dissuade him.
At the first training, Chad, a cocky kid, initially outran Scott Helvenston until Scott caught up, passed Chad, then stopped suddenly and met him with a right hook to Chad’s stomach. He had the wind knocked out of him.
“You want to be a SEAL?” Scott bellowed, standing over Chad as he gasped for air. “You better stay three paces behind me! Three paces behind me!”
After that, Chad didn’t attempt any more hotdogging. But he did keep up with the workout and was invited for another day. Dad’s plan to discourage Chad was backfiring. Instead, Scott finished pre-training and pronounced his surprising verdict: I know you’ll pass.
“I felt knighted,” Chad reports in Seal of God, his book tracking his progress from a trouble-making kid bored with school and church, one who lived for thrills, both legal and illegal.
Growing up in Southern California, Chad loved baseball and pranks. He would ride bikes on top of the school building roofs and run from the cops, hiding under trees when police helicopters searched for him.
Once he put a bunch of bones in his sister’s pockets so that their dog would chase her around and overpower her to eat the bones. She had to be taken to the hospital for that one.
Chad liked collecting gunpowder from model rocket engines and making mini bombs to blow up. Once a particularly big bomb blew up in his face and arms, resulting in second degree burns that required a trip to the hospital. Sometimes, his brother told his parents, and Chad got in trouble for his mischief.
At some point, Chad’s parents became Christians and started attending church. Chad never opposed the idea of being a Christian and believed in his heart that he was good, but services and Sunday school bored him.
When he dropped baseball because the coach didn’t accept him on the team in his freshman year, he took up skateboarding and would sneak out of Sunday school to go practice tricks in the parking lot.
Chad excelled at skateboarding and used all his free time to get better (he didn’t do homework). He got so good he competed in extreme sports competitions and got sponsored by Vans shoes, which gave him notoriety among the kids and free gear.
With boyish face and charm, he even was cast for several commercials to do tricks on his board.
Over summer vacation, he did stints as a fisherman on a professional boat, working 18-hour days alongside the professionals. With his money, he bought a jeep. Upon graduation, he enrolled in college simply because it was the thing to do.
By now, a friend had introduced him to drinking and smoking dope. As he partied more, he dropped skating and fishing.
His life was adrift and pointless, every passion abandoned, with nothing in the future to work for. Then his epiphany came in the college parking lot: He didn’t want to take a college test he hadn’t studied for. He would become a Navy SEAL.
He immediately told his parents. He didn’t need college. He was going to be a SEAL.
They lacked his enthusiasm. His capriciousness was only one problem. Another was that his mom worried he would die in Iraq.
Dad set out to dissuade him. He located online Scott Helvenston and cajoled him into showing Chad he didn’t have the right stuff. Instead, Chad proved to Scott that he did have the stuff.
With just weeks to go before Chad entered the Navy, Scott was contracted by Blackwater to join operations in Fallujah, Iraq, because it paid so well.
Chad’s trainer and friend, Scott Helvenston, was brutally killed in Fallujah, just days before Chad was to report for training.
The Muslim uncle of a 17-year-old girl under demonic influence was upset when local missionaries arrived at the door of their home in a Syrian refugee camp.
It was the Islamic month of Ramadan, and she had reacted violently when a Muslim cleric attempted to help her, according to a report by Christian Aid Mission.
“The cleric had been met by the young woman’s screams and her aggressively pushing him away from the home,” a local ministry’s leader says. “As he began to leave, their daughter encouraged his quick movement from the property as she picked up stones and began throwing them his way. He left promptly and did not return nor seek out her parents.”
The girl’s parents mentioned she often would shout at no one and for no apparent reason, and she would throw objects at others. Being Muslims, the family requested a visit by a Muslim cleric for three days. But when he finally showed up, the girl repulsed him.
The Muslim parents then decided to seek help from Christian missionaries. When they showed up, the girl’s uncle was none too happy. Muslims often detest Christian missionaries.
Reluctantly, the uncle… Read the rest: demon-possessed Syrian refugee girl
Waving flags that said “Jesus is King,” 650 Christians marched up the beach bike path to the pier Saturday in an event that was meant to spark revival.
“This is not a protest,” said Vadim Semenchuk, a coordinator with United Revival of Sacramento which staged the event. “We’re here to proclaim the name of Jesus.”
Drawing smiles, smirks and wondering glances on a walk more famous for fun and flashing flesh, the gathering first worshipped, prayed and preached on the grass next to the beach at Barnard Way, before walking up to the pier shouting Jesus chants.
“The church of California has gotten its roar back,” said Ross Johnston, who leads the Orange County based group California Will be Saved. “The only hope for America, the only hope for California is Jesus. We’re not just here to get excited and feel good, we’re here to start a move. We pray for the Golden State to become golden again.”
Police initially estimated the event to have 325 people, but a more careful count by this reporter as they marched up the bike path revealed there were in fact 650. Latecomers may account for the discrepancy.
United Revival started doing outdoor revival events and marches during Covid when riots convulsed America over racial police brutality.
“When the world was protesting and riots were happening, we were like, why doesn’t the church go out and march and proclaim the goodness of Christ,” says co-founder Ivan Katrenyak. “The whole goal is to rally the church. As Joshua took cities (in the Old Testament), we’re here doing that today and exalting the name of Jesus.”
Coming Jesus marches this year will be held in Phoenix, Dallas, Tampa, Seattle, Portland, Denver, San Francisco and Sacramento, where United Revival is based and is raising up a local church in the North Islands neighborhood. Read the rest: Revival in Santa Monica.
After Shin-Wook Kim scored a 2014 World Cup goal against Costa Rica, a TV broadcaster asked who he wanted to thank in his moment of glory. Usually, players honor their parents or fans, but Shin-Wook surprised the reporter.
“God!” he boldly declared. “I am a soccer player who belongs to God.”
Today, Shin-Wook plays for the Hong Kong premier league team Kitchee. Whether on the field or off, he talks about Jesus so much his teammates call him “Church Brother.”
Shin-Wook Kim made his professional debut in 2009 and quickly rose to the top of the K League 1 and won the MVP Award, Best 11 Strikers, and Adidas All-In Fantastic Player Award in his first five years. Because he’s so tall (he’s 6’5”), Shin-Wook’s nickname is “The Advancing Giant,” a reference to the Japanese manga series “Attack on Titan” in which humans fight giants. Height is often an advantage in soccer to win balls in the air.
During the 2014 World Cup selection, Shin-Wook was not a starting player but was used to great effect as a substitute. He cemented a reputation as a “super sub” by often scoring within three minutes of being substituted on to the field.
Reporters have often been surprised by his answers to their questions. They expect a lengthy dialog about soccer, but he gives short discourses about Jesus.
“The average person doesn’t understand, but every soccer player has abandoned everything for the goal in front of him since he was young,” Shin-Wook told the CTS channel. “That is how soccer is played.”
The first time Shin-Wook attended church was during middle school. It began with a book that his friend gave him: Joy Dawson’s Forever Ruined for the Ordinary. At the time, he didn’t believe in God, but it caused some self-introspection.
Is there such a thing as a god? he wondered. Wouldn’t I really need someone to rely on in my life? He kept such thoughts to himself.
Since the third grade, Shin-Wook had played soccer. But suddenly he was presented with something to consider that is bigger than sports.
“Whether I win or lose, succeed or fail the preliminary round, there is always… Read the rest: Shin-Wook Kim Christian.
The first American Protestant missionary was NOT who is often credited. It may surprise some to learn that George Liele, a former black slave, was the first.
Liele sailed for Jamaica to reach the lost in 1782, 11 years ahead of heralded British missionary William Carey and long before American Adoniram Judson sailed to India in 1812 (and later Burma).
For some encyclopedias and missiology schools, that’s an update. The fact was brought to light by E. A. Holmes, a professor of church history at Stetson University, according to Baptist Press.
Liele was a slave in Georgia who received Jesus into his heart in 1773 under the coaxing of his master, Henry Sharp, at the local Baptist church. Genuinely touched by the Lord, Liele began to propagate the gospel among his fellow slaves.
He was ordained on May 20, 1775, becoming the first officially recognized black preacher in the Colonies. He preached for two years in the slave quarters of plantations around Savannah and even led a congregation at Silver Bluff, South Carolina, according to the Union Review.
Seeing the anointing on Liele’s life, his master freed him from slavery.
Hearing of family members in Jamaica who needed the gospel, Pastor Liele migrated to Jamaica with the help of British colonel Moses Kirkland. Landing at Kingston, Liele and his wife, Hannah, planted a church there by preaching among the slaves of Jamaica.
He served for 10 fruitful years but also faced severe opposition from the slave owners, who cynically viewed his preaching as agitating the slaves, and even was thrown in jail for a time.
Liele baptized hundreds of… Read the rest: First American missionary was black
In high school, Charlie Foreman was a chanting Buddhist. Then he took LSD, read Carlos Castaneda and hoped to meet a Yaqui Indian witchcraft guide. But because he was high or drunk every day, he joined the Air Force to clean up his act.
“Nothing really worked,” he says.
Stationed at a radar site in the Philippines, he fell back into partying. “A lot of the officers partied like we did. I got in trouble; there were some drugs in my car.”
When he returned Stateside to Nellis Air Force Base, he was supposed to report to the Social Action of the Air Force to continue his rehabilitation. But his records took forever to catch up to him, and he didn’t mind because he didn’t want to be known as a dopehead.
What he did do was work hard and steer clear of drugs and alcohol. He wanted to go straight “but life was so boring. There was no purpose,” he says.
Ever since his mom died of cancer when he was seven-years-old, Charlie was on a quest to find the meaning of life. One thing he knew for sure, “it wasn’t Christianity. It was something mystical, maybe Transcendental Meditation.”
That’s when a man came into his barracks and shared his testimony.
“I was listening to Pink Floyd, “Charlie recalls. “I wasn’t really interested. This guy started talking and was fighting with the noise, so he asked if could turn it down. He seemed like a nice guy, so I turned it off. And listened. I really related to him. He had gone through similar experiences like me.”
He accepted Jesus.
“It was incredible. I felt like I was high. I had joy and peace. Immediately I was delivered from the drugs. Whereas before I had tried to quit and fell back, I was completely delivered. I had no interest in drugs. I was sauced on Jesus.”
In the Air Force, he was given the job of keeping and clarifying bombing range scheduling for pilots, a job that required three telephone calls a day “if it was a busy day.” The rest of the time, he read his bible voraciously.
But when he married his Filipina girlfriend and brought her to the United States while he was still in the Air Force, things went sour. At first, she got “truly and wonderfully saved. God just whacked her,” Charlie says.
“But she held on to a lot of things from Catholicism. She would not let go of the idea that you shouldn’t be fanatical about God, and she was insanely jealous,” Charlie says.
When he got out of the Air Force, Syvia decided she wanted an airman so she could go back and forth to the Philippines. One day she came home with a hickey. Charlie encouraged her he could forgive her if she would stop.
To combat depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts, Eden Frenkel delved into personal development, self actualization, Buddhism, meditation, Hinduism and the mystical interpretation within Judaism known as Kabbalah.
“To be honest, I enjoyed the process of studying those cultures, but they were very temporary fulfillments,” the Jewish born singer says on her YouTube channel, Graves into Gardens. “I constantly needed to go back and search for more. They didn’t fill the emptiness. I was looking for peace and happiness.”
As a 12-year-old in the synagogue, she stayed before the ark and prayed longingly to God after everyone had left and gone to eat.
“God, I know there is something,” she uttered. “I don’t understand. I feel like there is something between us.”
Eden had a proclivity for music but joined the Canadian Army as a career. In addition to seeking peace from religion, she sought peace from psychedelics. She had suffered some abuse as a child, she says, and sought in vain to resolve the trauma.
When she got stationed in Toronto, she met some Christian women who were extremely friendly and they invited her to study the Bible. Why not? she thought, since she had studied so many other religions.
What she found out about Jesus startled her.
“All I knew growing up was he was a man who did miracles. In the beginning, I didn’t really take it seriously,” she says. “But after getting to know who Jesus was and what He did and what he claimed to be and what he wanted for his people, it was incredible.
Linda Seiler’s struggle with transgender desires and same-sex attraction had always made her feel like God was condemning her– but it wasn’t until she spoke to fellow Christians about her issue that her journey towards healing truly began.
“From my earliest memory I wanted to be a boy instead of a girl,” Linda says on her personal webpage. “As a child, I prayed repeatedly for God to make me into a boy and became obsessed with my pursuit.”
No one knew about Linda’s frustrations. To everyone around her, she was simply a tomboy, and nothing more.
“Around fourth grade, I heard about sex reassignment surgeries and vowed I would have the operation as soon as I was old enough and had the money,” Linda recounts.
Linda’s sexuality was further confused when her friends introduced her to pornography. Watching it, she envisioned herself as a male, reinforcing her dysphoria.
“In junior high, when all the other girls were interested in makeup and boys, to my horror, I found myself attracted to women, especially older teachers who were strong yet nurturing.”
Distressed by her fantasies and set back by the difficulties of getting a sex reassignment surgery, Linda decided to conform to societal expectations for women. This didn’t rid her of her mental troubles, however.
“I envied the boys around me whose voices were beginning to change, and I mourned the fact that mine would never change like that,” Linda says. “Instead, I had to submit to wearing training bras and being inconvenienced by monthly periods.”
During her junior year of high school, Linda gave her life to Christ. But things didn’t immediately get better.
“I began doubting my salvation experience because my struggles didn’t go away like I thought they would,” Linda recounts. “Yet, I knew Jesus had done something in my heart, and I wanted to follow Him.”
Linda began to experience a spiritual battle for her heart and mind. She attempted to do everything to fit in with other girls– including dating men in hopes of “curing” herself– but her inner thoughts told her that she was meant to be male. Suicide became a real consideration.
“In college, I got involved with a campus ministry and developed a deeper relationship with God, praying and reading my Bible regularly, even sharing Christ with the lost,” Linda says. “I eventually became a student leader despite the fact that I was deeply attracted to women who mentored me and was enslaved to sexual addictions behind closed doors.”
Linda begged for God to take away her transgender desires, praying earnestly for healing.
“My senior year in college, I attended a campus ministry talk on overcoming habitual sin,” Linda recounts. “The speaker quoted James 5:16, ‘Confess your sins one to another and pray for each other so that you may be healed.’”
Linda was convicted by this message and confessed her secret struggle to her campus pastor.
“He responded to me in love, assuring me that he was committed to finding me the help I needed,” Linda states. “I couldn’t believe it. I walked away from that conversation with a fresh revelation of God’s grace.”
Up until that point, Linda had felt that God hated her for her sin. However, this experience shifted her view of God from a severe judge to a loving father.
“For the first time, I discovered that being completely transparent with another person was very healing,” Linda says. “I didn’t have to hide anymore.”
Linda’s campus pastor ended up connecting her with a professional counselor. The next ten years were full of turbulence as Linda sought healing.
“It was a slow process, as there were not a multitude of resources at that time to help women struggling with transgender issues,” Linda states. “In fact, well-meaning Christian counselors told me they had seen homosexuals and lesbians set free but never… Read the rest: Transformation for Transgenders
Faced with no finances, no family and no friends, Aicha Dramé fell into stripping in Ottawa, Canada, and Nicki Minaj’s lyrics helped push her into the disreputable but profitable lifestyle, she says.
“At that time, Nicki was popping,” the ex-Muslim recounts on her YouTube channel. “She came out with the song “Rich Sex” which is basically about, if you’re gonna have sex with a man, he’d better have mad money, songs glorifying strippers, glorifying sex in exchange for money.”
Aicha began as an immigrant from Guinea, Africa. Her mother prayed five times a day like a traditional Muslim, and her father put her in Islam’s version of Sunday school so she would learn the basics of the family’s native religion.
But when he had to move for work to a smaller town, they lost touch with their Muslim community, and Aicha grew up feeling the pull of the world. It started with dance parties and fashion posts on Instagram that got her attention. She got private messages from NBA players in her DM.
Obsessed with her boyfriend, Aicha planned on studying fashion and going with him to Toronto. “Life was amazing,” she says.
But when she got to Toronto, the boyfriend didn’t come with her. After losing her wallet on the train, she took up living with her aunt while going to fashion school.
That’s where she met a bubbly and beautiful girlfriend who invited her into a lifestyle that involved clubbing, liquor and marijuana.
“I was getting high every day,” Aicha admits. “I was so high, I couldn’t even go to class.”
When her Auntie worried openly about her friendship, Aicha moved out and moved in with her friend, who was supported by a sugar daddy who only came every weekend, sometimes every other weekend.
Until Aicha’s friend broke up with him.
“He ends up cutting her off, and he is the money maker,” Aicha remarks. “This girl had made me quit my other jobs at this point. My income was coming from her, which was coming from him. She was cut off, so I was cut off.
“We have to strip,” her friend told her.
It was a shocking suggestion. But Aicha had been traveling down the road of clubs, intoxication and fast money already. And Minaj’s music encouraged her as well.
At first, Aicha couldn’t dance because she didn’t have an ID. But her girlfriend hooked up with an underworld figure. “I don’t know if he was dealing drugs or scamming or what,” she says. But that guy’s associate made romantic moves on Aicha, and she complied.
“He was about that life. He was a poom, poom, poom gangsta, a straight up G. He was a straight up drug dealer. He carried a glock! He makes money! He moves his weight!
“That’s what I wanted. I was so ghetto,” she adds. “My idea of success, my idea of the kind of man I wanted – I wanted a hoodie. I was so stupid.”
Aicha hooked up with the gangsta and eventually danced herself. Since no one knew her in town and since no one would find out the depths into which she had fallen, the plan was to save up money and start her business in fashion.
But when it came time to put money down on a condo, the guy let Aicha know he was “married to the streets.”
Her heart was broken. She was obsessed with his bad boy image, but ultimately wanted security and lifelong love.
Simultaneously, she felt trapped by the dancing lifestyle. She was 19.
“A lot of women get in a place where they think that the only way they are going to make it in life is through this lifestyle. You can make thousands and thousands a night,” she recognized. “Dancing like this is not something girls grow up wanting to do.”
When she got pregnant, she didn’t even consider bringing the child to term, but went straight for an abortion. Of course, she was alone and abandoned.
After years of learning the language, developing an alphabet, teaching literacy, missionary Brooks Buser and team gave the YembiYembi tribe in Papua New Guinea copies of the Bible five years ago.
“It has been a long time, almost 2,000 years, that we the YembiYembi church have waited for this translation of the Bible into our own language,” says a tribe leader on a Radius International video.
Waving palm-like branches (or feathers) and dancing, about 100 tribe members received the printed and bound Bibles – the labor of nine years delivered by small prop plane – with fanfare, preaching and jubilation.
The YembiYembi live in the Lower-Sepik Swamp of remote Papua New Guinea. With an estimated 5,000 members, the tribe with only three villages is so small that it’s not even in Wikipedia. You can reach it by plane or paddling 270 miles upriver. Their language is Bises.
Once the translation was finished, Radius International missionaries sleft trained local pastors to take charge of the church. From the video, it appears the majority of the tribe accepted Jesus, but a “vocal minority” remains in opposition to abandoning the customs of its elders.
“The Bible is important,” preached Brooks, 37, in Bises, which the video translates into English through subtitles. “But what’s more important is what you do with it as the church, the body of Christ. The Bible is here to help believers grow. I will visit you, but this Bible will guide you now.”
Brooks was a missionary child who grew up in Papua New Guinea evangelizing another remote tribe in the lush jungle. “The seeds of missions were planted in my mind,” says the man who counted San Diego as his American hometown.
As a child, Brooks spent half his time in the mud of the jungle with native friends and half his time at the missionary school, playing basketball and learning a traditional Western education.
“I remember getting on the plane here at 9 o’clock in the morning and flying to school and playing a basketball tournament that night in the gymnasium, looking down at my leg and I still have a little bit of mud on my leg from the tribe,” he remembers. “It wasn’t a normal upbringing. The blending of these two worlds was a unique way to grow up.”
Armed with an accounting degree from San Diego Christian College, he married Nina and pursued a career counting numbers. He became finance manager and even traveled to Paris, “on track for the American Dream,” he says.
But on a visit to his parents in Papua New Guinea, the newly married couple’s hearts were stirred. “She got to see where I grew up,” he explains. “God began to lay on our hearts the nation. We felt an incredible level of comfort leaving the American Dream behind and coming back here as missionaries.”
In 2001 with their newborn Bo, they began training with New Tribes Mission where they learned how to set up solar panels and build airfields. “There’s no power, there’s no stores” in these isolated areas where they reach tribes, Brooks says.
“During the class there was a lot of things that brought us out of our comfort zone,” Lynn says. “There was a class on animal butchering which was not my favorite.”
They learned phonetics and grammar to learn and codify the language. They launched into Third World life in Papua New Guinea in 2003. The Busers began surveying and exploring land to find an ideal unreached tribe to work with. Tribes actually write letters requesting missionaries be sent, probably because they have heard of the benefits of civilization and medicine that missionaries bring.
Because the airstrip was flooded at their first choice on the day of their launching into the mission field, the Busers went to their second choice, the YembiYembi. They flew to the nearest airfield, traveled by canoe and then hiked – a five-hour journey – to arrive.
The tribe was so excited and received the missionaries with a welcoming ceremony. “In 2004, we started building our houses,” he says. They had a team of fellow linguist missionaries. They had batteries for their laptops and a two-way radio to communicate with their base.
They began building an airstrip with the help of 1,000 Yembis, removing stumps with power tools. After days of intense labor, the mission group sent a barge with a tractor to finish clearing the field.
“That gave us our lifeline back to base,” Brooks says.
Simultaneously, they learned about their language and culture, hunting in the jungle late at night.
“The callouses on our feet got a lot thicker,” he says. “We learned how to throw a spear and hunt pigs, basically live like a Yembi in their environment.”
Missionaries are routinely criticized by secular intellectuals for altering native people’s customs and “Westernizing” them. The Yembi were animists.
His dad was The Lawrence Welk Show classical jazz pianist, his mom a concert pianist, but David Smale (rhymes with snail) wanted to play heavy metal.
“Wouldn’t you just love for your daughter to date the singer of ‘Cranial Abortion’?” Dave jokes on the Virginia Beach Potter’s House podcast. They played backyard parties, prompting cops to come and shut it down, until they debuted at a club along with Incubus.
With rock ‘n’ roll, came drugs and sex. He smoked cigarettes at 13, smoked weed at 14 and dropped acid by 15.
In the Los Angeles Unified School system, Dave attended middle and high school with Latinos and African Americans who were bused into the San Fernando Valley as part of integration policies.
“We got bullied a lot. We were just these little heavy metal-loving white kids,” he says. “One time this guy said he was going to do a drive-by shooting on us the next day. Because of that, I noticed in my house it was ok for me to express racist things. My dad and my brother would say the N-word and other racial slurs.”
Later he joined a punk rock band “Uneducated,” until his party girl got pregnant and he took up delivering fast food and telemarketing as a high school dropout to put food on the table for his baby and the girl whom he married at 18.
“I remember times stumbling around drunk and high, and all of a sudden, the baby starts crying,” says he, and thought: “I don’t know if I can change his diaper right now. I might put it on his head.”
“It was just awful,” he says. “I was partying and my baby was right there. It was not good.”
Five weeks after his first baby was born by C-section, his wife got pregnant, and the nurse at urged her to abort: “You’re going to die,” she said.
Leaving the women’s health care center, Dave and his wife felt an eerie sensation. “Did you feel like we just murdered somebody?” she asked. “Yeah, I do,” he responded.
Unable to make ends meet, he eventually decided to join the Navy with hopes of learning a trade. “That was my only way forward,” he says. “I was going nowhere. I was lost in dead-end stuff.”
At 20, Dave looked for a new beginning in the Navy, but the same old addictions and racism didn’t let him get that new start.
“I could wear a uniform, I could stand up taller, I could march in a straight line,” he says. “But I was still fighting addiction.”
Stationed a Point Mugu, California, Dave and his wife got invited to a Baptist church. She was gung-ho, he was blasé.
Dave went anyhow, and the sermon made sense. So, he accepted Jesus into his heart on April 1, 1999 and was born again.
“When I raised my head, everything was different,” he says. “My entire perspective changed in a moment. There was no going back. The cursing went away immediately, the addictions were all gone, the racism was gone. I didn’t hate all the guys in the Navy from different races and ethnicities. I loved these guys who didn’t look like me, but I saw them as God saw me. It blew my mind.”
His wife was pregnant with twins when he got deployed for six months. He kept pursuing Jesus the whole time, but when he came home, he realized his wife had given up on God and church.
“The laundry was piled to the ceiling. Checks had bounced,” he says. “There was no food in the house.”
He coaxed her to return to church with him, but she persisted in the party life.
For months, he tried to win her over, but she left him when he got orders to Virginia Beach.
Stung by the abandonment, Dave decided to backslide. He went straight to the oceanfront and ogled every girl in a bikini.
“At that point, I was so mad, so bitter, so upset, I completely decided to backslide,” he acknowledges. “I was on the warpath to find me a girl and do something that I would have totally regretted.”
To get to some of the most remote Liberian villages, a native missionary walks seven hours through the jungle.
“Sometimes we encounter mosquitoes, snakes or lions, among other animals,” the unnamed missionary told Christian Aid Mission (CAM). “We get sick. Idol worshippers sometimes threaten us, saying that if we don’t leave their village, they will kill us.
“We have to contend with all of that relying on God, the author and finisher of our faith.”
His willingness to endure hardship to bring the gospel to the unreached shows the value of “native missionaries” – locals who carry out the Great Commission to their nation. As a general rule, they are willing to suffer more than foreign missionaries and have the capacity to reach more people.
“In some places we go, there is nowhere to sleep; we just lie on the dirt floor,” says the unnamed ministry leader. “There may be no good, safe drinking water or light. When the battery in the flashlight I carry is finished, there’s nowhere to get additional light at all. There are no shops or stores in the jungle.”
In Liberia, 43% of the population follows an ethnic religion. About 40% are Christian, 12% of which is evangelical. Islam holds 12%.
But the labors of native missionaries are improving those statistics. Within a recent six-month period, the missionary and team led 270 people to confess their belief in Christ, the report says.
One recent convert formerly had lived like a prodigal. As a young girl, she wasted most of her life abusing drugs, alcohol and smoking.
“When I shared the gospel with her, I told her the story of the two sons in Luke 15, then I told her, if you will only believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and ask Him to forgive you, He will. Without hesitation, she immediately accepted the Lord Jesus, and she was baptized and is serving in the church as an usher, doing it with joy.”
How do the local missionaries make inroads into remote villages that are resistant to the Gospel? Sometimes, by farming… Read the rest: Missions in Liberia.
Despite being involved with the Brooklyn mafia, drug dealing, and losing his connection with his daughter, Robert Borelli made a 180 degree turn that changed the future course of his life.
“As a young kid growing up in Brooklyn, New York, being a small guy, I had to be a little rough kid. You had to learn how to fight,” Robert told DadTalk.
Robert’s neighborhood was tough and, unbeknownst to him initially, it was run by the Gambino crime family.
“They protected the neighborhood and got all the respect from just about everybody in it, including police officers.” Robert continues. “There was mutual respect between the officers and the mafia guys.”
Robert was well-liked by the mafia affiliates, and he often attended their social clubs to run errands.
“At the age of 17 years old, I started hanging out with one of the mob guys’ sons,” Robert says. “His dad often had a big spread every Friday night where all the wise guys from the neighborhood would come meet him and give him respect.”
Robert was impressed by the influence of the men there and was drawn towards the criminal lifestyle.
“My family had a hard time making ends meet. There were financial arguments in the house over rent, and at that age, that was not something I was looking forward to having for the rest of my life.”
Robert’s gravitated towards the mafia life, drawn by the respect, money, and nice clothes offered by it.
“See the people?” a mafia man told him one day as they observed some people at a bus stop. “They are the suckers; they have to go to work, and they give half their money to the government. We’re gonna keep that money for ourselves.’”
But by age 20, he was deep into trouble with the law. He had a murder case and possession of a weapon case. Prison offered the proof that he was good for the mafia because he didn’t “rat anybody out.”
So when he was released, he was ready to operate and scale up in the lifestyle portrayed fairly accurately, he says, by the movie “Goodfellas.”
“I was getting recognition,” Robert says. “I got involved in selling drugs.”
Robert was living a fast-paced life of partying, drugs, recognition and excitement. Robert demanded respect, and he would even resort to violence to get it. He wasn’t only running drugs; drugs were running him. He became a “crackhead.”
But then something happened that would change everything.
“In 1993, a little girl was born, my daughter, Brianna, and seven weeks into having her home, I walked out of her life to get high just for that night,” Robert states. “It ended up not being just for that night, and I ended up staying out getting high.”
Mom didn’t like his newly adopted lifestyle and forced him to stay away from their daughter so she wouldn’t get corrupted.
Finally the law caught up with Robert and he was Incarcerated for a long stint. He missed his daughter, but his wife wouldn’t let him talk to her on the prison phone.
“No matter if you’re a mobster or a crackhead, to walk out of your daughter’s life… Read the rest: Robert Borelli mafioso
As the numbers of cases of psychosis and addiction explode, medical researchers are warning about the dangers of cannabis based on a new study.
“Overall, use of higher potency cannabis, relative to lower potency cannabis, was associated with an increased risk of psychosis and cannabis use disorder,” according to the article published by epidemiologists in The Lancet.
Epidemiologists Lindsey Hindes and Gemma Taylor, psychologist Tom Freeman and the paper’s three additional authors called it “the first systematic review of the association of cannabis potency with mental health and addiction.”
Marijuana has been on a legalization steamroll in recent years in the U.S., with 37 states allowing the restricted medical use of cannabis and 19 states allowing recreational use, as reported by Faithwire. President Joe Biden is using his sway to decriminalize it on the national level.
But a number of studies associate marijuana use with paranoia, schizophrenia and other psychotic episodes. However, they noted no conclusive evidence associated with depression and anxiety, which some users also experience.
The active ingredient in marijuana that alters mental states is THC, which is showing up in higher concentrations.
“In the USA and Europe, the concentration of THC has more than doubled over the past 10 years, and new legal markets have facilitated the rapid development of cannabis products with higher potencies than earlier products, such as concentrated extracts,” the researchers noted.
The authors also explained people who used cannabis with high THC levels were more likely to have a “psychotic episode.” One study even found that people who use the highly potent marijuana on a daily basis were five times more likely to be diagnosed with psychosis compared to those who never use the drug,” Faithwire reported.
For years, marijuana was portrayed as a “gateway drug,” a mild narcotic that was a starting point for drug abusers to get into psychedelics, stimulants or other more dangerous recreational drugs. But a pushback against that depiction arose in the last two decades, with some researchers saying it was alarmist.
Separately, the criminal justice system was asking if it was worthwhile to arrest, prosecute and jail people over marijuana use, with a consensus emerging that marijuana didn’t merit the waste of public resources.
Pushed by his left-leaning base, Biden jumped onboard. “I don’t think anyone should be in prison for the use of marijuana,” he said July 16. “We’re working on the crime bill now.”
At 16, Chetra became a Buddhist monk in Cambodia. “It was my pride to become a monk,” he says.
But just five years later in 2011, he abandoned the monkhood because “I felt so empty inside. I wondered what my life was for,” he says on a Christ Church of Ewell video. “I felt so lost in my heart.”
In 2021, he got a job in a language school that taught Cambodian to foreigners, most of them missionaries. On his first day at the school, he had to sit through a Bible study.
“I didn’t really know what Christianity was,” he says. “I only thought I can’t believe in Jesus because Buddhism was precious to me. I thought Jesus wasn’t God.”
He stayed in the school for six years, attending Christian Bible studies but never believing. He had lots of Christian friends, all of whom were praying for him.
In 2017, a certain girl named Julia was more insistent. On Sunday, he said, he liked to sleep late, waking up at noon, well after the morning service was over.
She invited him to an evening fellowship. “I didn’t have an excuse,” he says. “I didn’t go to sleep so early.”
He sat as far away from the group as possible – in the kitchen. Then slowly he moved closer, to the kitchen door. Still, he was resistant. “Buddhism was my pride, so I couldn’t lose my pride,” he says.
But something happened in 2018 during the Pchum Ben, a 15-day festival in Cambodia that honors the previous seven generations of ancestors which are believed to be released to roam the Earth.
On these Holy Days, everybody has vacation. On Saturday during incense burning and chantings, Chetra started viewing his practices strangely. “Wow,” he observed. “What are these things?” Read the rest: Chetra the Buddhist monk from Cambodia
Never mind that driving him towards suicide were demonic voices, schizophrenic episodes, and the opposition of his family. What bothered Adrien Lamont in the Bible conference – where he had gone seeking deliverance – was that there was only one other black person.
Fortunately, she came straight over to Adrien with a prophetic word: “God sees what you’ve been doing and how you’ve been chasing after him, and he’s so proud of you and he loves you and all the people that have done you wrong and called you crazy are gonna see what God is doing in your life in the direction that he’s taking you and they’re all gonna apologize.”
Adrien stayed and received intensive prayer. The deliverance was decisive. Today Adrien is a rising star in Christian Hip Hop, though his music is oriented more to the street than the pew, a rough-edged message of salvation, not cleared for Sunday School.
Adrien Lamont’s father abused heroin and died when he was young, so Mom did her best to raise him. Grandma was the driving force behind church attendance, but Adrien never developed a personal relationship with Jesus.
He was drawn to music and wanted to make it big. As he searched for his identity, he began drinking, smoking weed and using other drugs. He also liked to wear a brand of clothing with occult symbols. Today he says those symbols opened him up to demonic interference.
“I was really involved in satanic imagery and satanic clothing,” he says on Testimony Stories, a YouTube channel that focuses on Christian rappers. “It got to a point where all these things I was surrounding myself, started to affect my spirit. I realize now in hindsight that a lot of those garments and things I was wearing actually had demonic forces on them.”
He had a ring that every time he took it off and put it back on, he felt like a different person.
Connected with the producer, he began his path to stardom in secular rap.
“I remember just getting very high and drunk one day and I remember him telling me about all these satanic rituals and blood sacrifice and sacrificing his daughter,” Adrien says. “Under the laptop we were recording on, there was a Ouija board. I felt like I was demon possessed and that demons were speaking out of me into the microphone.”
On that day, he says he felt Satan’s presence. Words were impressed into his mind.
“He asked me if I wanted to sell my soul to Satan,” Adrien relates.
“Yes, okay,” he spoke out.
The rest of the night, he felt a darkness he had never experienced.
Hours later, he was listening to his recording when his computer “glitched.” Up popped another musician who shared his testimony about how demons came out of him and how he ran to his mother, who had a shotgun in her hand. He was saved from evil.
Adriend couldn’t explain the sudden, mysterious site change on his screen. He knew he needed to leave Hollywood immediately and return to his mom, who was living in Long Beach. Early next morning, he wandered around Hollywood asking for a phone to call Mom. Eventually, he got an Uber home.
By the time Alyssa Gordon went to high school, her mom had been thrown in jail for too many DUIs.
“My family was pretty dysfunctional,” she says on her Wonderful Acts YouTube channel. She was a military brat born and raised in Italy. Her mom was an alcoholic. She ran away from home from time to time and grew up seeking in guys the love she felt was missing in her family.
She played the part of the social butterfly party girl with a smile facade but internally she was frustrated that guy after guy just took advantage of her and never wanted a true and lasting relationship.
“I began to get in this cycle of me really desiring love, to have someone genuinely care about me,” she says. “I would give myself to these men physically looking for that true love that I never got. I got really dark, it got really depressing and the cycle just kept continuing. The last guy who I thought genuinely cared about me cut me off…would act like I didn’t exist.”
The last guy broke her heart badly and she took it out on God.
“I’m cursing at God, I’m throwing things,” she relates. “I was yelling and screaming, ‘God if you’re real, I need you to show me…right now!’”
She had attended church, but, with her mom’s example speaking louder than her words, Alyssa didn’t respond to God’s offer of grace and love.
As a sophomore in college, she luckily had a friend who encouraged her.
“I don’t know if God is real anymore, because if he’s real where is he?” she asked him.
David Lou Bega, the Berlin mamba singer whose catchy tune “Mamba #5” set the world dancing, has turned himself over to Christ after reading the Bible in a bungalow in the Maldives when unending rain wouldn’t let him, his wife and daughter out for sun and snorkeling.
“In depression, I found a bible and started to read. After a few pages, I started to realize this was the truth that I was always looking for,” he says in The Last Reformation documentary. “I’ve looked into different sets of religions before, everything that was trendy and cool, like Buddhism and some New Age stuff.
“But I had passed over Jesus Christ for so many years, to my regret,” he adds. “There he was calling me, giving me the opportunity. I started reading and I felt so convicted. I broke down, started crying. That was the Holy Spirit.”
He had seen Torben Sondergaard’s miraculous street evangelism ministry on YouTube and called him to baptize him in 2018. Sondergaard filmed the meeting at which he baptized and prayed for David and his extended family.
“I felt like a baby,” David says. “I felt like a newborn. That’s why the term born-again is really fitting. You’re fresh. Your transgressions, your iniquities are gone. I was so joyful and clean.”
David Lubega Balemezi hit #1 in many European cities in his 1999 remake of Mamba #5 “A Little Bit of Monika in my life.” For it, he earned a Grammy nomination. The pinnacle of his career pales compared to his simple encounter with Christ.
“Even in the days I was rebellious and didn’t listen to you (Jesus), didn’t obey you, you never dropped me, you gave me a family, you gave me love, you gave me everything I have,” he says. “It’s weird; you want to sing; you want to dance. It was the… Read the rest: Lou Bega Christian
When his family left Texas, little 9-year-old Mack Calvin saw poverty and physical and verbal abuse under the drunken terrors of his father. His family was evicted many times, so Mack moved from school to school and his learning suffered. In college, he read at a 7th grade level.
So when the 100 colleges offering him basketball scholarships saw his 1.9 GPA on his transcript, they shut the doors to him. “This boy’s dumb,” Mack imagined they said of him.
“My father was always drunk. It was kind of embarrassing when he came to my baseball or basketball games drunk,” Mack told God Reports. “God said to me, ‘You’re not going to ever drink. I didn’t want to be like my dad. I detested the anger he displayed towards my mother when he was intoxicated.
Ultimately, Jesus had big things for Mack, who eventually became a Hall of Famer in basketball. In August, he’s running free youth basketball camps in Long Beach, aiming to help impart values to underprivileged kids and teach them about Jesus.
Born on a farm in Ft Worth, Texas, Mack’s family was middle class and never lacked food. But his dad was an irascible, foul-mouthed drunk who decided to move the family to Los Angeles. His continuous gambling impoverished the family, and they went from eviction to eviction until they arrived at the Imperial Courts Housing Project in Watts.
Right next door, there was a gym where Mack played and practiced continuously until age 15, before the family moved to Long Beach.
“I knew in my heart that I didn’t want to be like my father,” he says. “I wanted to be great. I wanted to be special. I worked hard.”
Parks & Recreation coaches took the raw material in Mack and formed a high-caliber player. At Long Beach Polytechnic High, Mack led his team to back-to-back CIF championships both years he was on the varsity team. He was all-CIF, the state sports organization for high schools.
Colleges wanted him. But his schools had put him into wood shop class, metal shop and special education; he fell victim to the instability of his home. So off to Long Beach City College he went. Mack led his team to championships.
Coaches Chuck Kane and Bill Barnes turned his academics around. Starting him in easier academic classes and connecting him with tutoring, the coaches transformed the academic underachiever into a Dean’s List student.
After two years in the community college, Mack accepted a scholarship offer at USC, where he broke UCLA’s 41-game winning streak with his tenacious play. What the 6’0” point guard lacked in stature, he made up with sheer grit and determination.
Out of college, Mack played seven stellar seasons for the American Basketball Associating until it merged with the NBA in 1976. He was an ABA all-star five times and was named to the ABA all-time team
“You’re talking to a miracle,” Mack admits. “It was by the grace of God. God has always been at the center of everything in my life, no matter what I accomplished, no matter what accolades, no matter what money I made.”
Joining the NBA, he played for the Lakers, Spurs, Nuggets, Jazz and Cavaliers before retiring after the 1981 season. He did some stints as a coach, including for the Lakers and for the Virginia Squires.
For 44 years, he’s sponsored a basketball camp to give back to the communities where he’s lived. “I want to always aspire to make a difference,” he says. He’s mindful of the hardships of his own upbringing.
He’s always attended church. In college he participated in college sports faith groups. On the road, he’s attended whenever it was Sunday, as long as there wasn’t a game. Today, he attends Bishop Charles Blake’s West Angeles Church of God in Christ.
“I loved the spirit that came from the church,” Mack says. “I’ve always had the… Read the rest: Mack Calvin Christian
Friends are expressing dismay that a Danish man who works tirelessly spreading the gospel around the world has been arrested in America over charges of smuggling arms from Mexico into America.
“Today Torben (Søndergaard) is sitting in jail because somebody made a false accusation against him, something that is not true,” says Jón Bjarnastein on a Facebook post on The Last Reformation page. “It’s because he’s preaching the gospel. This is nothing new under the sun. The Bible says that everyone who wants to live a godly life will experience persecution.”
Torben Søndergaard fled Denmark in 2019 after repeated attacks by the government to discredit his street ministry, which riled secularists by casting out demons in public places. If you don’t believe in the supernatural, much less demons, then one might think Torben is a manipulative charlatan. He applied for asylum in America and now is being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“I was invited to a meeting with Homeland Security who wanted to talk about my asylum case – a case where I, in Denmark three years ago, was accused of doing many things I had not done, and where I ended up fleeing to America seeking asylum,” he wrote on Facebook. “But then, they suddenly said that the real reason I was there was because they had been notified that I was smuggling weapons from Mexico to America.
“I was in shock.”
The accusation of arms running is strange because the illegal flow of weapons is generally southward, from America to Mexico. America is a manufacturer of arms, not an importer. What America imports illegally from Mexico is drugs, not weapons. CBN says the Department of Homeland Security had no comment on the case.
Doing ministry in Denmark for 18 years, Søndergaard, 45, founded the Last Reformation street evangelism movement with the purpose of restoring Book of Acts-style ministry. His Jesus Center trained disciples from 30 nations to spread the gospel worldwide, CBN reports.
But authorities in secularist Denmark didn’t like him and, starting in 2016, launched investigations from six separate Danish ministries into everything from food safety to unpaid taxes. They found nothing wrong, CBN reports.
The persecution continued when Søndergaard decided to homeschool his daughter. Seeking an abatement from the persecution, Sondergaard re-enrolled her in public school. But the attacks continued… Read the rest: Torben Sondergaard Danish evangelist.
Shinichi Tanaka believed vaguely that an all-powerful god who created the universe was out there somewhere. But it was not until a near death experience that he found his way to God.
From a young age, Shinichi had a great respect for nature and the “gods” of the Shinto religion. However, when visiting the shrines to pray, he felt that something was missing.
“I went there to feel a sense of purification, also to pray and give thanks,” Shinichi says on a Japan Kingdom Church video. “But it was like praying to a vague God, like the air.”
It was at 40 years old that Shinchi began to take on a different perspective on God. In a moment of introspection, he began to see God not as a group, but as an omnipotent Creator.
“I realized the existence of God, which had immeasurable power,” he continues. “Since then, I would close my eyes and meditate that the universe would send energy like bright and dazzling lights. That was my God.”
Shinichi did not know God yet. This would change when, at 49 years old, he experienced a heart attack that left him hospitalized.
“My life hung in a fifty-fifty balance,” Shinichi says. “But I kept a strong will to survive.”
At one point during his hospitalization, Shinichi underwent a near-death experience that led him closer to finding God.
“One night, while sleeping on the bed in the hospital, a beautiful world spread out before me, and I was drawn outside my body,” Shinichi recounts. “It was actually the entrance to death.”
“Then, suddenly, a voice shouted ‘No! Don’t go!’” Shinichi continues. “When I regained consciousness, I suffered from strong pain, and tried to get out of it.”
Shinichi believed that an invisible being saved him from entering death’s… Read the rest: Shintoist finds God.
As a result of her parent’s divorce, Savannah Hernandez felt shame, had insecurities, depression, and had given up on believing in God.
“I hated God at this point of my life,” says Savannah on YouTube, “I just felt like, man, there is no way that God is real. I’m going through so much stuff. How is God real? How did he make this earth?”
Many fall away from God and don’t come back, but Savannah is proof that restoration of faith is possible.
Savannah’s parents got divorced when she was 11 years old. From there, she swirled downward emotionally.
“It was really hard on me just to face as a child and trying to figure out what was going on and just how to really just grow up to be a woman,” she says.
Savannah had a strong dad who never left her or made her feel alone, but she still felt an emptiness inside. She looked for masculine approval, which caused her to feel worse about herself and develop more insecurities.
“I did feel like I was alone at some point in my house, and I did run to guys and just love to try to find some type of love and temporary fix in those areas that I was hurting,” Savannah says. “It just caused me to hurt, and it caused me just shame and feeling like I wasn’t worthy and that was really hard for any girl to face.”
After she graduated, Savannah tried smoking and became stubborn and prideful.
“I was just doing all these things behind my dad’s back,” she recounts. “I’m not doing anything to pursue any of my goals, I’m not doing anything, I don’t believe in a God.
His vaunted career in aerospace engineering led him to being featured in National Geographic for his research with NASA.
But the PhD from a German university couldn’t save Dr. Dragos Bratasanu from personal heartbreak when his startup flopped, and he went back to his parents apartment depressed, in wretched pain and envying the dead in the local cemetery.
“The pain was so intense, I took my pillow and cried out to God from the bottom of my heart,” he recalls on a CBN video. “God, if you’re real, I need you.”
Growing up in Romania, Dragos was turned off by religion because it involved “bowing down to bones,” burning candles and the belief that you can only get to Heaven through your local priest.
Instead of seeking religious truth, he sought scientific truth. Excelling in his studies, he got the chance to study in Germany, where earned his PhD in space science. He worked with the Romanian Space Agency, got a chance to work with NASA and was commended in a National Geographic article.
At the top of his scientific career, he fell to the depths of inner despair. His business failing, he was humbled to the point of not being able to pay his bills and moved back with his parents. He cursed his fate.
When he considered embarking on a spiritual quest, Christianity was his last option. He studied Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and other major religions. He even traveled to the Himalayas to study under the most renowned Buddhist monks. All seemed to offer good tenets, but didn’t resonate with his soul.
While he was on a sabbatical in Hawaii, a non-believing friend recommended he read Katheryn Kuhlman… Read the rest: Dr. Dragos Bratasanu Christian.
M.I.A. – the UK rapper who was banned for a time from the United States because she was thought to have ties to terrorism – has become a born-again Christian after a supernatural encounter with the Messiah.
“I had a vision and I saw the vision of Jesus Christ,” she told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe in an interview.
Born to a Sri Lankan Tamil family in the United Kingdom, Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam reached overnight success with her multiple platinum song “Paper Planes,” which pokes fun at discrimination against immigrants from war-torn countries.
After being denied a visa into the U.S. in 2006, M.I.A. blamed “them thinking I might fly a plane into the World Trade Center.” Her hit was born.
M.I.A. is an outspoken critic of the Sri Lankan repression of Tamil peoples. She has also spoken up for Palestinians on Israel’s West Bank.
Turning to Christ, she says, has caused her worldview to shift – a makeover that jeopardizes her standing with her mostly progressive fanbase.
“Basically, all of my fans might turn against me because they are all progressives who hate people that believe in Jesus Christ in this country,” says the singer.
M.I.A. was born in London. When she was six months old, the family moved to Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka, where her father founded the Eelam Revolutionary Organization of Students, after a succession of pogroms against Tamils in the island nation off the coast of India.
For a time, M.I.A.’s family went into hiding, as the government hunted them down. Though born Hindu, M.I.A. studied at Catholic convent schools. The Sri Lankan army reputedly shot bullets randomly into the school on a regular basis to terrorize the locals. Along with all the other students, M.I.A. would dive under the desks and tables to avoid getting shot, a regular occurrence she described as “fun.”
At age 11, M.I.A. was brought as a refugee to England where she grew up in the “incredibly racist” Phipps Bridge Estate, a slum. There, she mastered English, and her mom worked as a seamstress for British royalty. Immersed in political activism, M.I.A.’s father was absent from the family, leaving a hole in her heart. Her mom became Christian.
M.I.A. loved art and pursued film but got sidetracked by hip hop and dancehall music, which she was introduced to by eavesdropping on the beats blaring from neighbor flats after her own radio was stolen. Her stage name came from the time she lived in Acton and was looking for her cousin who was “Missing in Acton.”
Once on vacation in the Bequia in the Caribbean, M.I.A. was dancing in the street at a “chicken shed with a sound system,” and some Christians… Read the rest: M.I.A. Christian
The “goon-mobile” or “swagger wagon” – a 1978 Chevy Beauville van that belched out blue smoke from its tailpipe – accompanied Adam Dragoon everywhere he went, from delivering hotdog carts around town in Portland to the party bus in high school.
When he got saved in his later high school years, the Beauville became the church bus, carting people and equipment for outreach and service.
“I learned how to sell hotdogs at 10 years old, slinging the mustard, Hebrew National hotdogs,” Adam says. “I inherited the van, a 1978 Chevy Beauville. It was a tank, one of those half-ton vans. That became my ride, that hunk of junk. It was glorious.”
The hunk of junk is a metaphor for Adam’s life before Jesus: weighted heavily, inefficient, roaring around, wasting resources. The heaviness on his heart started early, when his parents got divorced in Oregon during kindergarten.
“I was upset that Dad was gone and he wasn’t coming back,” Adam remembers on a Testimony Tuesday podcast on Spotify. “That definitely had a profound impact on who I was.”
Then both his grandfathers died when he was 15.
“That hit me real hard,” he acknowledges. “It was the first time I had to deal with death. I got angry at God. My mother’s father knew Jesus, so I was confident he was in Heaven. But my other grandpa was blasphemous and told dirty jokes. One of them was in Heaven, and one of them was not.
“That had a profound effect on me.”
What was a young boy supposed to do but fall in love with a cute blond at a telemarketing firm that he now realizes was a scam?
“I had to take care of the car. I had to pay insurance. I had to put gas in the tank, so I had to have a job,” he remembers of his 16th year. School was less appealing than work: he had a ready mind to learn but an unready hand for homework and barely passed his classes.
Raised in Arizona – “the Promised Land where all the California people who can’t afford California go,” Adam spent summers with his father where Grandfather Dragoon put him to work peddling hotdogs from his deli. He learned a work ethic.
During the summer when he was 14, Adam tried reading the Bible with his other grandfather but didn’t understand because he wasn’t yet born-again; the Holy Spirit was not yet upon him to teach him the meaning of the Scriptures.
“I put some serious effort into it,” he says.
His mom took Adam and his brother to church, one of those megachurches with cushy chairs, AC flooding the room, and a youth group of 800 kids. If you asked him, Adam would have said he was a Christian.
At the same time, there were doubts. Taught in public school, he was filled with a lot of skepticism and atheistic ideas, the fodder of the public school system.
So, when one day he sat next to a glowingly pretty blond at the telemarketing business, Adam was ripe to listen to the Gospel from her. Taya radiated light, the light of Jesus – and she was stunning.
“One day I got brave enough to leave a note on her car: If you ever want to hang out with me, you can call me,’” he remembers. “Amazingly enough, she called me.”
The first conversation ended with him asking her to hang out on the weekend. She responded with: Today’s Wednesday, and I’m going to church. Do you want to go to church with me? Read the rest: Adam Dragoon pastor of Virginia Beach Church
Wanting to “unleash” himself from society’s norms, David Wood decided to flout rules in the biggest and worst way, by murdering someone. Not just anyone. He developed a plan to murder his own father.
“Some people don’t want to live like cattle,” David explains on his Acts 17 Apologetics YouTube channel. “Some people don’t want to follow this pattern that we are all expected to mindlessly follow. Some would rather bash a man’s head in, or shoot up a theater, or walk down their school hallway stabbing people. Why shouldn’t they? Because it’s wrong? Because of your grandma? Or do people have intrinsic value? Human beings were (to me) nothing but machines for propagating DNA.”
From childhood, David had psychopathic tendencies. He was further influenced by an atheistic moral vacuum and the destructive philosophy of nihilism, a poisonous mixture that influenced the monster he became.
As a boy, when his dog died, his mother cried, but he felt nothing.
Crying isn’t going to change the fact that it’s dead so why are you crying? he thought.
Years later, when his friend died, David again felt nothing. When his mother got beaten up by a boyfriend, he felt nothing.
“I don’t remember ever not living with violence in the family,” David says on Premier Christianity. “My mum was habitually with very abusive boyfriends. One of my earliest memories was hearing a lot of screaming and walking into the kitchen and seeing blood everywhere, and my mum saying: ‘It’s ketchup, go back to bed.’”
David became a habitual rules breaker. He broke into homes, ran from police, and trampled people’s gardens. For David, morality was, at best, a “useful fiction.”
“My atheist worldview was throughout the universe or through time, we’re collections of cells,” he says. “You could kill 1,000 people, or you could spend your entire life helping people. It doesn’t make any real difference. You might as well just do whatever you feel like doing with the time you’ve got.
With a nihilist worldview, he adopted the Nietzschean self-concept of an ubermensch. He was mad at society for trying to “brainwash” him with its rules. The right thing to do, he believed, was to throw off all restraint and prove his superiority. He was “Humanity 2.0.”
There’s nothing wrong with me. It’s everyone else who has a problem. I’m the only smart, sane one, he thought.
David started studying how to build bombs but ultimately rejected mass murder because it was so prosaic.
“Anyone can blow up a bunch of random people, you don’t know them,” he says, “If you’re sick of life dangling at the end of society’s puppy strings, the killing has to start much closer to home. My dad was the only relative I had within a few hundred miles and so he obviously needed to die, and I had a ball-peen hammer that would do the trick.”
Later diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, David felt no remorse, no guilt, no sense of right and wrong. His determination to live “unleashed” knew no bounds.
On the night he planned to murder his father, 18-year-old David sat trying to think of one thing wrong his dad had done to him. He couldn’t think of a thing. He attacked him anyway with the hammer. His goal was to kill him, but he failed.
“I underestimated the amount of damage a human head could endure, crushed skulls could apparently be pieced back together by doctors,” he says. “My dad had brain damage, but he survived the attack.”
David was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison for malicious wounding under New York’s law.
In jail, he met a Christian named Randy whom he mocked. Randy wouldn’t back down easily. In fact, Randy engaged in a spirited debate with David. Surprisingly, they became friends. To compose arguments to refute Christianity, David began to read… Read the rest David Wood.
Actor Denzel Washington is once again unleashing a furious attack against social media.
“The No. 1 photograph today is a selfie, ‘Oh, me at the protest.’ ‘Me with the fire.’ ‘Follow me.’ ‘Listen to me,’” he told the New York Times. “The Bible says in the last days – I don’t know if it’s the last days, it’s not my place to know – but it says we’ll be lovers of ourselves. We’re living in a time where people are willing to do anything to get followed.”
Not only that, people are committing suicide because of snide remarks on social media.
“This is spiritual warfare. So, I’m not looking at it from an earthly perspective,” the two-time Academy Award winner says. “If you don’t have a spiritual anchor you’ll be easily blown by the wind and you’ll be led to depression.”
The 67-year-old goes so far as to give youth advice regarding Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat: “Turn it off. It’s hard for young people now because they’re addicted. If you don’t think you’re addicted, see if you can turn it off for a week.”
Denzel just portrayed MacBeth in an Apple Movie released Dec. 25 and now available on streaming. The Shakespearean tragedy explores the demise and demonization of a once-loyal general who allows ambition to take over his heart. Read the rest: Denzel Washington social media
Doubt plagued Sean McDowell, son of famous doubts-slayer Josh McDowell, when he stumbled across an atheist website that refuted his Dad’s book Evidence that Demands a Verdict point by point.
“Honestly growing up, I probably kind of thought someone wasn’t a Christian because they just hadn’t read Evidence Demands a Verdict or More Than a Carpenter,” says Sean on a 100 Huntley Street video.
The books have been decisive in establishing the faith of many people based on hard evidence to corroborate the Bible. But here was a well-reasoned attempt to erode confidence, Sean said.
“All of a sudden, I’m reading some really smart people — some doctors, some lawyers, philosophers, historians — going chapter by chapter, pushing back very thoughtfully on the arguments that my father had made,” Sean relates.
It shook him to his core.
So Sean, 19 and in college, sat down with his dad for coffee and came clean.
“I want to be honest with you,” he told Dad. “I’m not sure that I’m convinced Christianity is true.”
Sean wasn’t sure how did would react. Josh has famously written 150 books and given 27,000 lectures on college campuses to stir university kids to faith and show them what their atheist professors don’t want them to know.
Would his dad lose his temper, kick him out of the family and disown him?
Actually, Josh did none of that. Josh McDowell became a Christian master of apologetics when he as young man decided to study to disprove Christianity, which he thought was an annoying idea that needed to be dethroned in American. Read the rest: Sean McDowell doubted the Christianity of his father Josh McDowell
Because she was sickly, little Satabdi Banerjee was consecrated to Kali, the revered Hindu goddess who would bring healing.
But when Satabdi got older, she read the Bible to appease her conscience. All was going well until she hit the Book or Romans, which shattered her view that all religions lead to the same godhead.
“If you read the book of Romans with an open heart, you will see God talking to you,” Satabdi says on her own YouTube channel. “I used to look down on Christian missionaries because I thought they do not understand one very simple concept: All the rivers are ending up in the ocean.”
Satabdi Banerjee was born to a Bengali Brahmin family and took pride from her high caste birth and her family’s devotion to the Ramakrishna brand of Hinduism, the belief that no matter what the religion, they all provide salvation.
Her family members prayed hours every day in a dedicated prayer room at their house. They had lots of Hindu idols, decorated them for holidays and invited relatives over for special meals on those holidays.
They also celebrated Christmas — with gifts in the name of Santa Claus and a birthday cake for Jesus, whom they took to be one of many valuable gurus.
“We used to celebrate everything — Christmas, the birth of Buddha. But at the same time, we thought it was all the same thing,” she says. “We celebrated everything. We used to do carols and cut cake for Jesus.”
Satabdi had a strong desire to please the deity.
“We were so dedicated. I was so dedicated,” she says. “I just had one goal. I wanted to please the gods so that I could meet the gods and be with the gods. I thought I was very close to the gods.”
But she was also painfully aware of the sin in her heart.
“There was this other side of me. I had committed so much sin. Nobody knew my inner heart.”
Satabdi was an avid reader through her childhood. But she refused to read the children’s illustrated Bible because it was Christian, and her mother, who had purchased it at a high price, complained that it alone sat neglected on the bookshelf.
“I did not care about what Christians thought,” Satabdi says.
But the in 11th grade, she met a Catholic girl and flipped through the Bible just to be friendly and to report to her friend that she had read it. There was one problem though: she knew she hadn’t read it. She lied. Read the rest: Satabdi Banerjee couldn’t be helped by Hindusim.
Alexis Hoffman found herself in a pool of blood. She had cut herself over 40 times.
“I was so ashamed,” she says on CBN. “What did I just do? That’s not me! Why did I do that?! That is not how I act! Why do I keep doing this? Who is this that is doing this?’”
Having shoved God aside in her freshman year in 2009, she ventured into a damaging relationship that introduced darkness into her mind and voices into her head. For her, high school meant she was high.
“My heart became calloused after the abusive relationship because I felt like I could just never get right with God. I felt like I was too far gone. Like I had messed up too much,” she remembers. “I would hear things like ‘You should kill yourself.’ And I would hear a lot of whispers.”
Meanwhile, Alexis’ parents battled through prayer for their daughter.
“When the only thing that your daughter ever gave you was joy, and then you find out that she’s on drugs, sex, you know, alcohol, it breaks your heart,” says her father, Ted.
Robin, the mother, was also anguish-stricken.
“Lord,” she prayed, “You said, and Your Word says that she is Yours and You will not let anything happen to her. And I know that Your Word is true and I believe You.”
The voices started in her senior year.
“They told me I was useless and ugly, that I was worthless and dirty. They told me to just die. And I believed them,” Alexis says. “I remember having this obsession with stabbing. I would sneak out into the kitchen and I would start taking one knife at a time and bringing it into my room.”
When Mom found the stash of knives hidden in her room, she called 911 and had her taken to ER, from where she was transferred to the psychiatric hospital. None of the treatments — including 20 different diagnoses including schizophrenia — seemed to work.
Alexis kept threatening to take her life.
“Robin and I were preparing ourselves for her to kill herself,” Ted says grimly. “And you talk about that’s tough when you have to prepare yourself.”
Alexis also manifested fits of rage and sometimes even blacked out.
“When Alexis got mad…whooo, it was not pretty. It was scary,” Robin remembers. “I had even said to my husband, ‘We should get locks on the bedroom door.”
Then Mom took Alexis to a revival service with Pastor Todd White.
“I could see her eyes going crazy… Read the rest: She cut herself.
Ed Mylett was still smarting from a humiliating performance at the basketball championship game earlier in the day. That evening, he was hitting line drives — his true love – into center field.
He was holding and swinging the bat flat and choppy like his hero, baseball legend Rod Carew, when he heard a voice from behind the backstop. “Who’s the little lefty? I like this kid’s swing.”
Ed glanced back. It was #29 himself, Rod Carew, MLB’s hitting maestro for 19 seasons. Ed was flabbergasted.
“Hey, kid, how would you like me to work with you and train you? Can you make it to my batting cages every Tuesday night?”
Wilting before his hero, Ed struggled to find the words. Yes, yes, yes. He would be there.
In the following months, Rod altruistically gave of himself and mentored 8th-grader Ed Mylett, as he did selflessly with hundreds of other talented young people throughout Southern California. Not only did he provide technical expertise, but he also spoke words of confidence into the kids’ lives.
Rod is a born-again Christian. His generosity eventually proved the Bible’s admonition, “Give, and it will be given you, good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over will be put into your lap.” (Luke 6:38)
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One of those hundreds of kids saved Rod’s life, Ed says on his Aug. 24, 2017 Elite Training Library video.
In September 2015, Rod suffered a massive heart attack on a golf course. Golfing by himself, he was on the first hole at the time. He drove his golf cart to the clubhouse and someone called paramedics. Read how the kid he mentored blessed Rod Carew with a heart.
Mustard Seed Budget 