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I remember that day. I’d been homeless for two years and weighed 90 pounds. My wife, Brenda, and my three kids were gone. As a 45-year-old alcoholic, I was the number one supplier of marijuana and the number one meth cook in Van Zandt County. But that day, I had no home and was walking down Interstate 20 on my way to another dope house.
Then the good Lord spoke to me, and I’ll never forget it. He just told me there was a better way of living than this. I argued with Him all the way to the dope house. When I got there, there was nobody there, so I felt like God was telling me to go home. I said, “I ain’t got no home.” I feel like He was still telling me to go home.
That came out of nowhere. In those days, I thought John 3:16 was a John Deere tractor. Growing up, there was no church or God mentioned in our family. There was a lot of love, though. My dad was a mechanic, and we had go-karts and all kinds of things to play with as kids. He would teach me sports like boxing. But I watched him die of cancer when I was 18, and I became homeless after that for about two years. My mom sold the house and just left me. So I was on the street and an alcoholic by the time I was 21. That’s where that lifestyle started.
So I went and knocked on Brenda’s door. Brenda was a Christian and the strong foundation who helped me get to where I’m supposed to be. She didn’t have to let me back in, but she did. I really think God gave me a chance that day—to either listen to Him and go His way or go another way. I chose to listen to a voice I’ve never heard in my life.
When I came in, she said, “Give me your phone.”
“I ain’t going to give you my phone,” I said.
“Then there’s the door,” she said. So I gave her my phone.
Then she said, “You’re going to go to church.”
“I’m not going to church.”
“Then there’s the door.”
“What time the doors open?” I said.
I was tired of that lifestyle, and my wife stood firm. So I started going to Crossroads Church, and Brother Mark [John Mark Robinson, Crossroads senior pastor] actually took two years of his life [to invest in me]. He took me and my son to play disc golf every Sunday afternoon after church. I ended up accepting Christ playing disc golf. So now in my ministry, I have a disc golf course at the church, and that’s what I do. I share the gospel while I play disc golf.
“I still run into people sometimes at church who remember me as I was. And after 17 years, they still know me in the prisons. They can’t believe where I’m at. I tell them, ‘Well, it can happen to you, too. You can’t be too lost to be found.’”
That was 17 years ago. I was six months clean when they put me in charge of running a Celebrate Recovery program there at the church. That same program has been going for 17 years now. For the last seven years, I’ve been the full-time outreach pastor at the church, running the program and other ministries of the church.
I also get to go into the courtrooms here—I’ve known judges all my life. They let me come in and share a testimony during court. I really got plugged into the various services for addicts, the probation office, and the jailhouses. God has probably saved over a hundred people through that program who have accepted Christ and been baptized.
We do a food distribution on the first of every month. I’m in charge of that, and I get to go out and pray with the people who come. About 100 cars come through that, so I go out and share the gospel with them on the weekend.
God has blessed me so much. I have my family back. I have a great church family that supports me, and I’ve come through surgeries and health scares, but He is faithful. My testimony is that if God can do it for me, He can do it for you. I’m nobody special. I was just a kid growing up in the countryside who knew nothing of God or the church or the Bible. I fell into the trenches, but somehow, God saw in the future that He was going to do something with me that nobody else saw. And when I look back at it, He’s been with me the whole time.
I still run into people sometimes at church who remember me as I was. And after 17 years, they still know me in the prisons. They can’t believe where I’m at. I tell them, “Well, it can happen to you, too. You can’t be too lost to be found.”
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