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SHAWN McDONALD: I was raised by my grandparents. My parents were young and just didn’t want a baby at the time, so I grew up with them. As a young kid I grew up with a lot of questions, you know rightly so, and a lot of just confusion. I didn’t understand why my parents didn’t want me, and as I got older my confusion turned into anger. It kind of started off as just being a punk kid shooting out people’s windows with BB guns and breaking into cars and stealing stuff, and somewhere in there I started smoking pot and drinking, and just getting loaded all the time and pretty quickly became a heavy addict.

I told my grandparents, I was like, “Hey, I want to go to college. Just get me away from here, get me away from my friends, I’ll straighten my life up.” So they sent me off to college and I just fell right back into it, you know. This time I got really involved and really wrapped up into it, and started dealing on the streets and I was partying constantly, and never going to school. I was enrolled but I was never going, and right next door was this guy named Chris, and Chris had moved to college with his two best friends and his whole goal for the year was to lead his two best friends to Christ. And they just showed no interest at all, they just didn’t want to, and I was selling them drugs this whole time. So Chris decided, knowing this, that he was going to befriend me and find out why I was choosing the lifestyle that I was.

So I ended up getting busted again, and this time I got–I mean, there was no way out of it, and ended up with nine felonies. My walls just kind of came tumbling in. I was sitting in my apartment that night, and I had this Bible that I’d had since I was a little kid, and it was the only thing I knew that talked about God. So I went and I opened it up and I stuck my finger in it and I just was kind of like, “God, if you exist, if you’re real then show up, show me who you are,” and I stuck my finger and I just read the first thing, and it was talking about “clean the demons out of my house,” and I just felt like God was speaking to me, he was warning me about my lifestyle and it scared me and I got rid of everything, and I was growing again, and I got rid of everything out of my apartment.

Literally the next day the cops came and showed up at my door with a search warrant and came in, and searched and they couldn’t find anything. I was just seriously kind of, “I don’t what is going on, but there’s something beyond me.” And I went to Chris, because Chris was the only guy that talked about God, and I was like, “Man, I want to know about this guy named Jesus that you’re always talking about.” He took me to a college group and man, it just rocked my life. I got hit, I mean I got hit hard upside the head and I feel like God just kind of came crashing in and changed me, and I started running after him.