I grew up in a culture of the 60's and 70's where drug usage was becoming very popular, so I gravitated to that at a young age and started using drugs at a very early age and my life just continued on that track. So overall you know a 30 something year period, I served over 24 and a half years in state and federal prisons, and I was committed to living a lifestyle of selling drugs, gangs, I got involved with a worldwide international One Percenter Motorcycle Club which was the Outlaws Motorcycle Club based in Detroit.
I was a member of that club for over 10 years. The Outlaws Motorcycle Club is a "One Percenter Club", and a One Percenter Club is people the group of men that have dedicated their lives, live or die for that motorcycle club. I've been involved in shootings, shootouts with other rival motorcycle clubs in New York, Indiana, in different places. It's a very violent lifestyle. I grew up in a home where violence was encouraged, violence was encouraged to defend ourselves, and it brought us to a point of being very aggressive. So once I went to prison at 17 years old, it was an environment that actually, I kind of fit right in.
It was never a matter of how much time I had to spend in prison, my mindset and my psyche was so distorted and twisted, I looked at life of how long I could stay on the streets. I didn't look at life as how long I'd be in prison. I knew I was going to prison. I wasn't completely naive to that fact. I knew living that lifestyle was either going to wind up in prison or the cemetery, point blank. I didn't have a problem with it I felt very comfortable in prison, and I did well in prison, while I was in the federal system after 9/11 happened in 2001, I really got curious to why somebody would claim to commit these acts of violence, and attribute it to a god.
I started studying the Bible, coinciding, looking at the Bible and looking at the Koran trying to come to an understanding, and through the process of studying the Bible, a friend of mine also told me if he could ever go to the chapel, you ever get a chance to go, go. I had always refused to go to the chapel I never wanted to go to the chapel in prison. I didn't think I was a broken man. I didn't think I needed Jesus is that actually, as a matter of fact, I thought I was a Christian. I believed the Bible was the Word of God. I believed Jesus died for my sins, and I believed Jesus was the son of God. I thought just having an intellectual belief of those three things made me a Christian in spite of how I lived my lifestyle.
Then I heard an announcement on the PA system one day in a prison ministry team out of Ann Arbor Michigan were coming in there. These men sat down and lovingly witnessed to me about the Bible, they brought in the Millennium of Prophecy Series with Pastor Doug Batchelor. I watched that whole series and not only did I watch it once, I watched it multiple times because they had a room there at the prison where I could go in and just listen and watch the tapes in a media room, and I could watch them not just on the Sabbath I could watch them all the time. This was the point in my life where I realized I wasn't a Christian.
I wasn't living a Christian lifestyle, I had a historical belief that Jesus Christ existed, but I didn't have faith in Jesus Christ. And the minute I accepted this, there was the starting point. That was the catalyst of my life and how I see things in life begin to change. I became so excited about what I was learning from the Bible that naturally, I wanted to share with other inmates, and I had a reputation in the prison as being this gangster, this hard guy. I was a respected individual, and it actually stirred guys to, "What? What are you talking about? You?" I was not ashamed of it at all. I went ahead and witnessed that to many people, God, through this seminar, through these series has strengthened my personal walk with Jesus Christ today.