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Editor’s note: Lloyd Parnell, seen above in an older photo with his son, Chris, is a deacon and member of Cross City Church in Euless. He recently shared part of his testimony with the Texan’s Gary Ledbetter.
My son Christopher was phenomenal. I mean, everything you would want from a son. He was a basketball player. I thought he was going to get a scholarship. Football, track—Chris did it all. Great looking kid. He was popular, had good grades, and went to church. He would take the books of the Bible and memorize them all the way through Revelation. And then he learned to do it backwards.
As he moved on, I thought, “Man, this guy’s going to be phenomenal. He’s going to be a lawyer.” He wanted to be an athletic trainer. But his last year in high school, something happened to him and he was different. He would be late to class, wouldn’t do his homework right, let his car go down.
I said, “Hey, Chris, what’s going on?” But he never would say much. He wanted to go to Dallas Baptist University, so I put him through the first semester. He was good at soccer and traveled with the team playing, but he failed. I said, “That’s not like you. Man, that’s thousands we wasted.”
He decided to move to Austin after this first semester at DBU. At this point he did everything he did not do while he was growing up. He became a bartender down on Sixth Street. I mean, that’s a horrible place down there. And I’ve been there and seen it. There’s shootings, there’s drugs. Things went downhill from there so that 10 years later he’s on the street, using alcohol and drugs, and had developed all kinds of mental issues. As it turned out, he would come back and we took him in for a while—big mistake. After fixing sheet rock for a couple of months after he would put holes in the walls when he’d have a fit or something, I said, “Chris, we love you, but you got to go, man.”
He was on the street again—Houston, Austin, Fort Worth. He slept in the park and stole stuff to get by. We’d get him in a rehab center and he’d walk out. The last time he was in Austin he fell asleep on the state Capitol steps, probably drunk, and it was summer. The metal edge of the steps gave him third-degree burns on his legs and back so that he had to have surgery to save his life. We brought him home again for recovery, but he began doing the same old stuff and I had to send him out again. He was on the street in Fort Worth until he earned enough money to move to California. We never saw him again.
Chris was living on the beach out there for a year and a half. A minister worked with him a little bit, but we finally got a call from some city official asking us if we had a son named Chris. I said I did. He was dead. It was Pasadena, I think. We had to go through getting him transported back here. We had this funeral at Cross City Church [in Euless], where I serve as a deacon.
Vicky and I went through such emotional issues with this, but we had the church come around and see us through. We still have people praying for us. I would say what I learned from all that’s happened is to depend on the Lord. He’s the one that gets you through all this stuff.
"Vicky and I went through such emotional issues with this, but we had the church come around and see us through."
But to back up to 2015: A pastor, Ben Hayes, had taken Chris in while he was in Houston. For a while, Chris had a job and we were encouraged, but it didn’t work out. But Pastor Hayes would invite him over to his home to watch football, and he talked with him about his relationship with Christ. The pastor sent us a picture of Chris getting baptized. That photo is something that’s given us hope and encouragement since Chris died back in 2020.
I thought I had professed Christ when I was a teenager. I grew up in church and was ordained as a deacon, but I was not actually saved. A few years later, as I was coming back from East Texas, I realized I wasn’t saved and I was praying, “Lord, I want you to change me. I’m a church member, haven’t missed a Sunday through five years in junior high and high school. I still have my Sunday school pin [for perfect attendance], but I’m miserable.” Inside, I said, “I’ve got to get this Jesus thing all settled up.”
In a pickup truck, I invited Christ in my life and completely changed. I was about 25 and went back, told the church, and the pastor said, “What? You just accepted Christ?”
When I accepted Christ, I just started sharing the gospel. I was a counselor at a Billy Graham event over at the old Cowboys stadium. I mean, I just did all kinds of things as God opened doors. But in December of 2020, after Christopher died in April, I began a ministry of telling our story everywhere that I have an opportunity. There’s two stories that I share: his and mine. That could be at the grocery store, the gas station, it could be on vacation or in church.
Since December 2020, I’ve shared the gospel 405 times to 728 people. About 290 of them have made professions of faith. I just keep that as an encouragement to me.
