I was 14 when I came to jail with a life sentence. I am now turning 25 and have done 10 years in lockdown. But God speaks in mysterious ways. Through the hardships and struggles I have endured, moving from one facility to another, growing up in the system — He stayed with me.
There were rough times. I attempted suicide over a dozen times. I became an alcoholic at one point. I even almost died of bradycardia. But in the end, Jesus would find me every time. It could be with a pamphlet, or a verse, or maybe even a sermon I caught by chance on TV. But in the end, He never left me.
At 14, the media made me into a monster. I had committed murder, and my family walked away. But my father was a man of God and he is the only one who remained in the end. I wondered about his quiet strength, and after 10 years he finally revealed it was the Holy Spirit that kept him by my side.
As a child, I went to different churches. My aunt was a nun. I was influenced in all kinds of ways, torn by different denominations.
I got lost at some points, but I journeyed on to try and find the truth. Eventually it came to me: Jesus came to this sinful world as a sinless God to take our flaws and blemishes on Himself so that we may be made clean in the sight of the Lord.
The fact that all you must do to be saved is to believe changed my life. I became sober, started studying the word, went to Bible college. Now I am going to try to open the church when I parole and live for the Word. I will use my testimony to show that when God puts pressure on our souls, He is creating diamonds. In other words, He’s teaching us a lesson to grow and learn from, so that we may be closer to Him.
I have the possibility of parole next year and could use all the prayers I can get for both my parole and for my ministry once I am set free.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Here are our ground rules:
- You must credit Prison Journalism Project. In the byline, we prefer “[Author Name], Prison Journalism Project.” At the top of the text of your story, please include a line that says: “This story was originally published by Prison Journalism Project” and include a link to the article.
- No republishing of photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission. Please contact inquiries@prisonjournalismproject.org.
- No editing the content, including the headline, except to reflect changes in time, location and editorial style. For example, changing, “today” to “last week,” or San Quentin to San Quentin, California. You can also make minor revisions for style or headline size, and you can trim stories for space. You must also retain all original hyperlinks, including links to the Prison Journalism Project newsletters.
- No translation of our stories into another language without specific permission. Please contact inquiries@prisonjournalismproject.org.
- No selling ads against our stories, but you can publish it on a page with ads that you’ve already sold.
- No reselling or syndicating our stories, including on platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. You also can’t republish our work automatically or all at once. Please select them individually.
- No scraping our website or using our stories to populate websites designed to improve search rankings or gain revenue from network-based advertisements.
- Any site our stories appear on must have a prominent and effective way to contact you.
- If we send you a request to remove our story, you must do so immediately.
- If you share republished stories on social media, please tag Prison Journalism Project. We have official accounts on Twitter (@prisonjourn), Facebook (@prisonjournalism), Instagram (@prisonjournalism) and Linked In.
- Let us know when you share the story. Send us a note, so we can keep track.