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?”
Never mind that Richard Lorenzo Jr. wallowed in money. He still felt empty. To find fulfillment, he trained to be a warlock.
“I was making a hundred grand a month. I had the traveling, the women. I bought two properties,” Richard says on a Delafe video on YouTube. “But I was depressed. I had all this money, but the money was not answering it either.
“I stopped caring about the money. Now what I cared about was finding out what’s real? The witches were telling me real things. They told me true things about my past. They were telling me I was called to be a warlock.”
Richard’s descent into drug trafficking and witchcraft began with rejection in his childhood. He was raised in Fort Lauderdale to Puerto Rican parents. His mom took him to Catholic masses, but the violence of his neighborhood pulled him down.
“I loved women, I loved partying, I loved drinking and smoking. I loved robbing,” he says. “It wasn’t because I needed the money. It was because I wanted acceptance from my peers. I’m a product of my environment. If you do these things, you’re accepted and they look at you like you’re more of a man.”
While he was flexing worldly impulses, he also did well enough in his studies to get into Broward College and later the University of Central Florida, where he fell into fraternity party life at age 17.
He and his friends were doing crazy things; some even got shot. At his ex-girlfriend’s apartment, he had an experience in his sleep in which he fought off a demon by reciting the Lord’s Prayer. He remembered the prayer from his childhood.
Thinking he needed a “change of scenery,” he moved at age 21 to New York City, becoming a bouncer at clubs in Manhattan. The change of scenery didn’t bring a change of heart.
“I was still robbing, finessing anything – clothing from department stores. I was credit-card-scamming. It was an adrenaline rush,” Richard explains. “I was good at it. I had this strategy. I had demons in me.”
But after the rush came guilt, depression and suicidal broodings.
“I cut off everybody in my life because I was so depressed,” he says. “I had so much paranoia and lived in so much chaos that I just cut everybody off. I thought it was better to die.”
Despondent one day in his apartment, he heard a supernatural voice break through the darkness. “It brought so much life to my spirit,” he says. But Richard didn’t know Jesus yet, so he mistook the voice as belonging to his dead uncle.
Even though he didn’t recognize the voice, it encouraged him. Friends were going to jail and getting killed in New York, so Richard decided to flee the city and join the Navy as an air traffic controller. A lot of his deployment he spent in Greece.
In the military, Richard didn’t reform. As a matter of fact, he began selling marijuana. Reveling in vices again eventually landed him in depression, so one day on a beach in Crete, while his friends were in the club, he went alone to the beach to cry out to whatever Higher Power might be out there.
“I didn’t know anything about the Bible. I was crying profusely, just screaming, ‘Who are you? What’s the purpose of life?” he recalls.
He sought Haitian voodoo. He found God.
He heard a voice, the same voice he heard in New York. “I’m going to show you now.”
He was stunned.
Still, Jesus didn’t immediately show him. Though the supernatural encounter was overwhelming, he was still very lost. Instead of coming to Christ, Richard fell into even greater sin. It got darker before it became lighter.
He diversified his trafficking to cocaine, ecstasy, pill and “lean,” codeine cough syrup mixed with soda. Read the rest: Warlock Richard Lorenzo now a pastor
At first, Dan had no qualms about paying for his girlfriend’s abortion. Only afterwards did a sense of guilt creep over him.
“Without even thinking about it, without hesitation, I paid for her abortion,” Dan says. “I didn’t even feel guilty about it until a little later. It became one of the things that made me aware of my sinfulness later on. Up until this point, I didn’t have a conscience about what I did. But when I did that, I knew that I had done something wrong. It was a terrible choice.”
He ultimately became aware of his moral responsibility. “Guilt and condemnation are very powerful emotions,” Dan says. “The blood of Jesus is able to cleanse our conscience from dead works so that we can serve the living God. When you cross certain lines in your life, there’s a lot of guilt that is carried with it. It can lead to self-hate. Jesus is that scapegoat that took the blood and cleansed us from the guilt of the past.
“It’s pretty plain and obvious that you’re involved in a murder,” he adds. “But the blood of Jesus is so powerful and is able to cleanse your mind and your conscience of any person who has crossed these lines. You can experience God’s love, knowing that his blood was shed for that purpose.”
Dan saw Melissa at a car dealership and, instantly attracted, started asking her out on a date.
At the time, Melissa had two kids and was going through a divorce.
Melissa grew up in a heroin-running and heroin-abusing family that often moved between Texas and California. Her dad was the black sheep of a Christian family, and at times they attended church.
“When we were in church, my family was ok,” Melissa says. “When we weren’t in church, my family was crazy.”
Because of the fast living at home, Mellssa started hanging out at bars when she was 12. She started drinking and doing drugs at 15. She was pregnant at 16 and married at 17. She got into fist fights with her husband, trying to get him to work. She divorced at 20.
For his part, Dan, the youngest of six, suffered trauma at 8 when his parents separated in Galveston, TX. Dan and his brothers suffered a car accident. One of the brothers flew through the windshield. Dan woke up in a ditch.
Iran is no longer a Muslim nation, declares former Iranian Muslim Dr. Hormoz Shariat, who has broadcast the gospel into Iran for 23 years.
“I’m working with the people of Iran daily. I am in touch with them. I evangelize them. I answer their questions,” Dr. Hormoz says on a Voice of the Martyrs video on YouTube. “Iran is no longer an Islamic nation.”
Dr. Hormoz’s audacious statement contradicts Iran’s official census data (which says the nation is 98% Muslim) but coincides with an online scientific survey which pegs the Muslim believers at 37 % (32.2% Shi’ite and 5% Sunni branches of Islam).
His declaration also runs counter to the perception of outsiders that Iran is a hostile extremist nation whipped into a furor to carry out the wrath of Allah.
But his observations are significant. As someone who interacts online daily with common people in Iran, he’s a man with his ear to the ground.
For years, Christian observers have speculated about wide scale revival in Iran based on scant data that emerges from Iran.
Dr. Hormoz’s assessment goes well beyond what has been previously reported and upends the way many view Iran. His observations may be useful when Christians pray for Iran.
However, his hopeful appraisal doesn’t necessarily mean there will be a change of government. The Iranian authorities suppress the population with an ironclad fist. The case of Syria is illustrative: while many heralded the downfall of the Syrian autocrat during the so-called “Arab Spring uprising” of the early 2010s, the dictator clung to power through brutal military repression.
Nor does the decline of Islam in Iran mean everyone is turning to Christ. According to the scientific survey only 1.5% of the current population identifies as Christian. Meanwhile, a whopping 22.2% say they adhere to no religion, while 8.8% classify themselves as atheist.
All caveats aside, the news is heartening. Iran is far from the Islamic monolith of the Iranian propaganda.
“One-third said either God is not relevant to my life, is not important, or there is no God,” Dr. Hormoz says. “The last one-third were looking all over the place. They were looking at New Age religions, Eastern religions, all kinds, and Christianity, of course. But everything but Islam; they are not looking for Islam.”
After 40 years of repressive Shariah law-rule, Iranians are disillusioned with the government’s decades-old failure to solve the problems that existed under the Shah.
“Iran is the only nation in the world led by Islamic clerics. They implemented Islam in every aspect of life. They have laws for your bedroom, your bathroom. They invade every area of your life,” Dr. Hormoz says. “Iran will never be an Islamic nation. The hatred, the rejection of Islam is so wide and deep, people are no longer coming back to it.”
Incensed, Jeremiah Wacker stood up and walked out of church.
“When I heard the preacher say, Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life and that no one can enter Eternal Life without Christ, I was agitated, I was bothered,” Jeremiah says on a Lacy B channel YouTube video. “I left in the middle of church service. I was offended.”
Jeremiah Wacker had been raised with New Age teaching. He was taught the Bible was merely men’s thoughts and not absolute truth.
Jeremiah’s parents instilled him with pure New Age doctrine, that all religions have some element of truth and you can pick and choose what you like as if it were food on a buffet.
No religion alone was the truth, he had been told.
But in high school, a friend’s parents invited him to church. He acceded because of their kindness, not because he was on a quest for truth.
The preaching of the Word of God grated against his inner worldview.
“I was taught that the Bible was written by men and used by religion to manipulate people,” Jeremiah says. “I didn’t believe in sin, and I didn’t believe I was a sinner.”
Nevertheless, the conviction of the Holy Spirit fell on him when he heard the Word preached.
“When I was challenged by the message of the gospel, it was diametrically opposed to anything I believed,” he acknowledges. “But I felt conviction. Something was telling me I was not right with God.”
According to the New Age teaching he had learned as a child, he was his own god.
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
He was shunned as a boy because he liked “girlish” things: flowers, animals, women’s clothes, dolls and movies with strong female leads.
“I remember thinking that if I was a female, then I felt people would then accept me,” Dane Erik says. “It was my distorted thinking that I would be accepted.”
Because certain people bombarded him with the message that he was born LGBTQ and that he should embrace it fully, Dane passed from gender-confused to gay to transgender.
Dane when he became transgender.
Embracing sin did not bring the touted happiness, he says.
Today, Dane, 38, from Wisconsin, is a “man of God,” he says.
“I accepted what other people identified me as. I started to believe lies about God until I started reading scriptures for myself. It showed me He loved me and sought me out even in my confusion,” he says. “Even as I struggled to understand my identity, until I saw myself as God created me.”
His childhood was typical of someone who slips into LGBTQ. He was bullied and ostracized.
Dane today.
“I was made fun of regularly and excluded from groups,” he says. “Some girls didn’t want to be around me because I was a boy and boys didn’t like me because I was too ‘effeminate.’ I was fascinated with women and girls, they also gave me comfort and nurturing that men or boys didn’t.
“It made me cry and felt very alone as both boys and girls would bully or shun me.”
Wanting desperately to fit in and be accepted, Dane fell in with other misfits: disable kids, outcast kids and minorities.
Not everything pointed in one direction though. He liked swimming, hiking, wrestling, baseball, soccer and “getting out into nature without fear of getting dirty.”
In high school, he tried to project a masculine image and even bragged about a girlfriend who didn’t exist, “so people would stop harassing me,” he says.
To escape the loneliness and rejection, he took refuge in singing, music, art and movies.
Later, he took an interest in psychology. “I loved learning about people and their experiences,” he says.
The last scare was his wife. After being shot up with eight rounds at close range in Iraq, Navy SEAL Jason Redman survived but was disfigured. He had tubes going in and out of his body. What would be the reaction of his wife of just six years?
“There are stories of spouses showing up at Walter Reed (National Military Medical Center), walking into the room of severely wounded warrior and saying, ‘Nope. I didn’t sign up for this,’” Jason says on a Real Ones video.“ They take their rings off, leave them on the table and walk out.
“I was really terrified of how she was going to handle it.”
Jason Redman grew up in a Christian family, but he wandered as he grew up. He became a Navy Seal, the toughest and elitist soldiers on the planet, and battled terrorists in Iraq. He was living the dream embodied by his nickname “Rambo Redman.”
But the killer soldier feared by terrorists got shot up.
First, he almost was stripped of his trident, the Navy SEAL pin and badge of supreme honor.
As a standout Navy SEAL he earned promotions, but became cocky.
“I started to get a little bit of ego,” he acknowledges. “I started to think I was the man of danger, that I was better than other people.”
Now he recognizes that he became too prideful to listen. At the time, he was in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban.
As the war evolved, Jason was falling behind on his tactics and strategies. The new guys actually had more up-to-date knowledge about how to deal with the enemy.
“A lot of the older tactics I had learned weren’t the same as the ones our guys were running with now,” he says.
But Jason was too proud to ask for help from rookies. “I was insecure,” he says. “I was unwilling to say to the young guys, ‘Hey man, I don’t know how to do that. Can you help me?’”
To douse his insecurities, he turned to the bottle between battles. Jason became a hard drinker.
When a bunch of American soldiers came under Taliban ambush in an Afghan valley, Jason responded rashly. He descended into the valley to help them, even though air support was on its way.
It was gutsy to attempt with only his machine-gunner to cover for him.
It was not-well-thought-out. “I made a bad call,” he admits.
By descending from the opposite direction, air support could no longer bomb the enemy positions for fear of killing Jason also. Instead of single-handedly liberating his buddies, he single-handedly threw a wrench into the process of neutralizing the enemy.
For that foolhardy antic, Jason got called in by his commanding officer. He was informed that military personnel were upset. For endangering so many of his fellow soldiers, there were vigorous calls for him to be kicked out of the SEALs.
“Guys wanted my head on a block,” he says.
In that instant, Jason’s dreams died in disgrace. “They were going to take my trident,” he says. “My world was over.”
After the dressing down, Jason went to his room and, blaming everybody else, grabbed his pistol and stuffed the muzzle into his mouth.
Desmond Bell was not afraid to launch out as a pastor and “pioneer” a church at Wilberforce, Sierra Leone. He had already conquered his worst fear.
He had gotten married.
“I thought marriage wasn’t worth it because I was afraid I would be like my dad,” Desmond recalled. He grew up with a single mother because his dad had been unfaithful.
“But (my pastor) showed me that I could make a difference. He showed me how to love my family. It was actually Pastor who influenced us to get married because I was scared. He showed me I could be loyal to my wife.”
Three pastoral assignments later, Bell, now 41, took over a church in Marseille, France from Charlie Forman who now is an evangelist. It has been an astounding odyssey for a man born into one of the poorest nations of the world.
When Desmond was only two months old, his mom, a telephone operator, separated from his dad. Bell grew up in a middle class home in Sierra Leone’s capital city, Freetown, and integrated in 1992 into the Door Church which was exploding in the middle of a guerrilla war.
At 19 years old, Bell got caught up in the whirlwind of exciting preaching, enthusiastic outreach, commitment and loving pastoral attention that marked that early church. Pastor Alvin Smith became a father figure for Bell.
He met his wife, Matilda, another young person drawn by Holy Spirit fire, and they married only after Pastor Rob Scribner from Santa Monica pushed them forward. “It was obvious that they liked each other,” recalled Rob, whose church had help bankroll revival in Sierra Leone.
Bell, who is four years older than Matilda, pioneered a church in Wilberforce in 1998. He was among the first… Read the rest: He was afraid of getting married.
A brainiac in school, he dreamed of becoming another Thurgood Marshall, but when his mother was murdered when he was only 14, he turned to stickups with a gun on the mean streets of College Hill, Tampa Florida.
“”That’s when I changed my concept of life and became a totally different person,” David White says on a Manifestations Worldwide video. “My dreams and aspirations were totally killed. The idea that there was a God in Heaven was over for me. I declared that night that if there is a God in Heaven, then you’d better stop me because I’m going to hurt all these people.”
He went from a gifted program at school to fending for himself on the streets. Filled with rage, David “pimped” himself out to older women to have a place to sleep and food to eat. To get a little extra money for himself, he became a trigger man robbing people at gunpoint.
“I was a little stick-up kid,” he says. “I was a wicked young kid. I was known to be a shooter.”
A local drug dealer took him under his wings. Knowing that brandishing a gun would get the young man killed, the drug dealer taught David to deal drugs instead. It was a safer way to make a buck.
Because he was so dangerous, the cops wanted him off the streets, so they planted drugs on him, accused him falsely and locked him up, David says. He was labeled “a threat to society.”
“I was innocent of the charges I was in prison for, but I wasn’t innocent,” David acknowledges. “I had done a lot of worse things. They did what they had to do get me off the streets.”
A God-hater, David despised “jailhouse religion.” While Christianity turned him off, he like the white-hating religions of the Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam, or the Hebrew Israelites.
“I was trying to prove that the Bible was full of falsehoods and contradictions and that Christianity was the white man’s religion,” David says. “But then I found that the things I was taught to battle Christianity with was actually a lie. I found that Christianity was established in Ethiopia since the year 84.
“As I was reading the Bible, I was changing,” he adds. “The book changed me.”
Then he stumbled on Gideon, who put tests on God to find out his will and purpose.
It occurred to David to likewise test God – in a “weird way like a child would.”
“If God is real, send a bird to touch this window pane,” he recalls. “It was raining out. When I called on God to touch a window pane, amazingly a bird touched that square. I was an intellectual and it didn’t make sense. I thought it was coincidental. So I… Read the rest: Gideon’s test man in prison
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
All the Merritts wanted was to enjoy boating on the lake after several days of rain. What they didn’t take into account was that the floodgates on the dam were open and the undertow would suck their boat onto the dam where it would be smashed, their family thrown into peril.
“The water was very calm on the surface,” Kelly Merritt says on a 700 Club video. “Our boat was being pulled without us realizing.”
But all the extra water was the reason authorities, unbeknownst to the Merritts, had opened the gates to allow the overflow to run off down the spillway. It created an unseen undertow that sucked the Merritts toward danger.
Three days of rain had left the family stir crazy. So when the rains abated, the family of four thought to get out and relax on the lake, which was glorious and serene.
The closer the Merritts got to the dam, the stronger the undertow. When the family finally realized what was happening, it was too late. The current was stronger than the boat’s motor. Try as they might, they could not escape.
“We had lost control of the boat,” Kelly says. “The motor didn’t seem to matter anymore.”
With mounting fear overwhelming them, the boat struck the concrete barrier on the lakeside of the spillway, quickly fracturing and coming apart.
“All of a sudden, my (teenage) son jumped out of the boat and began swimming as hard as he could,” Kelly relates. “I watched him get sucked underneath the boat.”
Kelly grabbed her daughter and hugged her impulsively, but as they were pushed over the dam, her daughter was ripped from her arms by the force of the water.
“It was very much like I was dead,” Kelly says. “I dropped for what felt like an eternity. I reached up and felt the carpet on the bottom of the boat, and then behind me I could feel the concrete. I was pinned there. It was a horrifying feeling.”
By the time his family found him locked in an outdoor freezer on a Mississippi farm, Victor Marx was unconscious, clutched up in a ball, where his molester had left him to die because he realized the 5-year-old wouldn’t keep quiet about the rape.
Today, Victor ministers to kids in juvenile hall. He’s a 7th-degree black belt in martial arts and trains cops and military. He ministers in war zones in what he calls “high risk mission work.”
“The closer we are to danger, the more we’re helping people,” he says on his podcast. “I minister to these kids because I know where many of them have been. I know where God wants to take them. That which was meant for evil in my life has actually turned for good.”
How did Victor Marx heal the innumerable childhood traumas and become an effective minister of the gospel?
His biological father became involved in the Louisiana mafia, pimping women in honky-tonk bars and selling drugs. Dad didn’t cut or shoot up people like the Italian mafia in New York; he fed them to the alligators in the swamp, he says on the self-made documentary of his testimony.
Because Dad was splitting with Mom around the time of Victor’s conception, he never acknowledged him as his own child.
At five, Victor was taken advantage of by a neighbor who invited him into a room between two chicken houses where he threatened him with death if ever told. Since the neighbor got the idea that Victor would tell, he locked him in the commercial cooler to die.
“I remember being unbelievably terrified,” Victor says.
Victor kicked against the door and screamed until he succumbed to the pain, the horror and the intense cold. He curled up in a ball and passed out.
Meanwhile, his family began to miss him and began to search about. They looked around the pond and woods and checked the chicken houses, the building, and finally the freezer.
“Thank God they checked the freezer,” he says.
When Victor regained consciousness, he told them what happened. His family administered “country justice.”
“They kicked down his door and beat him in front of his family,” Victor relates. “They took him outside and hogtied him to the tractor and they drug him outside the house. They drug him all the way around. There was this one big pecan tree. They made a noose and threw it over this limb. They hooked it to the back of the tractor.
“They pulled the tractor, and he started going up, choking, trying to grab. They waited for him to go limp, and they cut him down and left him. They didn’t want to kill him and go to prison. They just wanted to put fear in him.”
His family’s crude justice did nothing to free Victor from the PTSD. Nor did it free him further trauma… Read the rest: Overcoming trauma Victor Marx
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 circus brought Tanzanian Solomon Kuria to America. Beer brought him to Jesus.
“I wanted to stop drinking but I didn’t know how,” says Solomon, now a resident of Anaheim, CA.
Solomon Kuria was raised a strict Muslim in Tanga, a small village in Tanzania. His grandmother sent him to a madrassa school to learn Arabic and read the Koran. His cousin became a leader of the mosque.
Solomon became an acrobat. How did this happen?
At the time, China forged close ties with Tanzania, which had turned politically to socialism. As a result of its involvement and influence, China recruited and trained willing Tanzanians in the Chinese art of acrobatic performance.
A Chinese official representing a program to promote culture and the arts trained Solomon and his buddies. At the same time, he being steeped in Islam at the madrassa, and was unaware of other religions.
“Everything you see is about Islam,” he remembers. “I didn’t know anything about Christianity.”
At the time, tourists were rare in Tanzania. But a Swiss tourist happened to see Solomon and his buddies perform and asked for a video of their stunts, which he took back to Switzerland and showed to some key people.
The next thing he knew, Solomon got offered the chance to work and perform in Europe, which he did from 1985 to 1994.
The next place to call was America, where he was offered work at Las Vegas’ Circus Circus, a distinctively family-friendly destination in the City of Sin. On other weeks, he worked at Disneyland’s California Adventure in Anaheim.
Solomon didn’t go to mosque but considered himself a good man, faithful to Islam.
The one nasty habit he picked up was drinking alcohol, which is strictly forbidden in Islam.
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
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.
God moves mountains and U.S. Navy ships, just ask Rocky Colona.
Growing up in St. Louis under remarried parents, Rocky, half Sicilian, had one half-brother and three half-sisters. Because his dad was excommunicated from the Catholic church for his divorce, Rocky attended church sporadically.
He was a straight-A student who got into a lot of trouble in the public school (he started drinking at 13), so his parents moved him to an expensive private Catholic school, a strategy that didn’t help much. He graduated early because of some shameful things he told a teacher with cancer.
“They passed me a year early because I was so bad,” Rocky says on the Virginia Beach Potter’s House podcast. “I said some things to her that I was just in a bad state in life.”
At the University of Missouri-St Louis, he drank his way to failing grades and decided to drop out and join the Navy, at the urging of a fellow sporty friend, with the aim of becoming a SEAL.
He never became a SEAL because he fell in love and married a woman named Ingrid in the Presidential Honor Guard. He viewed the Honor Guard as a stepping stone to his goal. Ultimately, he abandoned the SEAL dream at the warning of his friend.
“All these (SEALs) guys are divorced,” Joe told him. “I don’t know if this is going to be good for you.”
As a secondary plan, Rocky wanted to work his way into the CIA, FBI, or Secret Service. At the top of his class in A school, he got his pick of ships and opted for the Kearsarge, which wasn’t to deploy for 1 ½ years — after he planned to leave the Navy.
But when he reported for duty Jan. 6, 2002, he was hit with shocking news. They would leave on an unscheduled deployment in three days. At the time, President Bush was accusing Iraq of secretly building weapons of mass destruction, and the Navy was getting into position for possible action. His wife was stationed on the USS Eisenhower, so they were apart.
“We literally didn’t see land for the entire 6 ½ months except for two days,” Rocky remembers. “I got really depressed. Eating habits went away. I stopped working out.”
So, he did something he never had done. He prayed a non-ritualistic prayer, a sincere heartfelt plea: “God, if you can get me home for the 4th of July, I’ll quit drinking, I’ll quit smoking, I’ll live like a priest,” he implored. “That’s what I thought God wanted.”
The next day, the amphibious assault ship’s chief petty officer announced over the public address system: “Somebody else took our spot, and we’re going to head home. We’re going to be home on the 3rd of July.”
Rocky went up to the deck, threw his cigarettes and chewing tobacco overboard and marveled how God had moved an entire ship due to his tiny prayer. He didn’t know the scripture about the mustard seed of faith yet.
He promised to nix his vices, a pledge he wasn’t able to keep.
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.”
As an immature Christian, Nathaniel Buzolic got a big bite of international fame as Kol Mikaelson on The Vampire Diaries. But now that he’s committed more deeply to Christ, Nate preaches regularly to his 2.4M Instagram followers and many have gotten saved.
A lot of those saved are Muslims behind the “Islamic veil,” a set of borders where strict Muslim beliefs are enforced and evangelizing is punishable by death.
“I won’t name the countries that they’re in for their protection, but I’ve got Muslim people who have converted to Christianity because of my social media,” Nate says on a 700 Club Interactive video. “I interact pretty boldly with the Muslim community on my social media.
“I don’t think God goes, ‘Hey, I’m all for vampire shows,’ but he goes, ‘I’m going to use them for my glory.’ Look how God can use what the world tries to push, a demonic thing and witchcraft, for himself.”
The son of poor immigrants in Australia, Nate dreamed of acting and moved to Los Angeles when he was 24. He first heard the gospel and responded when he was 27 at a Passion Conference in Atlanta but wasn’t strongly impacted until six years later.
“It made me ask what’s my life really all about it in an Ecclesiastes sort of way,” he says. “It made all the things I was pursuing like acting and fame really sort of meaningless. I thought there has to be something more.”
At the time, he was working on The Vampire Diaries, the internationally famous CW teen series that launched him to fame as he played the sympathetic villain Kol Mikaelson.
Regarding Christ, he was convinced but not so committed. He had a French Muslim girlfriend and gloated that he didn’t judge anyone. But when she broke his heart by cheating on him, Nate was so shattered he wanted to die at 33.
“I was at rock bottom,” he admits. “I was in a very dark place. I’d be on an airplane, and I’d say, ‘God bring it down. I want it to all be over.’ I wanted to be numbed. I didn’t want to feel anymore.”
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.”
FAISALABAD, Pakistan — Kids as young as 2 years old are working in the brick-making fields of Pakistan. One man with a free school wants to change that.
Sarfraz Anwar’s father and brother started in the brick fields. To make bricks, they squat and grab a ball of moist clay-rich earth. They form it into a loaf, cover it with dry dust, and plop it into a mould. It is turned over and dropped onto the ground in long rows to bake under the blistering sun.
It’s a grueling job, and most who fall into this line of work never get out. Some get indebted to their employees when they borrow for their weddings (Pakistanis love 3-day ceremonies with much expenses). They spend the next decades of their life trying to pay off that debt, much like a student loan in America — only they become almost like slaves.
But Dad and Umar escaped the fields. They had a vision to work as Christian laborers. First Dad took at a double shift in security to raise money to launch a school for children that could be free. With whatever free time, he pedaled his bike to the brick fields and sprend the message of hope. Read the rest:
“Just shut up!” he said in his mind, frustrated that Jeff would argue with Louie, who had gotten saved, and that he had to listen to it in their one-bedroom apartment.
Tom, then 19, had come from New York to Prescott, Arizona, because it was famous as a college party town. “Getting saved wasn’t part of the plan. We were in a prolonged adolescence with the feigned attempt at getting an education,” Tom says on a Don’t Sell the Farm podcast.”
So when Louie got cornered by a Christian and acceded to go with him to church one day, Tom offered to provide the alibi when the Christian accompanied him to service.
“Just hide in the bathroom, and we’ll tell him you’re not in,” Tom told him.
But Louie was a nominal Catholic and used to showing up every so often to Mass, so he stayed true to his word.
That night, when Tom and Jeff stumbled out of the bar and walked home, Tom remarked sarcastically: “What if Louie got saved.”
They found him in his bed reading his Bible. Suddenly, their fears, however they were treated in jest, now became reality.
Louie told them he had gotten saved and invited them to church. Jeff started to argue with him. Tom rolled his eyes.
For the next days and weeks, the litany was unending. Louie invited them to church, Jeff argued, Tom fumed. “He was in our faces telling us about Jesus,” Tom told him. “Fine, we’ll go to Hell all by ourselves. But just shut up. I don’t want to hear it.”
Jeff was arguing with him nonstop. Louie was just devouring his Bible and was answering him. I couldn’t escape it.”
One evening as he lay on the bed trying to not hear the other two argue in the other room, Tom asked God if he was real. “I was laying on the bed with my hands behind my head, and I said, ‘God, I’m not going to do this just because Louie did this. But if you’re real, I’ll serve you.”
The “presence of the Holy God of the Universe came into that room,” he says. “I thought I was going to die. I couldn’t believe anybody had heard that prayer or would answer that prayer.”
Awestruck, he told God: “Ok, just don’t kill me.”
Tom attended a new convert’s class with Louie. He accepted Jesus. “I had already been confronted by the Holy Spirit,” he says. He was delivered from drugs, alcohol and cigarettes. The next day, he started looking for a job.
Finding a job was no easy matter in Prescott, then a town of 20,000. There weren’t many jobs to be had. He wanted to stay with the Prescott Potter’s House, a booming church. His first job to support himself and continue learning about Jesus as a “disciple” was to water plants at the community college. His last job was working on a trash truck.
Tom and his buddies were used to staying up to 4:00 a.m. partying, so when church let out at 10:00 p.m., he didn’t know what to do with his time. Fortunately, some of the brethren went out for coffee and fellowshipped after service.
He came home buzzed on caffeine, and he and his buddies went home afterward and wrote letters to all their friends back in New York that they were going to Hell and needed to get saved. “We bombarded them with letters,” he recalls… Read the rest: Roommate annoyed the Hell out of him.
Darren Munzone reacted to his wife’s newfound faith in Jesus and belief in the rapture by sneering: “Oh, you’re still here? The UFOs haven’t gotten you yet?”
He could tolerate the fact that she had gambled away their savings of $10,000. But he couldn’t stand the fact that afterwards she became a born-again Christian. “To me it was like she had become a nun or something. I was just not happy.”
He lashed out at her: “If I would have wanted to marry a Christian, I would have gone to church, But I met you in a pub. This is a rip off.”
Born to an Italian immigrant father, Darren always identified as an Aussie because of discrimination against immigrants, he says on a Virginia Beach Potter’s House podcast. He had basically no background in Christianity.
Admittedly, he was the bully of the classroom and got into scrapes frequently. When his mother divorced and remarried, he took out his frustrations by fighting with the neighborhood boys. His penchant for violence went right along with his dream to be a rugby player.
“I got into lots of trouble because of fights as a teenager,” he says. “I rebelled against my mom and my stepdad.” He didn’t talk much to his stepdad except two to three times a year.
For rugby league, he practiced very hard but wasn’t big enough and wasn’t gifted in the sport. Ultimately, a series of injuries sidelined him when was semi-professional, so instead, he turned to coaching, where he excelled.
“I’ve broken all my fingers,” he recounts. “I literally had my ear ripped off the side of my head and had to have it sewn back on. My AC joint in my shoulder – serious shoulder problems. I’ve had two knee reconstructions.
“I was far more successful as a semi-professional coach.”
The woman who became his wife was a nurse, and together they made enough money to qualify for a home loan. But when the broker informed them the term would be 30 years, Darren and Joanne looked at each other and walked out.
Instead of tying themselves down for 30 years, they decided to travel to England and Europe for two years for a work-cation. “I was running away from the broken dreams of becoming a professional sportsman,” Darren says. He played cricket in England.
After one year of living in England, Joanne had a miscarriage, and the subsequent sadness deprived her of all desire to keep vacationing. “She was devastated by that,” Darren says.
They returned to Australia, where Joanne’s depression deepened and widened even though they finally married.
“She blamed herself that we’d come back from our overseas trip a year earlier than expected,” Darren says. “She thought I was angry that we’d cut our holiday. To escape the depression, she started gambling.”
She played poker machines at the local bars. “This went on for some time until she had gambled all our money away,” Darren says.
The depleted savings was not just bad – she sought Jesus because of it after a co-worker invited her to church.
She broke the news about her secret gambling addiction and subsequent losses to Darren, who despite being hooked on money didn’t get too upset. “I was annoyed but I thought we’ll recover from that.” Read the rest: Darren Munzone rugby coach Australia now pastor
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
She grew up on a ranch and loved that lifestyle, but a freak accident propelled Kristi Noem into South Dakota politics and ultimately, national politics, where she’s become a leading voice against lockdowns, abortion, and transgenders in women sports. She’s been called America’s most pro-life governor and advocates for a return of prayer to schools.
“My relationship with the Lord is my foundation in all things,” Kristi stated in a South Dakota Public Broadcasting article. “As a result, the values I hold according to biblical principles impact my decisions: we are called to love, but we’re also instructed to stand for truth.”
Following the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, South Dakota enacted some of the nation’s strongest laws to prohibit abortions, saying doctors, not mothers, would be prosecuted.
“In South Dakota today, we’re just so grateful that every life is precious, and it’s being recognized in this country,” she told CBN. “This is the decision that so many people have prayed for, for so many years.”
Kristi loved ranching, chasing cattle on horseback, and sitting in tree stands hunting. The family loved God and attended church regularly.
“You read Scripture, you think, gosh, God loves farmers more than anybody else,” she waxes nostalgic. “He’s talking about sowing and reaping all the time and your barns are overflowing, the cattle on a thousand hills.”
When she went to college, her dad died in a freak farm accident, so Kristi came running home, eight months pregnant with her first daughter, to help run the family business.
At that time, the federal government offered no sympathy for her loss, instead slapping the heirs with a huge “death tax” bill that it took 10 years to pay.
“We were still reeling from the loss of the powerhouse in our family, and already, the government was reaching out its hand to take part of our American Dream,” she told Fox News in 2017. “We had a tough choice: sell off a portion of our family farm or face a decade in debt. We chose the latter. We spent a decade in debt and struggled to keep our heads above water.”
The inheritance tax law was one reason Kristi entered politics, first in the state legislature and then as a congresswoman in the House of Representatives, where she fought to overturn the devastating tax law.
In Congress, she also “got into some tough fights with the leadership of the House” to get the Farm Bill passed.
When she returned home to get elected governor of South Dakota, she riled atheists by celebrating her inauguration with an interfaith worship service. “You are Lord and King of South Dakota,” the pastor said at the festivities, according to Patheos. “We thank you Lord God that we have faith and that the Holy Spirit absolutely takes over every corner and every crevice of this Capitol and of this state.”
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.
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.
Mustard Seed Budget 