My Testimony started long before I can remember. At the age of two I was in front of the church singing “This little light of mine” to the congregation with my mother. My grandfather lead worship service at the little Baptist church we attended. I do not know a life “before” Christ, something that I am truly thankful for. I do however remember turning away from Him, or at least allowing my actions to.
My parents got divorced when I was eight years old, after which my mother turned to drugs. The state tried to take us away from her on multiple occasions because she was not doing well at all. My brother, my two sisters and I started using drugs and drinking at a very young age. By the time I was out of elementary school I had attended 12 different schools and lived in three different states. My mother had turned to meth and crack, my sisters turned to sex, while my brother and I smoked a lot of marijuana and did our best to imitate the shortcomings of our family.
In high school I became worse, at this point I lived with my father who was a religious man however I wanted nothing to do with God anymore. I did even more drugs and started committing crimes. I was sent to a juvenile detention centre when I was 16 for robbing a vacant house. By the time I was 18, I was incarcerated in county jail for theft.
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Daniel today
I always knew who Jesus was and what He did for me however it wasn’t until I was in jail that I truly decided to come back to Christ. I had lived on my own since I was 15 and at that point did not have much of a support system in my life. So I started praying and reading my Bible while in jail. It was there that the Lord revealed His greater purpose for my life, and reminded me who I was and who I was called to be.
I was incarcerated with a man going to prison for murder. His name was “Mellow” and was honestly one of the scariest guys I had ever met. One day during chapel (a minister would come to the jail) Mellow asked if he could sing a song that He had written. As he banged his fist and pencil onto the desk making his rhythm the room was swarmed with the Holy Spirit, his song was so beautiful and so inspiring that I will never forget it. In tears, I recommitted myself to Christ that day. This man was facing serious time and had done some horrible things, but I saw God move through him with more passion and more conviction then I had ever seen in all my life of being a Christian. I decided that if Mellow could find hope and redemption through Christ, (and also use him so powerfully for His glory) then so could I!
Since that day the Lord has pulled me through so much. I still had some battles with addiction and pain and yet every time, God brought me through it -making me the man that I am today. I no longer use drugs and have not been in trouble since. In every difficult situation my faith has grown more and more. I am blessed with a beautiful family, own a construction company, and am now attending a college in which I get to grow even closer to God. My faith and spiritually are both still growing, and even more so now that I have been attending Liberty. I know that the Lord can make beautiful, amazing things come out of the worst people and worst situations and am so grateful to be able to say that my pursuit of growth will never end. I would be, and was a totally different man without Christ in my life.
