How Emmanuel Zepeda survived and thrived foster care

What freaked tykester Emmanuel Zepeda the most was not be removed by Children Protective Services from Mom and Dad. It was not being separated from his two older sisters in transitional housing. It was the kid who screamed all night long.

“It was the kid I think who was going through some crazy stuff,” he remembers on the Virginia Beach Potter’s House podcast. “He would be screaming all night. As a kid, I didn’t know what was going on. I was freaking out. I was crying that night.”

Today Emmanuel is a testament of how God can help foster care kids, who suffered under drug-abusing and drug selling parents.

Emmanuel Zepeda’s parents were rebels cast out by their respective families. They were so shunned by their families that when Dad was in jail for trafficking and Mom interned at a rehab trying to clean up her act, none of the family members would take in Emmanuel and his sisters.

“I was in and out of that foster home,” he says. “Growing up we never knew when the police were going to show up and take my dad away. I grew up in a very dysfunctional home. Both my parents were heavily involved in drugs and in-and-out of prison. It was always in the back of my mind: Were my parents going to be taken away?”

Emmanuel was born in Brawley, California. When he was taken out of the transitional facility and placed in a foster care home, “you could tell the people did it just for the money, not having a heart for the kids,” he says. “There were a lot of times where they would pull me by the ear where my ear would start ripping and start bleeding. They couldn’t hit us.”

Emmanuel didn’t have a taste for the Foster Mom’s cooking. His punishment for not eating was to have to sleep at the table. “My sister would come at 2:00 a.m. and pick up and take me to bed,” he remembers.

Emmanuel was in kindergarten. His father was in prison for armed robbery. His mother entered a Victory Outreach woman’s home to get clean from drugs. She wanted to clean up for her kids, but he battled with rejection because, ultimately, she sent him away.

“We had a disconnection with the rest of the family because my parents were the rebels of the family,” he explains. “Who wants to take in four kids? So, we definitely went straight into the (foster care) system.”

While he lived in poverty, Emmanuel and his older brother and sisters went to the local church for sandwiches. “To this day, I remember how good they were,” he says.

After so many years, his Uncle Ben and Aunt Rosy got saved in the Potter’s House Church and received the kids into foster care when Emmanuel was seven years old. He started learning the Bible stories, with Veggie Tales.

“My life changed from there,” he says. “The exampleship they set with going to church helped me. I definitely did see a difference coming from a dysfunctional home and seeing how my parents would fight throwing stuff around. I would never see my aunt or my uncle fight at all. I looked at that and said, ‘Wow this is different.’ We felt safe there.”

But Emmanuel didn’t serve God like a straight shot arrow. He dabbled with the ways of the world: girls and marijuana. He learned to be a chameleon: in church he played the part but at school he showed nothing of Christian character.

“I can’t even count on my fingers the times I backslid,” he says. “The last time I backslide, I believed the lie of the world. I looked at my friends from school, and it looked like everyone was happy and having fun. I decided, ‘You know what? I’m just going to do what I want. I’m going to go experience what the world has to offer.’”

By now, his parents were serving Jesus and were adamantly opposed to Emmanuel falling into the gateway drug. One day when he skipped class to smoke weed, school administrators called to alert the parents of his absence in school.

Dad was waiting when Emmanuel, still a little high, got home.

“How was school?” Dad asked.

“School was cool,” Emmanuel replied.

“I got a call that you didn’t go,” Dad responded. Read the rest: Surviving and thriving after foster care.

Pimped by mom, woman found freedom from guilt in baptism

To pay bills, Mom prostituted BJ Garrett until she turned 15.

“I had no healthy concept of love,” BJ says on a 700 Club video. “Love was very sexual to me. I just remember feeling very ugly, very alone, very unwanted.”

BJ’s journey through the moral sewers of America started with abuse from her own father.

“My dad did things that no dad is supposed to do to his little girl,” she says.

Her mother stopped pimping her when she got pregnant as an adolescent by her boyfriend. Having a baby represented the first ray of hope in her life. Finally, there was someone who would give her pure love, and to whom she could give pure love.

“I wanted to be wanted and having a baby fulfilled that — she was going to be perfect and lovely and love me unconditionally,” she says.

Her boyfriend abandoned her, however, and later she found herself pregnant with another teenage boyfriend, but that relationship also soured because the young man was not ready for the responsibility of fatherhood.

“All he said was, ‘I don’t want to be a dad,’” she remembers. “And I just thought there’s no way I will ever let my child feel even for a moment the way I felt my whole life.”

The answer was abortion.

“I really thought I was doing the very best thing for my baby by having an abortion,” BJ says.

Her ill-conceived decision brought guilt and self-loathing.

“It was like just a little section of my heart was to never beat again,” she recounts, grappling with her unexpected emotions. “I was the dirty, ugly, gross, vile human being that now just put this ugly cherry on top by ending my own baby’s life.”

At 19, BJ had a second child, and paying bills became her chief concern. Sadly, she turned to an income source that was available for someone with no education or training – she entered the adult entertainment business and became a sex worker on the side.

“I was mom by day and and stripper and prostitute by night,” she says. “My body had been used my whole life to pay for things, but it was always forced upon me. Now I was in control.”

But “being in control” didn’t mean she was happy.

“With every song, every dollar, every set, I just got more cold-hearted,” she says. Read the rest: Sex worker from childhood.

Madame Giorgio in Atlanta breaks free from the chains and comes to Jesus

As a madame in Atlanta, Pamela Hillman had a mansion and drove a Hummer.

“I always had a lot of money,” Pamela says on a CBN video. “It was a very big business.”

Pamela was a small town girl, whose mom was a free-spirited Playboy bunny and whose Dad was an abusive alcoholic.

Trouble started for her when she was 5 years old and begged her dad to be able to keep a stray puppy she brought home.

“If you come upstairs with me, you can have him,” her dad told her.

When she ascended the stairs, she was violated. “Something happened that day. It planted a seed that I could get what I want by going upstairs.”

The horrific happenings altered Pamela’s life forever. She went from a happy-go-lucky girl with dreams of growing up to becoming a PTSD-warped automaton whose emotions were guided by the sordid underbelly of American sin.

She DID tell mom what dad had done to her, and mom got him kicked out, but other members of the family picked up where dad left off. The curse had spread.

At age nine, Pamela found marijuana lying around the house and discovered she could be free from her room, from restrictions, from pain — all by smoking.

“When I discovered pot, I just went somewhere else,” she says. “I felt free from being trapped in that bedroom.”

Soon she was progressing through harder drugs and found cocaine.

But sex was her major coping mechanism in the quixotic quest for love. She was married and divorced three times before she turned 20. Prostitution, drugs and being in and out of jail became a way of life.

The men who consort with strippers and prostitutes while using and abusing them, denigrate and antagonize them. They would echo to her the dehumanizing words from her own self-condemnation.

“I was a whore. I was a slut. I was never going to amount to anything.”

Now she’s happily married.

The never-ebbing undercurrent of her life was shame. “That was all that I knew. Filth.”

Fortunately for Pamela, not every influence in her life was bad. If her mom and dad contributed to her downfall, her grandmother was a voice of reason and Christian love.

A friend of her grandmother prophesied over Pamela when she was young. “This one here is special. She’s going to do great things for God.”

Many times those words of hope would come back to Pamela. They especially reverberated powerfully when Pamela, at age 26, decided to kill herself. With enough cocaine in the needle to end her life, Pamela heard those words again as she held the syringe, ready to jam it into her arm.

“God, if you’re real, help me, rescue me,” she cried out. “I need you.”

The voice spoke. “You don’t belong here. You’re going to do great things for God.”

“In that moment, I heard my grandmother’s voice,” Pamela remembers. “I heard so many of her prayers.”

Instead of committing suicide, she committed her life to Christ. She got off drugs, abstained from extra-marital sex and went to church for two years.

But Pamela had one slip-up, one moment of weakness in which she fell into sin again. She was overcome with grief, shame and hopelessness. She thought there was no recourse but to dive headlong into full-blown sin.

“I relapsed because I couldn’t deal with that shame and guilt,” she says. “I was unworthy to be in His presence, to be a child of God.” Read the rest: God saved the madame.

‘From hoe to housewife’: How God helped one women break out of the strip club and get into financial services

Theirs was a marriage made in Heav…

Well, maybe not.

Theirs was a marriage made in a strip club.

The first time Kris-Lynn saw Justin Williams, he was wending his way through the crowd at After Hours in Tampa, FL, offering molly, X, weed and cocaine. She saw he was popular and handsome.

The next night, they were consuming drugs together, and from that moment on, they were inseparable.

But the fast life of money, drugs, pimps and stripping eventually slowed down. It had to. After all, she was a wayward pastor’s kid whom the Good Shepherd went seeking.

And Justin got let off a 15-year prison sentence with just one year of house arrest. When the miracle of the lighter sentence occurred, he told Kris-Lynn her days of dancing were over.

Kris-Lynn was a bright child, good with the books. Being raised as a pastor’s child in Florida didn’t mean she knew God. She went to all the retreats, heard about Moses and Daniel and constantly attended church, as was expected.

But when she saw church members doing ungodly things, she secretly wondered if there was any authenticity behind the religion.

“I didn’t like the things that I saw in the church that I knew weren’t God. Sometimes humans can pervert who He is,” she says. “I had a tainted view of what Christianity was.”

When she returned pregnant to her hometown from high school in Gainesville, she faced harsh rejection from the Christians who ought to have had compassion. She was kicked out of homes and wound up on the floor of a local Salvation Army in 2006.

“I was church hurt,” she remembers. “Wow, the people in the church are turning me away when I’m pregnant? If this is the Lord, then I want nothing to do with it.”

Actually, she wanted more than just to disassociate herself from the church. She wanted to disassociate herself from her emotional pain.

“I never wanted to feel like that again,” she says. “So I determined in my mind not to feel anything at all. And to get money.”

Dancing in the clubs was a quick way to make big bucks. And it provided her with access to drugs to numb the internal pain.

Then she saw Justin and was smitten in 2013. She plied her trade, he, his. Together they lived the high life of hustlers. Read the rest: From hoe to a housewife: How Christ helped one woman break out of the strip club and get into financial advising.

He tried to be the devil’s #1

Incarcerated for a schoolyard murder, a psychologist told 12-year-old Ronnie Legg there was no forgiveness available to Him from God.

“I was like, ‘Wow, I’ll never be able to get into Heaven,” he says on a video published by a Texas outreach group. “I might as well be the devil’s #1. As soon as I was found guilty and sentenced to 21 years, I started pushing hard to try to do the devil’s work. I was pushing hard to be the ultimate gangster.”

Ronnie’s troubles began early: a single mom, abused as a tyke, living in poverty. For selling drugs on the wrong street in East Houston, his brother was killed. Nine-year-old Ronnie followed in his footsteps with drinking and smoking dope.

His mother, brokenhearted at the loss of one son, steeled her heart against what she thought was the inevitable demise of Ronnie.

“There’s no more love here for you because you’re going down the same path your brother went down,” his mom told him. “You ain’t going to do nothing different, so I’ll be danged if you break my heart.”

Ronnie responded to the rejection by throwing the first object he could find at her.

“I hate you,” he yelled.

At age 12, he was on the schoolyard when a group of young gangsters tried to jump him. But they didn’t count on Ronnie being armed and he shot three of them, killing one. He was arrested four days later. Even without a jailhouse confession, prosecutors secured a conviction.

By age 15, he was in the penitentiary because he was so dangerous. While there, he joined the Houstone Blast gang and fought every day to make a name for himself.

“As I started doing that, everybody was patting me on the back,” he recalls.

Released from prison, he trafficked dope, pimping and kidnapping in Houston.

In December 1999, the Feds tracked him down. It seems his best friend snitched on him. Sentenced to 72 months, he got into trouble in prison so much that his sentence was lengthened to 9 years and 4 months and then into 12 years.

“I ended up walking around some of the worst prisons in the whole United States,” he says. He was in Beaumont prison during the racial riots. He was transferred to Oklahoma and then to Pollack, Louisiana. Of 100 Texans in Pollack, only he and another survived.

Ronnie eventually was transferred to a Death Row penitentiary in Indiana. In Victorville penitentiary, he was thrown in with the Crips and Bloods. It didn’t matter to him that he was the only Houstone. Almost immediately, he stabbed someone on the yard.

Finally, he was transferred to the “Alcatraz of the Rockies” in Florence, Colorado, the “worst of the worst. Everybody there is a killer. Three people a day get stabbed,” Ronnie says.

When he was admitted, the warden gave him one warning:

“All I ask is that you don’t put no steel in my officers.”

When he was finally released, Ronnie went home and immediately resumed drug trafficking.

He got busted for a crime he didn’t commit. Read the rest: Houstone gang Christian.