shareyourstorynow.org

LYRYCYST: Well, my story really revolves around my mom’s story. My mom was 15 years old when she had me. She was already doing drugs. She had three kids by the time she was 18 years old. She ended up marrying my youngest brother’s dad, who was an alcoholic, and he abused her. And I used to watch him beat my mom. Eventually my mom decided she had to leave that relationship and get out of that lifestyle. But she had no support system, so she packed us kids in a car and we left town. And this guy decided, “If I can’t have her, no one will,” basically. So he decided to follow her, and he was trying to kill my mother. So I spent most of my childhood running from this guy that I barely knew, living out of cars, living out of hotel rooms and safe homes, and all this different stuff.

That was my childhood, just kind of skipping around, and then eventually got to high school. I was pretty messed up by then, and I started dabbling with different stuff, you know partying, alcohol, girls, all this different stuff. Meanwhile my mom was kind of tired of being dirt poor, tired of living out of a car, all that stuff. So she did the only thing she thought she could do. At the time, she had an 8th Grade-level education, but she was very pretty. So she became an exotic dancer. What it did to her was just tore her apart. She felt dirty and she felt ashamed, you know the way people treated her and looked at her kind of ruined her vision of herself. So she started doing cocaine and a lot more hard-core drugs, and eventually led her to a $2,000 a week addiction to cocaine.

During this time, I was 18 years old, suicidal, depressed all through my high school years, about to graduate, and no one had ever shared about Jesus with me. No one had shared a single part of the Gospel. I did not know who Jesus was, I did not know what he did, I had no idea what the Church was, nothing. And an old party friend of mine, we used to get in so much trouble together, ended up moving away a year earlier and got saved, and I had no idea. He knew what it was like to be me, he knew my story, and so he took a chance and he called me up one night during the worst part of my life, and invited me to come hang out with him for a week. I went down, hung out with him, just had a lot of fun with him, but I noticed immediate changes and I noticed something was different about my old friend.

That Saturday night he invited me to church for the very first time, and the first time I went to church, the first time I heard the Gospel, I got saved. And it’s crazy, because I had never read the Bible, I had never read any scripture, nothing, and immediately—you know, people always talk about it doesn’t make much sense to them before they’re saved, but immediately after I was saved it was like this world opened up to me, you know what I mean? I could actually understand and comprehend what I was reading, even though I had no prior knowledge of Christianity.

So I mean it impacted my life huge. It changed me so much where I realized that Jesus was a rebel, he was bold, he was always in people’s faces, he was always telling them exactly how it was, but at the same time he was being gentle, he was being loving, you know he was hanging around the people that no one else would take a chance on. The Bible sets such an example of what Jesus did that it caused me to analyze my life and how I treat other people and try to accomplish the same thing.