Victor Saikouski turned to atheism after his father left the family and his mother moved around taking different jobs to fund the family’s needs.
“I adopted a world view of atheism and I truly believe that there’s no such thing as God,” Victor says on a Hungry Generation video. “It actually became to me almost as a sport to argue Christians and to deceive Christians out of their belief in Jesus because I was so radical for atheism.”
Victor was born in Belarus. When he was 14, Victor’s mother remarried but drank and used drugs with the stepdad, and they divorced also.
Eventually, Mom moved the family to the U.S. in search of better opportunities. She worked two jobs to make ends meet.
Years later, the stepdad moved to America and got saved. He reached out to Victor’s mom wanting a reconciliation.
Victor didn’t believe the man had really dropped drugs.
“We found it very hard to believe,” Victor says. “Me being atheist, I rejected that idea of church right away and I thought that man is a liar.”
Still as time passed, Mom broke down and got back together with Stepdad. Little by little, the family started going to church.
As a madame in Atlanta, Pamela Hillman had a mansion and drove a Hummer.
“I always had a lot of money,” Pamela says on a CBN video. “It was a very big business.”
Pamela was a small town girl, whose mom was a free-spirited Playboy bunny and whose Dad was an abusive alcoholic.
Trouble started for her when she was 5 years old and begged her dad to be able to keep a stray puppy she brought home.
“If you come upstairs with me, you can have him,” her dad told her.
When she ascended the stairs, she was violated. “Something happened that day. It planted a seed that I could get what I want by going upstairs.”
The horrific happenings altered Pamela’s life forever. She went from a happy-go-lucky girl with dreams of growing up to becoming a PTSD-warped automaton whose emotions were guided by the sordid underbelly of American sin.
She DID tell mom what dad had done to her, and mom got him kicked out, but other members of the family picked up where dad left off. The curse had spread.
At age nine, Pamela found marijuana lying around the house and discovered she could be free from her room, from restrictions, from pain — all by smoking.
“When I discovered pot, I just went somewhere else,” she says. “I felt free from being trapped in that bedroom.”
Soon she was progressing through harder drugs and found cocaine.
But sex was her major coping mechanism in the quixotic quest for love. She was married and divorced three times before she turned 20. Prostitution, drugs and being in and out of jail became a way of life.
The men who consort with strippers and prostitutes while using and abusing them, denigrate and antagonize them. They would echo to her the dehumanizing words from her own self-condemnation.
“I was a whore. I was a slut. I was never going to amount to anything.”
Now she’s happily married.
The never-ebbing undercurrent of her life was shame. “That was all that I knew. Filth.”
Fortunately for Pamela, not every influence in her life was bad. If her mom and dad contributed to her downfall, her grandmother was a voice of reason and Christian love.
A friend of her grandmother prophesied over Pamela when she was young. “This one here is special. She’s going to do great things for God.”
Many times those words of hope would come back to Pamela. They especially reverberated powerfully when Pamela, at age 26, decided to kill herself. With enough cocaine in the needle to end her life, Pamela heard those words again as she held the syringe, ready to jam it into her arm.
“God, if you’re real, help me, rescue me,” she cried out. “I need you.”
The voice spoke. “You don’t belong here. You’re going to do great things for God.”
“In that moment, I heard my grandmother’s voice,” Pamela remembers. “I heard so many of her prayers.”
Instead of committing suicide, she committed her life to Christ. She got off drugs, abstained from extra-marital sex and went to church for two years.
But Pamela had one slip-up, one moment of weakness in which she fell into sin again. She was overcome with grief, shame and hopelessness. She thought there was no recourse but to dive headlong into full-blown sin.
“I relapsed because I couldn’t deal with that shame and guilt,” she says. “I was unworthy to be in His presence, to be a child of God.” Read the rest: God saved the madame.
Edgar Cervantes in his car. He delivers for the deli and he drives to outreaches all over to share about Jesus.
By Jasmine Cervantes and Mark Ellis
Little Edgar Cervantes shrieked with terror when the cops raided his home in Pacoima, California, hauling his mom, dad and uncle off to jail for the drugs, hot money and stolen jewelry retrieved on the property.
The tyke, then only 6, was unceremoniously dumped off with his grandmother. From a tender age, he was marred.
By the 11th grade, Edgar had fallen into a calamitous family pattern: smoking marijuana, stealing, partying and fighting. Pacoima, a poor neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, was a gang war zone in 1990s, so Edgar, joining the fray, became part of the Pacoima Cayuga Street Locos gang.
He was tagging, handling plenty of illicit money and ditching classes. Three times he got arrested for grand theft auto. While kicking back with some “homies” one day, he got introduced to Nadia, and they started dating. After a few months, she told him she was pregnant.
Edgar “freaked out” because he was still young and lived with his parents. Nadia wanted Edgar to take responsibility and come and live at her house with her parents, who were shocked but wanted to make the best of the situation.
Edgar, who had dropped out of school, started working but maintained his drug use and gang activities. He preferred his drug trips to spending time with Nadia. After an extended time of not getting Edgar to change, Nadia got fed up and asked him to leave.”
Nadia was left alone working and raising her baby, Jasmine.
Every day Edgar woke up feeling depressed and lonely. He quit his job and turned to heavier drugs – crystal meth, for example – to numb the pain and forget about losing his girlfriend and daughter. The meth produced erratic emotional states and made him violent.
Mustard Seed Budget 