Hi my name is Steve Gonzalez and I am signed up and God willingly will going on the July 2014 trip route 2. So I was thinking what better way is there to let people know about me than sharing the testimony that God did in my life! I hope you are very encouraged by it and know that our God is able to reach anyone. Also I want to say that my testimony is not about me being great in anyway it’s all about me failing and coming up short but God in His mercy and grace saving me and redeming me through Christ on the cross. Also one last thing I wrote this for a college paper a year ago so if it looks really proper it’s because of that! (Side note I got a C- on it :/ )
I always thought knowing God was enough, until I found out that he didn’t know me as His own. (Matthew 7:21-23)
The irresistible smell of Sheriff Blaylock’s nachos in the air, a huge rabbit mascot walking up to give me a high five, yes this was a regular day working at Minute Maid Park (A major league baseball stadium in Houston, TX). I was 16 at the time, and lived a carefree life. I was in the 10th grade, worked for the Houston Astros, and had my GMC truck. My life was easy, and I had pretty much everything I wanted. However this particular August day was different. So as usual at work I’m at my seating section on the first base side, standing by, waiting to answer any questions that a fan might have. From behind me I hear “Excuse me sir.” I turn and see my friend (Lets call her R) from high school. “Hey, how are you?” I say. She replies “I am good. Just looking for my seats.” However before I could even help, I see her. Her name was (Lets call her J). She was R’s older sister, and she was beautiful. Barely being able to focus I directed her to the seats, and just like that she was gone.
Later that night as I’m sitting back, and playing video games. I started to receive some text messages from R. She starts to tell me that her older sister saw me and wanted to see if it was cool if she got my number from R. Without hesitation I said “Yes!” Soon J and I began to talk constantly and shortly after we started to date.
By all of today’s standards, I was a proper gentleman. I respected her, I loved her, and I was there for her. However, she wasn’t there for me. At the time I was a virgin by choice. I thought one day when I would have a wife, it would be nice if I waited for her, and I found a woman that had waited for me. J, being the woman I soon found out she was, wanted to have sex, and constantly put pressure on me to have it with her, but I never did. I soon found out that I was glad I didn’t have sex with her. I found out that even though she was with me, it didn’t mean I had her to myself. I would learn about more and more lies every other week, how she was so quick to cheat on me. But for some reason, I kept forgiving her because what I felt and said was true. Little did I know that J was the start of my soon-to-be downfall.
I kept forgiving her but through the constant breaking of my trust things started to happen to me. I started to find out what depression and stress felt like and how it grows into anxiety. Then I got to watch how anxiety grows into anxiety attacks. Yet it did not stop there; I got to bear witness to how anxiety attacks turn into uncontrollable rage attacks of destruction.
I remember one night we had another argument on the phone about how she was messing around again. I felt the wave of anxiety come crashing onto me. The anxiety attack soon followed, with me constantly repeating, “What did I do wrong? What did I do wrong?”. Shortly came the rage attack with me slamming my phone at the ground, then me breaking my knuckles on the ground, the walls, and doors. I couldn’t feel pain when the rage hit; I only could think that I must have done something wrong to cause this. But throughout my whole attack, I would forget to breathe and begin to hyperventilate. I soon blacked out and collapsed. I remember waking up after that collapse and feeling electric shocks all through my body (it was the lack of oxygen in me so my body hurt) . I tried to get up but the only thing that would move was my right arm. I crawled my way with one arm from my room to the restroom and pulled myself into the shower trying to calm myself down as my rage was trying to resurface. I just laid there for the next half hour as I tried to stop my hyperventilating.
I had become something I hated, something that was trying to tear myself apart. That’s when I started to smoke weed. I never did drugs before, I had no need. I didn’t have anything I was trying to get away from, or anything that I wasn’t trying to feel. But I knew people who always smoked, and I needed a way out. Weed had become everything I wanted and needed. It allowed me to forget pain, it allowed me to laugh with happiness, but most of all it allowed me to escape reality. I would never say it gave me peace it only gave me a pause of what was really happening inside of me. It soon came that I wanted more than just weed. So I started to drink. Every weekend my friends and I would be in Cypress going to about three or four parties a night. I would get stupid drunk and high every weekend just so I could feel something that wasn’t real.
J and I dated for about eight months and by that time I had changed. I was 17 now and my average day was spent suppressing most of my true thoughts and feelings, smoking something, and drinking some alcohol before school had even started for that day. I soon had another girlfriend named (let’s call her D) who came with another set of problems. After her I wasn’t a virgin anymore. I had given even more this time to D that I ever gave to J, but still she broke my trust, and I was done with the relationship. Then once more I got another girlfriend named (Lets call her G), and then once more my trust was broken again. I began not to care anymore. Girls were easy and became objects to me. I would hear the same stories from all of them, and see the same end results from all of them, liars, cheaters, and people who were just looking out for themselves.
Before I could ever have the life I have now, I had to fall to the lowest point of my life. I was now 18 years old and my life had become a mixture of drugs, alcohol, girls and evading police. It was the end of my senior year, and I had been talking to this girl who went to my school. She had invited me to come over to her house. I knew what that meant, so I was on my way. I got to her house and soon after we started to get intimate, but after a few moments her stepdad came home and walked in on us. He was a big guy, filled with anger. We started to get dressed as he was yelling. Then he left the room to go get something to kill me with then he came back into the room and he said the words I will always remember, “You know what that’s not my daught that’s not my problem, but if that would have been my daughter you would not be walking out of this house alive.” Then he said it was his wife’s problem. After waiting for her mom to get home and standing in this girl’s room for 30 minutes (because the stepdad would not let me leave) after her mom got there as we both got yelled at, she looked at me and said “Leave.” So I left with my heart beating the fastest and hardest it had ever beat.
However that same day for the first time, my friends Taylor and Jordan had asked me if I wanted to chill at their house that day. They were brothers. So after being traumatized for life, I drove to their house and hung out with them and their family. But it was strange. For some reason their family were treating me really nice, almost like a son, and I couldn’t figure out why. Later that day I went with them to a Christian improv center. I met a whole bunch of their friends and once more I was confused, trying to figure out why they were treating me so nicely. It confused me so much that I kept wanting to hang out with them. Eventually they invited me to a place called White Oak Baptist Church. For me, I wasn’t sure because I grew up in Catholic Church, and my idea of church is a place that is extremely boring and that started too early in the morning. But still they continued to invite me, and eventually I went to their Wednesday night service. I went but I couldn’t understand anything. It wasn’t making sense to me what the youth pastor was talking about. He talked about how God wants a relationship with us, but to me, I couldn’t figure out why God would want to have a relationship with someone who sins and does it on purpose. I was once again confused, so much that it made me want to come back to try to understand.
After going to the Wednesday night service several times the church was having a week long summer camp coming up, and they were inviting me to go. But I wasn’t sure because that week I was supposed to go to the river with my friends and get drunk and smoke. Eventually, they were able to talk me into it by telling me about the camp they were going to having a blob in the lake, and I had always wanted to try that.
The first night of church camp had come, and something I never expected happened. I heard about how Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane fell on his knees and prayed for me as He sweated blood. I couldn’t believe it! My God, my Savior fell on His knees and prayed for me? Then I heard something that no one ever told me before, that GOD LOVES ME!
Also, He wants a relationship with us so much that He sent His son to die on the cross to pay for our sins. I couldn’t believe it this whole time I was looking for something that would last, and that wouldn’t break my trust, and could love more than I could love. It was here, and had been waiting this whole time for me. How I reacted after hearing about Jesus’ love for me looked as if my parents were murdered in front of me with me falling to the ground with trying to holding in yelling and crying in pain, and shame from all the things that i had done. (After I left the service that night it was the first night that God showed me a vision. It was short and faint but I saw kids without anything and starving on the side of the street and God gave me a passion to want to be with them. Also just adding I had never hearding of spiritual gifts before or knew of missionaries or what they were or knew God gave callings.) As the week went on my heart only broke open more and more and I was starting to be able to hear the Word of God and understand it.
It had finally come to the 4th day of camp, the day before we had to leave. Throughout the whole week we were learning about the relationship that God wants with us, and we learned about quiet times. This is a time you have set apart each day to go to Him and just talk. That particular day I was planning on waking up early and going out to this spot in the woods I had found to go out to pray and read my Bible. But when I woke up it was pouring down rain. So I decided to do it later. The day went on and eventually it stopped raining, but I had forgotten about my quiet time. So it was about eight at night and we had just gotten out of evening worship, and we had about an hour before playing some night games. So my friend Ryan and I decided to go play some knock out with some of the other guys. I lost and was out of the game within three seconds, and the same for Ryan. It was weird usually we do a lot better, but this time we were just off. So we shrugged it off, and we were just about to go play soccer with a ball. As soon as I kicked it, I slipped and fell and lost my shoe. Then Ryan went to get the ball and stepped in a hole and tripped and fell. We were looking at each other with the strong feeling that something was really off. Then I realized that I hadn’t had my quiet time. So I asked him if he would like to go grab our Bibles and have a quiet time, and he said yes.
It was about 10 minutes later that we had our Bibles and flashlights and we were off into the woods heading to the spot I found a couple days earlier. So we got there and we prayed. Ryan prayed that God will speak to us through His Word. Then I prayed that God would guide us. By faith I opened my Bible at random and turned to Haggai Chapter 1 (It’s funny how not that many people have read this book before, but this is the book that God use to bring me to Him). It talked about how the people of God were defiant and didn’t want to listen to God. So Ryan and I broke it down and talked about how we need to listen to God and be obedient. The passage went on and said, “You have planted much, but harvested little. You eat, but never have enough. You drink, but never have your fill. You put on clothes, but are not warm. You earn wages, only to put them in a purse with holes in it.”-Haggai 1:6 Then we talked about that saying that we could fill our lives with all these things and pursue all this stuff but all this stuff of this world will come to an end, and that we need God in our lives. It was awesome! Everything we needed to hear to encourage us was in this passage. So just as we are about to be done and go back to camp I looked down and realized that there was one more paragraph in this passage, so I decided to read it really quickly. It talked about how the people of God finally listened to him and were obedient, and it happened on the 24th day of the 6th month. Then I paused in disbelief; it was the exact same day we were reading it. I was blown away. I went so crazy about it that I took off running through the woods leaving Ryan shouting with amazement that God is here! I took off running back to camp, and told everyone about what happened.
After telling the Youth Pastor I felt something pulling me to sit down and be still and quiet. So I sat down in the corner of a room and left my body. I saw myself sitting there, then my view started to expand. I saw the church camp I was at, and then I was able to see a vast amount of trees and water with the church camp getting further away. I saw America and then the world and it just keep on expanding. It keep going until I couldn’t even see Earth any more. Then it stop, and there I saw Jesus holding the universe in His hand, and without His mouth moving I heard I am the God of the universe. In awe I said you are the God of the universe and you are my God.
As of the 24th day of the 6th month in 2010 God brought me to Him. It still hurts sometimes to look back at all the pain and mistakes my past holds but I have come to peace with it knowing that if I wouldn’t have walked that road, I wouldn’t have come to this destination. Yes, we all make mistakes and fall short of the glory of God, but He is always there and will never leave us.
Thank you for reading. Hope you are encouraged! I plan on writing hopefully soon some of the crazy stuff that God alone has done over the past 3 years of Him living through His servant.
