My family life was pretty up and down. We didn't get along all that well growing up. I never really was into church that much as a child. I started doing drugs, I started doing a lot of Marijuana, it lead to bigger things. I started selling drugs to compensate for the amount of drugs I was consuming and that ended up not being enough so I ended up supplementing my income by crime actually.
My family had mostly disowned me. The only person I was holding out for me, that was there for me was my mother. My mother was praying just nonstop for me. I was in a stolen car and I was surrounded by probably 15 police cars. They took me down at gun point and they took me to jail. It was at this point that everything became real to me.
I was very tormented in my mind. I was struggling internally with thoughts of all the crimes and all the things that I did to both people I knew and to my family members. I’m thinking about my friends that were killed on the streets, I'm thinking about all the close calls that I have had personally and all these things got me into making decision that I when I got out of jail, I was not going to go back to this lifestyle.
The day I got baptized, I went off to the side and I knelt down. I just prayed to the Lord and I said Lord, I’m going to die today and when I come up out of this water, I just pray that all these things in my head will just go away, all these noise and all these thoughts. When I came up out of that water, it was gone. It was complete silence for the first time in 15 years maybe, God gave me peace. My name is Charles Stilwel and I reclaim my faith.