I Woke Up in a BODY BAG After Being Shot in the Face 😳 (Jesus Testimony)

[Music] Drew it's an honor to be here with you man and glad to be here truly a truly a blessing to to have such an opportunity to to sit with you guys as well not sure if people can see but on your cheek mhm there's uh this little brown thing that looks like for people that don't know will look like just a mole or maybe just a little bit of a a sun spot right but you were actually shot in the face that's correct yes sir with a 45 caliber handgun uh from about 6 and

1/2 ft during a home invasion on the northwest side of San Antonio yes sir you shouldn't be here nope according to doctors I I should be dead for sure um that's what the hospital said of course DOA what wasn't going to make it and when my parents were called This is the part of my testimony many people know when my parents were called to come and take a look at my body since my face was pretty messed up um I ended up coming back to life U while inside the the body bag itself and so

um was nursed actually back to health on the identification table and moved to ICU um but yeah um from the moment the bullet wound took place that it was death was on the table and God saw fit to to wake me back up even when death was the the diagnosis man and you're a faithful follower of Jesus Christ yes sir why is it important for you to testify for you to share your testimony since encountering Jesus in such a special way and having the testimony that I have I've learned over time that the less about

me um the more opport opportunity there is for God to be glorified and so I know that the word of God Says by the blood of the lamb and the word of their testimony and so I enjoy and I bless the Lord for the testimony that he's given me because it gives me opportunities like this to tell people that would otherwise be closed off to the church or Christianity or what Jesus has done for us on the cross um an opportunity to share not just my story but what Jesus has done for them as well

man let's from wherever you want to start uh Drew could you share with us what Jesus has done in your life and just tell us your your story of what has happened absolutely I think for me now that I look back on my life the enemy has always been after me so I start from day one uh so I was born in Busan South Korea I was abandoned at Birth at a fire station there in Busan and was put into an orphanage um I was adopted by an American military family and was moved Stateside at

age one that was the youngest age I could be uh escorted here from the adoption agency and so both my parents were US Air Force which is how I came across the last name Anderson instead of something more Korean but uh as you can imagine growing up in a American military family with white parents as a Korean child identity is something that I struggled with extremely bad as a military brat you move multiple times a year sometimes and so as a young child one thing that was important to me was friendship and relationship and I

just never had a true opportunity to develop friendships because I was meeting kids getting close to them and then having to move and so I came to a point in my life where I decided that the pain of being alone was a lesser struggle than the pain of making friendships and having to turn away from them or walk away from him so around like age nine or 10 I just decided I'm not going to make friends I'm going to be the kid that kind of just exists until my time is up there and move on

to the next location so I didn't really understand why I didn't look like my parents I would go to grocery stores and the cashier would look at me and say young man will be right with you and I didn't understand the concept of it I was like my you know my parents are right here you know and kids would relentlessly you know tease me or make fun of me because I look so different once they found out I was adopted you know that became the the subject matter of of their bullying or whatever it may

be so I was young I was identity struggle definitely I didn't know hey is why do I look different why didn't my parents want me why don't I know who my birth mother and father is still to this day I I have never met them I don't know what they look like as I kind of progressed through that my mom and dad came to Texas and they retired uh from the Air Force here and they sat my brother and I down and they said this is going to be the last move we make and you

know I got excited I was like man I get to make you know permanent friends finally um I get to you know grow relationships with people and I would love to tell you that the first group of friends that I made were the best choices but they they just weren't you know I I was vulnerable I was excited and I was looking for relationship and the group of friends that I found were the ones that took advantage of that vulnerability you know I I ended up with the wrong group you know I ended up in

trying to change the way I spoke change the way I cut my hair change the way the way I dressed the way I treated my parents changed radically you know growing up in a military household you're taught to you know maybe not even the Commandment now that I know it but you're taught man you you honor your parents you do your chores you excel in school and so everything about my Persona everything about my character changed uh radically I got into crime I got into cigarettes and other addiction I got into to lust and pornography

I got into anger and violence and I really started to lash out uh even to the point where my parents still had my best intention but I would say things to them like you know I wish you wouldn't have adopted me I wish I had you know different adopted parents where my mentality was if you don't give me what I want now that I finally have what I want which is identity with the wrong crowd then I'm going to lash out at you and I'm going to try to hurt you um in that way and

so my young into high school that's kind of where I stayed uh rebellious disrespectful crime addiction name it and I've probably done it I tell people a lot of times the things that I haven't done is is a very small list in comparison to things I have uh participated in and so I struggled I thought that I had found identity but what I had really found was uh a solution to avoid that I had that that I didn't truly know what the solution was yet you know you fast forward a little bit of time you

know I get in in trouble with the law I spent some time in jail and I think that's something worth glorifying you know I think that my friends are celebrating you know the the cheap hashtags or it's like free Drew and you feel almost like okay they care about you they love you they miss you and that fed the the ego of that uh Persona of mine I had great parents I had a great upbringing and I just abandoned all of that to belong to something because I I truly didn't grasp what it meant to

belong to something and so um I end up getting run over by a vehicle um doing something kind for somebody I was taking gas to a friend uh somebody lost control of their Jeep Grand Cherokee and hit me um I land I ended up on their Hood actually and I was like at that point I was like Oh They'll stop uh but come to find out this individual was probably Under the Influence or they were scared but all I felt was the the SUV moved back onto the road and I slid off the front of

that and under the vehicle and so to this day while I sit here in front of the camera I have I have a broken collar bone that fused but it's still broken I have a metal um tibia fibia I have screws and plates and a metal flexor for my foot um so I have screws and bolts through in my legs at that time I went to Sami or bamy which is Brook Army Medical Center on Fort Sam here in San Antonio I was hell of act there and they told me I I was never going

to walk again and as an athlete man that messed me up I was like no way I'm not you know going to be able to walk how old were you at that time I was let's see it was a year before I was shot so 20 2010 so that's 14 years ago I was probably 23 and a half at that point the funny thing is well not funny the now that I look back the God thing about it was I had enlisted in the Army and I Was preparing to be sent to MPS February 5th

and January 30th is when I was run over um and since I was run over then of course I was unable to leave for maps again they told me not going to walk again they taught me how to use a bed slide a toilet seat a shower seat and one morning about probably like I'd say 80 90 days into my stay at Health South riosa here in San Antonio I woke up one morning and I went to the restroom and the nurses run in and they asked me a question Drew what are you doing I

was I was pretty honest I said using the bathroom but the nurse looked back at me and she said yeah but but you're walking and so I kind of looked down and I was like oh crap you know I am walking but I wasn't saved at the time so you would you know if you're saved at that point you give glory to God you're you're shouting the hallelujah praise but in that moment since I still wasn't saved I was like I'm the next you know super hero like regeneration man whatever it may be but I

was in my own understanding I was I was responsible for the healing I was responsible for the recovery it was my hard work that led to that and so walked out of the hospital even being a a product of God's grace in that moment and walked right back to the things that I was attached to and a part of a year goes by I get myself a decent job um and they actually pay for my housing which was a win as a young adult you're like man I don't got to pay rent I'm getting a

nice paycheck this is a good deal and one night I I hear some noise and like what let me go see what this noise is and I see a person in my living room which is weird because I have no roommates and so I'm like man this this is a pretty odd situation I see that he's invaded my house and so me and my pride I go after the one guy I push him out of the way and what I don't see is that there were two other people behind my couch on the ground and

one of them stood up and he actually had the gun in his hand and that's the last noise that I remember in that moment was the sound of the gun going off and me trying to move out of the way of course as we started the the share here I I didn't do a good job at dodging it it definitely hit me it entered through my right cheek and ended up bouncing around in my head and exiting out behind my right ear um I was pronounced dead and taken to a hospital to be identified because

my face was atro like badly mangled and as I said before or ended up waking up in the body bag they've done plastic surgery on my face um my right ear um I am 100% deaf in it uh the reason why it looks the way it does is plastic surgeons created me like an artificial ear canal so I could at least look as if the ear was functional uh they took stomach tissue wish they would have took more but they took stomach tissue to to reform my face and create an artificial ear that's why I

have uh herbs pausy still to this day diagnosed on the right side of my face where everything kind of droops and my eyebrow doesn't move up and down and my lip doesn't pucker well on that side but you know ultimately people ask me well that you know they say well man that that sucks true but I say man but I could have been dead and so I'll I'll trade an ear and uh a face that droops on one side for my life um the cool part about the hospital stay for me which is really uh

the moment where God started to work in my life was there was a nurse um and I've been asked so many times her name and and man I I just I don't remember it but while I was moved to the ICU room um there was a nurse um a sweet African-American lady who read my chart and she walked in and I I remember her voice so clearly she said baby God has a plan for you and I I didn't want to hear that and I would try to respond but since the bullet had destroyed my

jaw hinge they had my mouth wired shut and so I couldn't even tell her to leave if I wanted to so it was almost like God was saying no you're going to you're going to listen you're going to hear this lady out now the amazing part about this is she spent every day whether she worked whether she was on my floor or whether she was my assigned nurse spending time with me and she would either read the Bible or she would just speak into my life eventually I just submitted to it because there was no

tantrum I could throw or no noise loud enough to get her to uncommit from doing so and the day that I was being discharged you know of course we had grown some sort of of tangible relationship and she said do me one favor um now that you're walking out of here and you know the the least I could do was honor a request of hers because she had invested so much of her time and she said I want you to go to church and I want you to just go to a service and give God

a try and so initially I made up my mind I'll go check that box I'll go check it and that way I honor the time that you've spent so I wandered myself into a non-denominational church one Sunday morning I did what I feel most firsttime guests do is they skittishly walk in they sit in the back row which is where I was now Drew before before you move to that part you're coming out of the hospital after getting shot in the face you woke up in a body bag yes sir you know what what are

the doctors and the people around you saying or what are you hearing because to you you you probably don't remember much from from what happened that's right but from the outside looking in it probably looked crazy that you were walking out so I just just just to want to take some time here of what what were you hearing around you the doctors your family like what was happening through that process well while I was in the hospital bed there was always a San Antonio police officer outside my my room because they were afraid that if

word had gotten out that I had survived and this was some sort of a gang related activity and they found out that I was still alive that someone would try to you know come and finish the job potentially doctors were absolutely astonished um I had a couple of neurosurgeons and a couple of ENT um doctors come in Specialists and say we're we're a little tentative to do certain procedures because we've only done these procedures on people who are dead and so they were having to Pivot and do a lot of different things procedurally because I

was alive while they were having to do it and so one of those procedures was that the the capsulation around my brain had been severed by the bullet and so CSF fluid or cerebral spinal fluid was leaking out of my ear and so they had to re encapsulate that portion of my brain by doing some procedure because they couldn't Stitch the brain up and so in order to keep my CSF fluid flowing the right way they had to do some new trial procedure that ended up praise God to work but they were telling me along

the way this is not something we're used to doing and even when we look at you it's an amazing story because we just haven't had to do these things outside of a a cold environment which is what they called like somebody who was already passed like um as far as their training had gone so I know for sure that uh my situation definitely were was challenging to the neurosurgeons the neurology department and the ENT specialists that were working with me through that process how long were you uh how long was that process of being in

the hospital and and the healing uh well the process from getting into the hospital and coming out of the hospital how long was that it was about 3 months for me um quick yeah it was because they had to do several brain surgeries they also had to install a drain into my head to uh drain fluid that was collecting in a pocket that had been caused by the bullet of course like I said they had to do the the facial plastic surgery the ear canal plastic surgery and then I had to to sit there and

kind of be monitored at a high level because again a lot of the procedures they were trying to do they had never done before so I had a CSF leak and you know my ear canal since it's artificial it doesn't lead all the way to the inside of my head it literally stops about maybe a quarter of my pinky in um and so because there was no way for it to drain out of my ear any longer they started to test whether or not it was going to start to drain out of maybe my eye

my nose or any other opening and so there was a lot of procedures they had to follow up on regularly um I thank the Lord you know for the The Specialist Team that's around me I've had them for the entirety of the journey even to this day um those are the people that I still go to for my follow-ups and and scans that I do and so I mean they're they're still to this day shocked at a lot of the things that that I've overcome now of course all credit goes to the King of Kings

for what I've overcome but they're astonished um and that was pretty much the testimony of my time in the hospital and uh and I have to ask this because I'm not going to be okay if I don't ask this but waking up in a body bag and very quick if you could just like what does that really like what does that mean does that mean that your heartbeat came back or was it that you literally like woke up like what did when they say you woke up in the body bag so my mom and my

dad explained the situation like I was they have a a room where I was going to be identified they had my ID on me but my face was very badly mangled and so they called my parents of course to to ID me and so they were getting ready to ask for the identification to take place uh it seems very law and ordish but this is this is what my mom and dad explain to me um they try not to talk about it cuz they get very emotional when they do but they expected to see their

son dead and before that curtain got moved back for them to identify me I actually came back up in the in the body bag I went into what's called breakthrough seizures I had 31 of them according to Specialists consecutively and that recaus my brain to activate and my heartbeat to come back and so so you actually physically lifted up I was in the bag and they were getting ready to identif ID ify me and then I came back to life and so they're like why is this bag moving and I was alive again and so

um they had to run the equipment into the identification room to stabilize me and then moved me to ICU from that point so my dad says you know when he thinks on it it still haunts him to this day that he was waiting on the other side of you know a wall preparing to look at his son dead and instead he he hears people start freaking out like panicking like not knowing what the heck is happening and now then telling them your your son just your son just came back and now him having to go

through the opposite shock of instead of looking upon your child being dead and ready to bury him now struggling to live on that same identification table but alive nonetheless so he tells me that he went from radical grief to insane Joy but he didn't know how to posture his feeling or his reaction and so he just took some time to kind of sort things out mentally and my mom shares the same thing my mom is and I blessed the Lord for my mom but my mom said she was just an emotional wreck cuz she was

like man I I can't do this to wow you know like what is happening and my mom and dad are actually the ones that cleaned out my apartment um they were there when the blood was being cleaned off like walls and all like so they they have a lot of pictures man and they had the opportunity to to get some pictures of me while I was laying there and the once I was in the ICU with the hole in my actual cheek and you know it's it's definitely something that even to this day a decade

and almost a half later that still strikes a pretty emotional cord with with my parents so the the nurse God puts this nurse in your in your room that basically starts to plant seeds yeah you know you get out of the hospital you honor her request of going to church now before you continue where you left off did you know anything about Jesus what was your even did you have any preconceptions of who Jesus was before going into that church absolutely so my mom raised me Catholic and so I went through all the I think

they call them sacraments I went through baptism First Communion I believe the last one's called confirmation I went through those things not happily I I'll tell you that it wasn't something that I looked forward to doing on Sunday was go to you know Catholic church and go through this process but that was pretty much the end of my knowledge of the Lord I didn't read the Bible I said a prayer um dising genuinely before I ate you know like I said a prayer before I went to sleep that my mom taught me that was like

a nursery rhyme almost and that was really it the lifestyle that I lived was I knew that there was a God but I didn't care about whether or not or what he thought about the life that I was living or that he had any control over any aspects of those things so my belief or my faith was rooted in only my understanding of what my mom was forcing me to be a part of until that moment so tell us about yeah let's keep going from where you left off so you go into this church and

what is it that you see what happens well it freaks me out because you know up until this point the only thing I've ever seen in church was robes and you know communion walking up to take you know communion and singing hymns I walk into this building and there's strobe lights and this huge screen and fog machines there's like 15 people on the on the stage there's whole drum kids guitar players and I was like overwhelmed and I didn't know the songs you know so I just kind of was standing in the back I was

ready again like I said I'm going to check the box I'm going to honor the nurse's uh request and I'm going to dip and I'm I'm not going to ever come back to this and so worship now that I know what that was worship part of the service and I see an invitation come where people come up to the Altar and they start worshiping and so I was a little tentative about that but they did an altar call halfway through the worship section and for whatever the reason was I ventured myself up there almost thinking

maybe this is part of the service maybe this is what you're supposed to do so I kind of ventured up there I still stood kind of in the as far back as I could at the altar and I just kind of stood there this part's a little funny I don't mean to make light of it but then I see this guy come off the stage and he starts touching people on their heads and then people are falling over and I'm like you know I'm like what what is happening and then there's there's ladies running behind

them covering them with sheets and I'm like yo like maybe I shouldn't have come up here and so he reaches for my head and I Matrix him I'm like no like there's no way I'm letting you touch my head and he looks at me and I remember so clearly he said Son God has a plan for you and I had only heard that one other time and that was out of the nurse's the nurse's mouth uh when she had poured into my life and so it caught my attention and he ended up praying for me

in that moment I didn't truly understand what what praying for somebody was and he was just speaking life and telling me that he had known that that he saw that I had been through this and been through that and been through much and the title of the sermon that day was I didn't know at that moment but it was going to be a second chance and what I found myself doing at the altar that day after I was prayed for I didn't know the lyrics of the song but man I got literally wrecked at the

altar that day and I didn't even understand it I went from being very nervous at the altar and kind of in Uncharted Territory to weeping and I couldn't explain why I was weeping I couldn't stop weeping but I will tell you this that that day there was no more alcohol for me there was no more vaping for me no more cigarettes for me no more pornography no more Lust For Me the things that I struggled with I radically had no appetite for after that moment and that moment caused me to literally leap dive into head

first into whatever I had encountered and searching that out and that's really where my relationship with the Lord started and the narrow path for me began can you expand a little bit on that on that process for some people it's a it's a radical moment but there's always usually a process what did that process look like for you so for me I'm I'm just going to be as transparent as I can um a lot of people found out about my testimony pretty quickly and because of my testimony I was put in positions that I wasn't

ready for um but the ideal was because of his testimony and because people know of it in this city people will come to find out or talk to the guy with the testimony so we should give him some sort of public position or be put him in the public eye so my process for me when I look back on it was terrifying because I had literally just come to the Lord I had had my first encounter with with the Holy Spirit I felt like I was free for the first time in my life and I

was being asked to meet with people and counsel people from positions and titles that I didn't even understand the meaning to and so to use it as as plain and simply as possible the body um or people in the body of Christ were attempting to utilize my testimony as a way to grow their own Ministries and I remember being so now I know the word is convicted but I would be sitting in these rooms telling people to pray for things that I didn't even understand how to instruct them to do so so I was giving

them very generic info and I realized in that moment man I I really got to step away from all this and get back to what my mother and father taught me coming up which was man I need to study who this Jesus is I need need to know his word properly and so I devoted time away from all public Ministry away from church attendance to get to know the Jesus that had that had uh rescued me before I came back to you know the four- wall system and being a part of any sort of weirdness

like that that way at least I was prepared to Steward what God had done for me in the right way how long had it been when you receive that that realization that man I need to step away how long had it been from the moment that you gave your life to Jesus to that moment less than half a year and so it was I walked into the church radically encountered the Lord turned from everything and then God what I was told was well God wants to use you in in this way and I know that

to be true now but it was much too early I was not I was process itself the process that you that you mentioned I felt like I still was a kindergartener in it all but because of my testimony I found myself just kind of sharing that but not knowing how to transition that to telling them about a good God or about what Jesus had done or those other things like that so process for me went from coming back to life people finding out about it and being thrusted into position that I had probably no business

being in and then realizing through my own Integrity like this is wrong and having to separate myself from from that and you know I won't I won't dive too much into the response to that but me wanting to become stronger in my faith before um operating in such things I mean it wasn't always received well yeah you know and Drew at this time you're How old uh that's the next year so 24 20 yeah 24 Yeah it's you're I mean you're a baby basically yeah just in general in life um you lived many years mhm

in the world doing what you wanted to do drugs all of these different things yes can you talk to me and and sometimes it can be hard to explain and maybe it's just a few words but man what was God doing in your heart cuz there's one thing of you can say all of these things just started to go away and and God is the only one that can really do that so I believe it but what was he doing man behind closed doors in your life what was God doing that made him that made

God real to you once I encountered the Lord the way I did God started to really activate self-reflection and I started to find God in in everything that I had been through so abandoned at Birth like struggled with identity and I started to see the relation between what he had done for me and what his word said in comparison to what I had been through in my life and the more examples that I were was able to tie to the word the more examples I was able to tie to his love for me the more

he became he became realer and realer more tangible and more tangible to me every every moment because I was like I struggled my whole life to even explain all the things that I felt I had to go through for no reason and then end up at a point where I'm like man there was a reason and it was so that God could be glorified in my life and having that understanding shift where it was no longer you know what I saw and what I had been through but now who had paid the price and why

I had to go through it that changed my mind and my mentality radically when it came to all the things that I counted as pain and struggle and unnecessary um being unloved being unwanted not knowing who I was to knowing that it wasn't that I was absent identity it was that I didn't know where to look and so as the more that I grew my personal relationship with him the Greater Works he did not just in my heart but in my mentality when it came to thinking about and and and understanding the things that I

had gone through in my life up to that point can you can you give us some specifics of how God re made you come into realization of who you are like your identity because you talked about it being an orphan and and experiencing even those encounters even at school of rejection and all of these things or people making fun of you or being at the counter at the grocery store and you're seeing you're hearing these comments that are totally cat catching you off guard that deal all everything deals with identity how how did Jesus Christ

um help you in that man I remember the first time I ever read through the book of Romans and I looked at it and it said you know what can what can separate you from the love of the Lord and I remember asking myself the question audibly I was like what is what is the love of the Lord and of course everyone goes to John 316 but to me John 3:16 means so much more than you know just the the the first memory verse that you would probably attest to memory uh and so God so

loved the world that He Sent His only begotten son for me is something I didn't understand at that time to a point where it caused me to reflect so much on it I was like what I do that and the answer was was no and so for to know that there was somebody who cared enough about me somebody who didn't feel like a son who didn't feel like he was wanted who had parents that abandoned him without ever trying to reach back out not ever getting the answers or the closure that you know as a

young person um that I wanted you know and then to realize that this whole time well I thought I was unwanted there was somebody willing to pay such a high price just to have fellowship with me blew me away and so for a lot of people I thought that that verse to them was reminding them of the price paid for me that helped me find identity and who I truly was like while he sent his son so I could be engrafted into his family tree it wrecked me it messed me up it changed my entire

perception of what um love truly meant and that's how I was able to find identity and not my circumstance not my situation not the the crappy or the the sad story of of my life up to that point but I was able to find purpose and the identity that I was truly lacking just in those simple words for God so loved the world and it literally gave me this context of what I was missing this whole time wasn't missing and man it it man still to this day I you know the clean Xbox is right

here but still to this day man it it gets me that I lived so long not realizing you know that you know I I had parents and I was adopted by by good people but there was a God that loved me before then and to to know that he saw fit to rescue me not just from death and eternal life and sin but that Esau fit to give me a chance to wake up on a table that not many people wake up on has been a burning coal of a reminder of how important it is

to live a life that honors the Lord and to tell as many people as possible that there is a Jesus that is not only real but knows and is it is able no matter the situation H when you went into that process of uh just learning about God stepping away from well for lack of better words we'll say the limel you know yeah besides this identity factor which was so important man what what begin to happen as you stepped away from from the noise from the Limelight and just focused on Jesus what happened in those

moments I mean even now to this day um I'll say this the more of the Bible I read the more I know that we truly have no idea the greatness or I can't even still to this day fathom the goodness and his faithfulness and so you think you have it all together but man you think you know it all you think that there's nothing you can learn but truly the more I studied the scriptures the more I spent time in his presence the more I I learned man this is scripture is true it says apart

from him you can do nothing and I learned that progressively as as my life unfolded and as that process unfolded it was man I've been doing this thing on My Own Strength my own understanding and my own way for so long and now I understand that there's a greater way there's a greater understanding but it's found in a in a faith a hope and a trust in me removing myself from the equation me giving a yes unto a sovereign God instead of me deciding what I want to do or not do and so I had

to choose humility and honor instead of my own ways and learning that has taught me again early in the process all the way to today that if you ever feel like you've reached a point where you can't learn something from the scripture or that you've made it already that man I would get right back into the word and into his presence because he shows me daily that I I still don't have a great grasp of everything that he is truly capable of not in his word but in in who he is as as a good

God how long has it been now since you've been uh Faithfully Walking With Jesus Christ so I'd say confidently over a decade 12 going on 13 years that I've walked this thing out with not of course Perfection but with a definite commitment and a consistency to to stand on the foundation of Truth and to share what God has done in my life unto the door opening to a conversation uh to talk about the Jesus that is able to do the the same things in the lives of those that I speak to you know Walking With

Jesus is uh is totally contrary to what the world does what's you know what culture as we know it does um for you what did that what did that look like in these last 10 years Walking With Jesus being a part of that weird crowd you know that you once saw in that church service um yeah what is that look like for you picking up your cross surrendering your life to Jesus Christ trusting in Him what does those 10 years have looked like a lot of gain internally a lot of loss externally and so I've

lost a lot of friends that I thought were friends because of the lifestyle I've chose to live now um I've lost a lot of opportunities because of people that look at my life now as unable to be monetized for you know their own gain and so walking the narrow path that the more narrow it gets the less room for for people with weird motives have kind of surrounded me and so it gets it's not exactly the the most fun thing to do because you don't have a whole lot of people around you um but I

can tell you confidently that the change the peace uh the comfortability and and the joy that I have internally is worth the things that I that I've lost for sure but over this long process now and the the narrow path with Jesus and and doing my very best to honor him as I do so um externally it looks like being willing to walk away from and lose things that you know aren't part of the next level and the next step and the the next part of the journey and being okay with it you know and

and I'll I'll be honest and say that that that took some time for me to get used to there there were moments where I wanted to look back there were moments where I wanted to drag people with me that that God was clearly saying you got to let go there were times where I struggled to to be alone and the enemy would try to whisper and say this is just how it was when you were you know little or younger and you know what benefit is this for you if all you did was receive Christ

to go back to feeling the same way you did and so I'm not going to say it's been a you know a skip through the the flower patches and you know Sunshine the whole time but I can say unequivocally uh that it has been the most worthwhile Choice I've I've ever made in my life Drew who is Jesus to you man Jesus it's going to sound cliche but it literally is everything to me um he's served as Savior to me now he serves as Lord of my life but if you look at my my story

and what he's done in my life he has literally been the Lifeguard he promises to be whether I was Faithfully stewarding what he had paid for me or not he remained faithful he never changed despite me being ever changing and man I I can truly answer that question with the word he's everything to me because there's not a single thing he has yet to be for me uh except a failure and so man he is he is the reason I'm sitting in front of y'all right now telling you about the goodness um that he has

to offer us and not just his word but his character Drew can you pray for the people who are watching and um keeping in mind that there's those who are watching who are in the church who are hearing your testimony are encouraged uh but are in need to continue to keep moving forward and then there's those that are watching that are not walking with Jesus um and you get an opportunity here to pray for them could you just pray for those people who are watching right now absolutely my pleasure dear heavenly father Lord we just

we step into your throne room today God and we come humbly Lord and we just thank you for the opportunity to share the goodness and your faithfulness with all those who have tuned in Lord God and whether the person that's watching right now whether the person listening right now is Faithfully serving you Lord God lord maybe they've drifted from your presence or maybe they've yet to receive the revelation of of your love for us God or what the price was paid for Lord God but I just ask that whatever their situation is wherever they are

in the process Lord that you would remind them today God of your goodness Lord would you embrace them where they are would you say that you can come as you are but that Lord remind them that you love them too much to stay as they are so Lord I just thank you that you're doing a a work in the lives of those who are watching God would you reignite the fire of their first love Encounter With You Lord if they have drifted from you God would you remind them that as far away as they've drifted

from you that it is one step away to come back to you and God would you radically step into every circumstance and situation would you break down every last barricade in the way of those that have yet to encounter you as Savior and Lord of their life God I just pray that Lord what you've done in my life would encounter and minister to somebody who may be going through a season of death in their own life Lord and remind them that no matter what the diagnosis is no matter what it may look like and no

matter what people may say or think Lord that you are the final say so in all matters of life and so God I just pray right now that you would touch those who are watching Lord that your favor would cover them Lord that you would encourage them where they are Lord and that you would lift the hands of those who feel like their arms are dropping in Jesus name amen amen Drew is there anything from your testimony that maybe you've missed that you would like to add on or share with the people who are watching

I mean I I would just like to to share kind of a celebratory part of my testimony is you know now I'm sitting in front of you guys sharing you know what I went through as a young adult a child that I've survived some things that people shouldn't survive but I'm sitting in front of you now serving God Faithfully um with a loving wife of almost three years I have three beautiful sons that all love God with all their heart and man I'm just telling people about the good news of Jesus and so man all

the stuff that you heard God do in my life I'm I'm doing my very very best out here nowadays to to truly honor and Steward the opportunity that God has given me uh to tell people about the goodness of God but man love my family is my first Ministry and it would be not a testimony of his grace and mercy to not share with you that people do change life can get better and God is able amen uh Drew any last words uh for people that are watching right now and I just pray that you

would remember less my name and more what God has done in my life hey everybody this is Eric vioto president and founder of mission deaf our mission with deaf testimonies is to create the world's largest Archive of Jesus testimonies until his return We Appreciate each and every single one of you who gives to make these videos possible what you are seeing on the screen right now are donors who gave in the month of September next month you'll see the names of those who gave in this current month of October if you would like to give

in support of our ministry please visit our website at Mission de.org again thank you so much for your support God bless you [Music]