When I was 7 yrs old I knelt down beside my bed with my mother and prayed a prayer of repentance and salvation to Jesus Christ. This was the starting place of my faith in God, but I wasn’t until years later that I truly surrendered my life to him. Over the next few years my parents marriage fell apart eventually ending in their divorce. This moment was devastating to me, I became more distant in relationship to my family and sought to escape the pain and confusion through rock music.
At 13 I decided to become an atheist. Convinced that God was a strict disciplinarian who wanted to remove all of the joy from life, I turned away from Him completely. The next 8 years were a downward spiral into a life of immorality, drugs, and alcohol. At 21 I found myself working as a bartender in New Orleans, my life of carousing was catching up with me. One day I had the realization that without a dramatic change of direction I was going to be dead very soon. I cried out to God to reveal himself to me and deliver me out of darkness I had embraced. The Lord is faithful, he immediately broke into my life and opened a “way of escape” for me.
It was a year later that I fully surrendered my life to Jesus. The Lord had been pursuing me, but part of me was holding out on Him. In the spring of 2004 I enrolled in a “spiritual development” class at my college. Almost immediately I came face to face with the dark ideology and practices of the New Age movement. In that moment I knew that I had the choice to leave everything behind and follow Jesus or accept the New Age. On a Sunday afternoon I surrendered my life to God and never looked back. He has blown my mind with his kindness and mercy and proved his faithfulness so many times since that day. He must increase in my life and I must decrease, He is everything!
