You can run, but you cant hide.......a cliche phrase we've all heard before, but never held more truth than when my life was changed forever.
I was born into the Christian faith, my great grandmother was the woman of faith in our family and made sure I was brought up in the faith. All this stopped when we moved away when I was 5 years of age and I had forgotten all but the few Sunday School stories that I could retain. Throughout the rest of my childhood my mother was to busy working (to support me and later my little brother alone) to think about Church. When she couldn't find work and we became a welfare family, she somehow decided it was time to start going to Church.This started the beginning of the downward spiral into me turning away from God, but only for a season.
As we started going to church after church, never staying in one place, because of scandals or manipulative leadership. Eventually before I reached my mid teens, we had stopped going altogether. I had developed the opinion that all Christians were hypocrites and I didn't want to be one of them. I had made up my mind that if I was not going to give my all to God, I would give my all to the world, and revel in it. My teenage years were a blur of promiscuity and drug use, "if it felt good go with it", had become my motto. This destructive pattern had snowballed into becoming an adult, trying to find answers in sex, drugs, music, working hard and playing harder. I tried witchcraft, just to find it to be a lazy, unstructured, mess, an unnecessary addition to my already lackadaisical lifestyle. I had become a self proclaimed atheist, and had come to love blasphemy. My best friend was a devout member of the satanic church. The drugs got more hardcore, and addictions as well, from cigarettes to methamphetamines. After awhile I started selling drugs and the company I kept went from bad to worse.
I thought I was a good person, but the road to hell, they say, is paved with good intentions. The turning point in my life came about in 2008. I had always helped my little brother, trying to get him on his feet, help him find a job and a place to stay, anything I could do to help. I had set him up in an apartment next to mine and a job where I was at. He was following in the same self destructive lifestyle that I had went down at his age. My fiance and I had left the house to do laundry, and when we returned my brother was leaving at the same time leaving a trail of empty baggies behind him. Not giving it a second thought, I had found my front door open with scattered empty baggies all over. When I discovered that $2,000 worth of drugs and my laptop was stolen, I was enraged and knew who to look for. In an unquenchable rage, I found and brutally beat my brother, permanently injuring his back and cracking his skull. I almost killed him.
This led to 1st degree, B felony assault charges and me in jail unaware of the consequences. I was only in jail for a couple of weeks and had no idea that the state had a case against me for an eight year prison sentence. I would heckle the people who would come to minister to us, not giving the repercussions of my crime a second thought, or thankful that I had no drugs to get caught with.
One day I was in an isolation cell, had been there for a couple of days, and the only thing in the cell was a Bible. I could vaguely remember my way around the book, but read it for the sake of entertainment, skipping to and fro. That very day, I was allowed to go the pod I was in to take a shower and stay for "church". It was no time before I started mocking the man who came to speak to us, and before I knew it, I was hit with a strong dose of conviction the likes I had never experienced. God was trying to get my attention, he got it. I was hit so strong with this feeling of conviction that I was doubled over. I tried to logically explain it, "bad gas from bad jail food" I thought to myself. I heard the still, small voice in the back of my head with one word......PRAY.
I tried to laugh it off, "maybe I had been in isolation too long" I thought to myself, just then it hit me again. It felt like someone had gut-checked me, I did not realize that this was a heart-check, and I was doubled over again with the single overwhelming thought....PRAY! Everything else around me just faded away, I had always said I can't put my faith in something I couldn't feel or touch. I was feeling Him now, no doubt.
Just as the man was about to leave, I caught up with him and said "I don't know about once saved always saved, but I KNOW I need to pray. At that moment I swallowed my pride, bowed my head, and repented. I didn't know what else to do. As soon as I had prayed, I felt light as air and immediately told my fiance(my wife now) to pray, in the name of Jesus Christ , or she might never see me again. She thought I had lost my mind, it was the last thing she ever expected to hear from me.
The next five months became a test of my new found faith as well as a way for God to hammer out all the rough spots to make me ready for my new life. I was cut off from communicating with my fiance, so I had no idea what was going on outside, I had to let God take control of EVERYTHING. Confrontation is unavoidable in a jailhouse, so when anger and confrontation arose, I went to my bunk and read the Word and prayed. God has now become my peace. I walked and talked like the new creation He had made me. My lawyer had a very strong drinking problem and was never prepared when each court date came, my faith had to be strong in God and not man.
When I could talk to my fiance again she had come to repentance, had been baptized, and received the gift of the Holy Ghost, along with her mother and brother. We then decided to get married, yes I got married in an orange jumpsuit. After five long months, I was ready to face the judge and bless God no matter what the outcome.
The judge looked at me and said "Mr. Brown, I don't know why I'm doing this"....I knew why. He then proceeded to let me go with probation.
I went from the jailhouse to the nearest Chinese restaurant to the baptismal. I may have turned my back on God, but He never turned His back on me, in fact He came and got me. Sometimes we have to be humbled to our faces before we stop ignoring His voice. I am very sure that if God can change me, anyone can be changed.
