Looking back over the years is sometimes heart-breaking and sometimes encouraging. Which one it is depends on what you need at the present. If you were to be honest you would say you need encouragement. Not too many of us need a dose of heartbreak to level us out. I came from a past of self-serving motivation and a desire for adventure and dangerous excitement. It was the result of being tossed around until I was finally adopted. I never really felt like I fit anywhere. I would watch my friends growing up and be able to see that they looked like their father, mother, brother or sister but I didn’t look like the family that adopted me and it showed. I kept a private personality all to myself that no one could take from me or see. I used other personalities to get things done outside of that. As I came into my late teens and early 20’s I had a real need for wild freedom and took every drug there was to find that fun-place. It led me to many dangerous places including the criminal 1% lifestyle which led me to a mafia lifestyle including gun running and drug dealing, wild partying and dangerous missions. That finally got an FBI number infused into my criminal record. The adrenaline from being on the wild edge and being connected to others on that same edge was almost like the family connection I had been missing my whole life. After many close calls with death and crazy adventurous choices that should have taken me out, I came to realize that I was in fact untouchable. It got so bad that one night after being out on “collections” I came back to a supplier’s house only to see police squads all over the lawn and the street.

I pulled up with a truck load of weapons and drugs to get a duffel bag I had left in his closet with my personal stash, money and various ID’s I needed to get out of town for some much-needed rest. It never occurred to me that I could be arrested because I was “in the zone”. Like a ninja I simply didn’t process any fear. I walked right through the cops high as a kite and into the house where they had my partner handcuffed and asked the cop holding him if there was a problem with me getting my bag since they didn’t have a search warrant on me. He said we can’t stop you and I proceeded to the bedroom to get the bag and saw that they had torn through it, and everything was laid all around it probably so they could get pictures and inventory it. I put it all together, walked out and got in the truck and drove non-stop to Florida, dropped off the truck and hid out. I then took a cruise ship to the islands and relaxed. After a few more years of running and gunning I had become frustrated with a particular situation that was truly dangerous and most likely was going to possibly make me disappear for good. I was very angry at this event that made me decide to leave town after I had just started dating a girl I was very interested in, who seemed to go with the flow of my lifestyle at the time. After leaving town and heading to the mountains out west I got involved in another situation where a group showed up to my house I was partying at and shot one of my friends in the head and tied my other friend and I up with bailing wire. Then proceeded to take everything in the house including my new four-wheel-drive van. The duffel bag I always used with my ID’s was taken and I never saw it again. I was told by the cops that we should have died because this group had not been leaving witnesses alive, so they were convinced we were connected to the group.

“He’s too far out there and there’s no path back.”

You would think this would get my attention, but I still had a way to go. The girl I started dating stayed with me for four years during all of my wild wandering. We got married and then proceeded to make a family, but I still wasn’t ready to settle down. After she had our daughter, she received some news that there was a problem, and she had to take our baby in for surgery on her skull and brain on her first Mother’s day. I had been traveling as usual and a group of women from her parents’ church came and prayed with her and led her to the Lord. I was furious! “How could you give up our lifestyle and do something so stupid?” I said. That was it for me. Another disappointment in my life. You would think I would be used to it by now but this one hurt deep because I loved this woman, and she betrayed my lifestyle. Because I was running wild, I assumed she betrayed me as well. I was selfish and uncaring about anything but me and so I stayed separated from her for the following three years having an affair with another woman on the run. It began to get complicated for me and I longed for the good old days where I could do whatever I wanted, and everyone just got out of my way and let me do it. I finally came to the end of myself and laid it down after contemplating falling on my sword as the best way out for everyone. That’s when God announced himself to me as I asked one question in my head: “Where will I end up?” I always believed in heaven and hell but never processed what it took to get to heaven. I just assumed I would land in hell having been so involved in satanism, so let’s get it over with. As I contemplated all the scenarios, I concluded that the one thing I had not tried was God Himself. I got saved that day and would love to tell you I never looked back but over the years I keep looking back to see what I didn’t know at the time which was my wife had not stopped praying for me the whole three years. When I found that out, it broke me to the core, and I became dead to that old man. I am a new Creation.

So, in my case looking back has always shown me what is possible when every person I knew, and every person my wife knew, said it was impossible for me to get saved and become a Christ-follower. “He’s too far out there and there’s no path back.” I’ll end this note with what I started in the beginning:

“Looking back over the years is sometimes heart-breaking and sometimes encouraging. Choose encouragement and choose a life in Christ which gives you the truest freedom and greatest adventures you’ll ever know. Someone is praying for you and that someone is now me. I went from gangster to gangster for Jesus, and so can you.”

~ Ninja, Last Disciples MC, International President