‘My testimony’

(preached on 6/7/2025)

Our testimonies are living, timeless accounts of how God has acted for us. Unlike physical evidence used to substantiate facts in human litigation, the testimonies of believers do not degrade over time. Because the essence of God is found in our testimony. Even if the gates of hell with all of the expectant horror park outside our doors, we as the followers of God must not be silent. Where the essence of God is, He is there along with power. Lest we forget, that power can reduce the disbelief of the faithless to rubble, with the ultimate aim of winning their soul. Though every manner of evil has been committed in this world, we must never forget to view sin in the proper frames as anomalous and unnatural. I am neither an orator nor a theologian. Some years ago, Satan touched my life, even my person, to snuff out my life. I hope you will hear in my testimony how God countenanced and countered the terrible work of the adversary.

I tell you this testimony because the Scriptures tell me I should. The Scriptures also say that the ear tests words. Your ears will agree, what I am about to tell you is difficult to hear. Regardless, I hold a burning hope that each of you would perceive the work of God in some corner, syllable, or expression of this testimony. Of all the dark edifices constructed by Satan and sin within myself; from cornerstone to spire, doors to dungeons, nothing- and I mean no piece of the enemy’s fearful works was immune to the penetrating, reforming Light of God. I cannot stress this enough. Please believe me. I had a front-row seat after all. What this testimony holds is true, and what God says of Himself is true to the uttermost bounds of our comprehension and beyond.

2003 to 2004 was my annus horribilis or terrible year. My grandfather who was responsible for teaching me, “once a gentleman, always a gentleman”, passed away that February. Harmony within the family became distempered. Family ties loosened. My identity, bound so long in the strength of my immediate and extended patriarchal family, was eroding. A few short months later my mother crammed what of her belongings would fit into a black Jaguar XJ6, restored for her by my earthly father and I, and left. Those material and immaterial objects possessed unquantifiable sentimental value. Kneeling on an old couch, gazing out the bay window, I remember watching her drive away. Wanting to stop her, I could not. My trajectory began deviating in subtle and disturbing ways.  Life at this stage began losing sentiment and value.

On the heels of a noncommunicative summer, my father filed for divorce. I was staggered by this act. Emotionally unable to process the meaning of this weird waypoint, my natural reaction began to manifest. Polymorphic emotion broke through my weak, smiling facade at random times. One day at lunch, during my senior year, I started sobbing uncontrollably at a table surrounded by speechless friends. I was experiencing the distance created by sadness for the first time. Previously, I never had issues with my friends relating to me. Turmoil, catalyzed by loss, was beginning to consume me. Me, the once jovial son. Unbounded rage tinted my vision. The colorful facets of my personality were actively being whittled away as I forgot who I was. Crippling fear set in as I felt my grip on life slip. Trying more and more to feel normal, my fear compounded as reality set in. At eighteen I was dying.

My upbringing unfolded against the savage, grey backdrop of immorality cloaked as Catholicism. Further cloaked as true religion. I was taught to be upright. Like the world. I was taught to achieve in my academics. Like the world. I was taught to adorn my life with religion as an accessory. Like the world. Imperceivable layers of deceit were baked into my identity from an early age. On this shaky bedrock a rigid, hypocritical idealism seeded within my character. Knowledge of self was based upon the fluffy compliments of friends and family, as opposed to the mighty reproval of God’s Word.

Being raised in the catholic church left me spiritually bankrupt and wayward. The dogma had dulled me into a spiritual paralysis. Dreary, godless customs left me believing that God was a static, dusty, lifeless statue sitting on a shelf somewhere. Parishioners in the Catholic denomination are led to believe priests are most like God or closest to God. Scarcely can I utter those words without experiencing acute, emeticlike effects. Pulpits are places for truth. So I tell you the truth, the priests I have known, the priests God has shown me, are nothing like God, Jesus Christ, or the Holy Spirit. That observation was one of the first things God taught me of Himself, which gave me hope that there was knowledge and understanding with the Most High. As a young man observing the priests, I felt their training and overall lack of vigor, prepared them best for a career in taxidermy. To me, they treated the Gospel and their congregation a little better than stuffed animals. At the time I assumed Catholicism spoke for all religions. Thus, I believed religion held no invitation, no warmth, no love, and no answers. And so my path to becoming a son of Hell was prepared.

My disinterest in God was all but complete in 2003. If you were to tell me that God’s solution to my crises was already playing out in my life, I would’ve contended that your words were utterly separated from sanity. However, this is the truth. God was securing my redemption. 

Many of you will remember the Shock and Awe bombing campaign launched by the United States in 2003. It was an unmatched aerial bombardment against key military targets in Iraq, ultimately leading to the invasion of that country. There were increased recruiting campaigns in high schools across America to fill numbers in each branch of the armed forces. Being a directionless teenager, yearning for change and purpose, I was enamored by the idea of joining the United States Marine Corps. However, engulfed by clinical depression, fiery passions prismatically dispersed my thoughts, inhibiting sound reflection. I was incapable of deciding to enlist or not based solely on the emotional burden that I bore at that time.

I looked like my age. But I didn’t look like I felt. Lacking assurance I boldly decided against entering the Marine Corps. Knowing what I know now about the subsequent chapters in my life, I wholeheartedly attribute the decision against enlistment to God’s providence.

At eighteen, avenues to my heart were becoming like an endangered species. Love was like a wraith. Due to the egregious nature of the offenses laid against me by those I loved, it felt as though my heart had been cauterized. I couldn’t confirm that I was loved or was able to love anybody. Nobody could reach me. I no longer trusted my family. Friends were for socializing. Though they bolstered my countenance while we hung out, I knew they couldn’t reverse my circumstances – which was my chief desire at the time. Therapists, counselors, and clinicians were all paper-certified talking heads who had not experienced my war. So I didn’t trust them, because they couldn’t connect to me. Even if they could connect to me, I hungered for something deeper: justice. However, one genuine, unspoken desire remained. I wanted a serious girlfriend. 

Enter Allison.

I began seeing her everywhere. It was as though she was stalking my existence. Pestering me during our encounters to attend some after-school leadership council. Didn’t she know I was a slacker? I cannot fault her for failing to see that I had carefully avoided participating in any activity that would commend me as a scholar. To her credit, she was one of the brightest, most accomplished students in the entire high school. So of course I had no shot of dating her. Initially, I dismissed the council merely as a hangout for the goody-to-shoes, passively refusing her invitation. Until, as the friend in Luke 11:8, my blind resolve yielded to her sincere persistence. So I attended.

Boy meets girl. The boy becomes smitten with the girl. Courtship eventually ensues. The structure and conclusion of this narrative are popular. What about when an agent of Satan begins dating God’s daughter? Are we familiar with a tale containing such opposing elements? Would we offer our children in submission to such a plan? Could I offer up my daughter to attack the battlements of hell within another individual? Because that’s what Allison did for me. Before God achieved my conversion, these are thoughts and realities He weighed. He knew there would be tension, pain, and desperate circumstances. And there was. I was the godless substance of her parent’s nightmares. I was anathema. Even in the blackest iteration of myself, handling me was but a trifle to the Almighty.

Every young man desires to impress the young woman who has captured his attention. Generally, we do this by trying to be cool, clever, and sometimes macho. In one of our first times alone, I was so macho I urgently excused myself to the next-door bathroom, where I began to weep. It was impossible for my sobbing to be inaudible. Hearing me minutes later, she came around the corner into the bathroom. I expected her to stand back, aghast at what she saw. Instead, she drew near and placed her hand on me. I vividly remember standing at the vanity, doubled over, my athletic lungs drawing in immense breaths as my torso crested and sank with each sob that cycled through. I wanted to furnish Allison with a caption for the broken image before her. Eschewing the hope that any vestige of my reputation would remain after this display, I spluttered to her through tears and snot, “I’m sorry if you’re looking for a macho man…that’s not me.”

Each of these episodes signaled my state of mind. The fissures of my breakdown were growing at a rapid pace. Instability became constant. Powerlessness inundated my every thought. I wanted to reverse the fortunes of my family. Mom and Dad should be together. Feelings toward my family galvanized within me as never before. What were these feelings except incubators of vengeful convictions? And what were my convictions but calls to action? The judge, the lawyers, and even the court-mandated therapist all performed with the same level of deafness. They didn’t hear me. As I was dying and my family was disintegrating, hypothetical plots to assault the lawyers complicit in the civil dissolution of my parents’ marriage were considered. As my voice lost importance in discussions around the grotesque terms of custody and divisions of assets, I chose to check out from reality. Possessing as I did a deep inability to cope with the barbarism confronting me in every quarter of my life.

Descending from civility, chivalry, morality, reason, and control, I waited for the unforthcoming rock bottom. Broadcasting the devilry of my grief became my singular desire. I viewed my predicament as a case of collateral damage. I didn’t deserve the outcome I was enduring. So if I, the happy one, was going to lose everything, the world was going to feel as I did. Pain. Under my daft, self-righteous adjudication, wickedness became a justifiable means to an end. Boy, was I unrecognizable to my former self. I remember looking in the mirror one day and being surprised that my face bore no lines or raggedness. The youth and warmth exuding from the man in the mirror were strange to me. Who was he? Even to this day, what you all see, is not what I feel. That is a long-held secret, and difficult to share, being as it was from the secret treasuries of my off-put sorrow – things I only shared with God.

Three months into our relationship I began physically abusing Allison. When I thought my life could become no worse, a darker chapter unraveled the scant threads that remained of my identity. Allison’s reaction to our circumstances will most likely defy your expectations as it did mine. When your boyfriend abuses you there is no room for faithlessness. Only the strong stanchions of a truly God-fearing, faithful upbringing stand. All superficialness was stripped away between us. I was completely unprepared to come face-to-face with Jesus Christ in Allison. It was terrifying and heartbreaking. Always when the cycle of violence ended she would turn into my comforter. She would look me in the eye without fear or hesitation and tell me that I was forgiven.

It was 2004. I had reached desolation. If existential questions were sounding alarms in my mind before, they were now cacophonous dins playing to a foreboding meter. I wanted to unmake myself, and so did God. In the mire of this interval of my life, I was stressed, depressed, vexed, perplexed, and questioning everything. Where was the power I once had to be a gentleman? I was now an oppressor. To my aunt and grandmother, I had always been their ‘lover boy’. Never lacking in affection when they were around. How was I to reconcile the two versions of myself? I couldn’t. The person I once was, only lived in my memories.

The abuse worsened as I became increasingly unhinged. I declared war on everything, even my journal. A quote from that time reads, “My pen kills these lines with rage.” Arguments were no longer strictly between Allison and me. I sought the unwise counsel of my own family to counter the pressure I felt from Allison and her friends. As boundaries became more ambiguous my belief in justice, morality, and righteousness faltered. One day in the home that would be taken from me in the division of assets, I screamed at God, cursed Him, asking Him why all this had befallen me. Soon I would have my answers.

During one summer night, while Allison’s parents were away, I came over to her house. An argument commenced. My anger peaked and I lost it. I hurt her so badly that I started treating her for shock. She was on the floor screaming for her mother. At that moment, after all the violence, I saw the monster within myself. I posed a real danger to Allison and the entire commonwealth. A St. Louis County Police precinct was 5 minutes up the road from Allison’s house. While she collected herself in her bedroom, I decided to turn myself into the police. Standing at the threshold of the front door she grabbed me and refused to let me turn myself in. Amid my hysterical sobs, I protested against her poised, gentle mercy. I was tired and confounded. At eighteen, that youthful climax of life, I was an empty vessel, adrift, pitching in a sea of irreconcilable differences. I simply wanted to get away from her so I couldn’t hurt her anymore. But I couldn’t turn my back on the unconditional love she extended to me.

On the ultimate night of our relationship, we were to see what was the new Spiderman movie at the West Olive AMC. At dinner, I became jealous over some interaction she had with the waiter. Emotionally unstable with a non-existent self-esteem, I couldn’t interpret common friendliness from disloyalty. I flew into a seething rage on the drive to the theater. Pulling into the parking lot Allison opened the door to my car while it was still moving. As soon as we parked she fled to her brother’s car for safety. The double date was canceled and we went back to her parent’s house. This was July 2004. That night, one of the most damaging thunderstorms wrapped St. Louis in darkness with a record-breaking number of power outages across the region. I am convinced the darkness of that storm was somehow attached to the spiritual power behind the cataclysm taking place between Allison and I. Thankfully, by God’s grace I would not hurt her that night as God surrounded her with a vigilant cast of family, all of whom were now sensing something seriously awry in our relationship.

Allison’s parents grounded her from me because I was dangerous and they wanted to protect her. Between July and August 2004, Allison and I were secretly meeting. Later in August, she would go away to Mizzou. By the time she left, we had worked out all of our issues. During one of those charged, desperate conversations she referred to me as being sick. That was the first time I heard someone speak the truth of my condition out loud. She told me through a deluge of tears, “No matter how long it takes for you to get better, I will wait for you.” I remember hearing her words and feeling them quell my fear for the first time since my crises had kicked off. 

Her parents bought me a Bible for my birthday. After she and all my friends had left for college, I began to read the Bible. Then I began taking bible studies with Pastor Oster. By now God’s secret plot was becoming visible as my conversion was now kinetic. Each night alone in my bedroom, God’s Word would transfigure from words on a page into a powerful elixir, medicating the deepest, terribly scarred recesses of my soul. I was changing. All of the dark edifices were being destroyed by God’s Word. Forgive me, but I lack the words to recreate what it looked like when God went to war for me, stopping the work of Satan. But I will try.

Like Mary, I felt the Almighty overshadow me. Intoxicating, shielding love, tectonic power; plush comfort better than a chenille teddy bear, embraced my wartorn spirit. In the wake of my catastrophe, I knew how to do nothing. Was I a criminal? Was I violent? Was I a lover or a hater? He gently taught me everything. He re-trained me for life, while I still lived. Truly, God is salvation. He taught me how to speak, how to think, how to approve, how to stand. He displaced my loneliness with His Presence forever. When my earthly father slammed me against my bedroom wall, incensed with the very conversion that was saving my life, God taught me how to suffer the violence and endure the pain of his forearm crushing my throat, and what lengths mercy went to. God exposed to me the error of the catholic church. I was previously disabled by anxiety. From heaven God sent His peace as darkness-eradicating wavelengths, to perforate me and personify His Word inside of me. Wonderful counsels were daily being shown to me about my destitute past.

One weekend while visiting Allison at Mizzou, we were studying the quarterly together on her bed. She excused herself to the bathroom and as I sat there gazing at the quarterly and the Bible, I said to myself, “I want to try this religious thing.” Thenceforth, everything changed. The remaining family relations became increasingly distant. In my mind, I could perceive the image of my old man. The man of sin. Not only was I traveling farther away from the man I was, I felt separated from my friends. None of that mattered. To put it in modern parlance, I found the cheat code to life: God.

As a new convert, I appeared as a fiery radical to my family. One night ablaze with the zeal of the Holy Spirit I took a Sharpie and wrote on a white t-shirt, “God runs this show.” After many months of powerless dejection, embittered by an expectation that I was simply going to die young, this newfound germinating seed of faith was giving me traction. Believing as I did for so long that God was inaccessible, my conversion came as the greatest surprise to me. 

You have heard of the vortex of circumstances that conspired to end my life, as I figuratively floundered in my blood at the age of eighteen. Striving against sin so clearly thrusts itself upon some of us, necessitating a primal fight for survival. As it has happened in my life. Yet for others in our number this struggle, while still present, manifests itself in different or quieter ways. Consider the goodness of God in my life: these hands went from doing such diabolical harm to being the only ones in the operating room able to calm my crying daughter. I cannot tell where His grace originates from, but it has stitched me all up. When I ponder the load of love, mercy, and grace He has injected into my life, I become undone.    

All praise be to our iconoclastic God. Peace be with you all and thank you for your attention.

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