This is, you know, one of the sad things for my mother reflecting on her own mistakes, is that she doesn’t remember feeding or bathing me. So my mom, you know, repents and has this profound experience with the power of God, the power of the Holy Spirit just after shooting up meth. She then begins going to church, gives her life to Christ, and has this total transformation. She said, you know, it wasn’t easy, because to walk out of that lifestyle, I mean, you have to completely change your whole life.

Mark’s Childhood Desire to Preach and Mental Health Struggles

For the first time, now, life is starting to look relatively normal for us. My mom says, that around that time, when I was about five, or six years old when we were attending church faithfully at Alters Gate in Bryan, Texas. I still remember this. We would kind of push the chairs together, and I would sleep on the chairs or draw. During that time, I had this, I guess, a deep sense of longing, even in my own heart, that I wanted to be a preacher, and, of course, that would always follow me throughout the rest of my life.

It wasn’t like I wanted to grow up to be a fireman or an astronaut or a doctor. I wanted to preach the gospel, and so, yeah, my mom ended up getting remarried after that time, I think it was nine years old or so, she married my stepdad, Jeff, a wonderful, wonderful man. I started experiencing what I would probably call a lot of spiritual darkness. And I think it’s safe to say it was a result of the years of trauma and things that I had witnessed and experienced.

I was having, experiences with psychosis, depression, and various different things at the age of nine. I mean, just crippling depression and I was highly medicated. I wanted to die. I didn’t want to live. I had suicidal ideations, which were very concerning to my parents, but then I started experiencing these weird blackouts and moments of what you would call psychosis.

I have wondered if it was just really demonic. I would speak and say very bizarre things that didn’t even make any sense. But one of the reoccurring themes is I had these nightmares and fear of hands without a head. The psychiatrist told my parents a theory after she had developed knowledge of my story.

When my dad was drunk, my real dad, I would be in the crib crying, and much of the reason why there was a lot of crying I had a lot of issues when I was born, my esophagus wasn’t developed all the way, and I had a lot of issues sleeping and eating. There were several times when I had choked on my food, and they’d find me blue. But I guess during that time where I was just really unsettled and restless, and, you know, sometimes choking my dad would come into the crib, and, you know, it would be dark in there, and he would just grab me. So as a baby, you know, it’s like, all I see coming in are just hands with no face because I couldn’t see the face. And so the psychiatrist thought, I think that’s what’s going on here.

When I was about 15 or 16, I discovered I was always into sports, always athletic, and always got really good at things that I got really interested in. I was a fast learner. I was really into golf at that time, which my mom loved, and then I discovered skateboarding, which my mom wasn’t very excited about. I had just fallen in love with skateboarding, and all I wanted to do was skateboard when I was 16 years old.

Substance Abuse, Homelessness and Suicidal Thoughts

And so yeah, I got around several kids in high school that were really into skateboarding. We’d hang out and skateboard, and they invited me over to one of our friend’s houses one time. Very quickly I realized that, oh, they’re hanging out here because this is where they smoke marijuana. So, yeah, I tried drugs for the first time, and I was instantly hooked.

My thoughts about that is, I think as a result of just all that I had experienced, the mental illness, the depression, all of these different things I was going through as a young teenager when I discovered smoking marijuana, I felt very different. Things escalated very quickly because I had an avarice, a craving, an appetite for just using whatever I could, to feel whatever I could feel that was not what I felt.

Marijuana use went to alcohol use, and then alcohol use with the combination of prescription medication use, which usually was in the form of Xanax or things like that. Those combinations are very toxic and dangerous, but I loved it, I was falling into slavery that I would later never be able to get out of except by the grace of Jesus Christ.

I was pretty much homeless from the age of 16 until I was in my early 20s, and I went to jail a number of times. I spent a year in Denton County. 2008 would be the worst year by far my whole life. Oh, my goodness, 2008 was bad. The whole year. The drug use, and alcohol use, became so severe. I was experiencing horrific medical problems.

I feel bad for my friend at the time. We lived together, and we did crack cocaine together, but there were a number of times when I almost shot myself in his living room. I lived basically on his couch and had what was known on the streets as a throwaway, which is just an illegal firearm with the serial number filed off, bought from some drug dealer.

There were a couple of times when I would rack the slide and chamber a round, but I just couldn’t bring myself to actually point the muzzle at my face. There was just something that was…I’d like to imagine that as I went to point the muzzle at my face, it was almost as if there was this angelic hand that would just block the muzzle. I felt like I just couldn’t bring my hand close enough.

As 2008 continued, I was arrested several times that year. When I was in jail, I was ready. I was really ready to be done. I was ready to be done, but I didn’t know how to stop, but I was ready for help. I got out of jail that year and then just kind of continued doing what I was doing, but I got arrested again. When I got arrested that second time, I spent Christmas for a second time in jail. And was about 40 days.

Experiencing the Love of God

This was late 2008 into January, January the 2nd I got out of Brazos County. On January 4th, 2009 Sunday around 5:32pm I checked into the Denton Freedom House. Denton Freedom House is in Aubrey, Texas, and it’s a men’s discipleship residency program. It’s a Christian-based men’s home, for men coming out of addictions, substance abuse backgrounds, and incarceration backgrounds. So I was a perfect candidate.

I still remember as it is obvious, I remember the year, the day, the time that I walked in there. I had several drugs at my disposal at that time. So I took all of them, I took all the drugs that I could before I went in. Also, I didn’t know it was a Christian men’s home. My mom had told me that it was a drug rehab called the Denton Freedom House, and I thought it was just a traditional drug rehab. She knew that if she would have told me it was a Christian men’s home. I probably wouldn’t have gone. And I think she was right.

So I came in on January the fourth, on a Sunday, and on January 6th, 2009 on a Tuesday, around five o’clock, Jesus touched my heart in power. Still remember it like it was yesterday. I was all by myself. I had already called my mom to come pick me up, and I didn’t want her to take me back to the house or anything. I just wanted to ride to the homeless shelter because I really wanted a cigarette and I didn’t want to be there.

My mom told me on the phone. She said, “I’m not coming to get you this time.” And she again, would always remind me, as she always did throughout all of those years, “You know, you told me one day you were going to be a preacher.” And I was like, “Mom, please stop. Would you stop with that? Like, that’s never gonna happen.”

So, yeah, I got off the phone with her about that and I was on the back of this patio area. I was all by myself, and I remember crying out, I was so utterly hopeless at that point in my life. I cried out, “God, I don’t want a second start. I don’t even want, the concept and the idea of a new life that perhaps this goes well, I just want a friend. I’m so alone. I want someone to love me. If I have to spend the rest of my life severely crippled with addiction and die and go to hell, but you be my friend now, I don’t care.”

It was almost as if, the only way I know how to describe it. I maybe even having this realization right now, like, which I’ve never thought of before. You know, when I was a child, suffering and the brokenness of my own home and my father, was coming into the crib to grab me, to shake me, to stop crying. It was like these other hands, these different hands coming down, not to do anything, but to gather me up.

It felt like, the only way I know how to describe it was it felt like a hug. I literally have chills thinking about it. Was 15 years ago. It was like this hug, but what it felt like was when the arms came around me, they just continued around me. It was like this infinite, circular hug that just covered me up, and when I was let go, I kid you not, I was instantly different, like that, total transformation.

And one of the things that I think is profoundly inconvenient about the gospel is that that’s all it took. There was this deep cry of, a deep cry for love, no matter the cost, no matter the price, no matter what it would take. I was willing to pay it if I could, but I didn’t need to. That’s what’s so interesting is God can literally just touch someone like that. And it doesn’t change all the years that the locust had eaten, right? It’s still gone.

So much of my family and the relationship with my family, and all the things that I had done and all the people I had hurt, and all the things that I destroyed and burned to the ground were still destroyed and burned to the ground, but yet in me, there was a kingdom being built. Jesus says, “Behold, the kingdom of God is in you.” Christ was now coming to indwell me. And, yeah, it’s indescribable joy, right?

I find that to be a little inconvenient, especially for my family, I felt like a million bucks, but my life had been destroyed. But it didn’t matter. It certainly didn’t matter, because what I had felt and the liberation and the Jubilee of my spirit and my soul and my mind was amazing.

This is a hilarious detail of the story the Denton Freedom House had already decided to kick me out. I was that intense in the first barely 48 hours. One of the staff members, by the name of Patrick Major, said, “Please don’t ask him to leave. Just let me, you know, maybe I’ll shadow him, and we’ll just kind of see what happens.” Well, I had this drastic transformation between just God and me. No one knew about it.

Turns out they actually thought that I had gotten wind that they were going to kick me out, and so I just modified my behavior for the sake of, if I can maintain this, you know, gig, then I’ve got room and board, and I don’t have to sleep on the street somewhere that night. They just thought it was odd my behavior like I just had this instant behavior change.

I literally didn’t detox from any of the drugs, like I should have detoxed from all the benzodiazepines that I had taken. Just all the stuff that I pumped into my system right before I went in, no detox, nothing. I mean, just transformation.

For those first several months of the program, I was told that I just kind of had this smile that you just couldn’t get off of my face. And I didn’t find out until about four, the program is six months long, the residential program, and then you graduate and you can go into different phases of the program or intern. So yeah, I was at the four-month mark, and they told me that they were gonna kick me out. And I was like, what? I didn’t even know. They were like, I guess just God had changed you, and we didn’t believe it. That’s how drastic the transformation was.

When I graduated from the program, it was July 2009. During that program, all of the men in the program had to do what’s called devotionals. In devotional you had about 15 minutes to share what God’s doing in your life. And it was during that time when I did a devotional that I felt perhaps what the prophet Jeremiah described, there was like a fire shut up in his bones, and he could not help but speak the word of God. I felt that fire.

I think I had experienced that really early on in the program, that there was this fire that had been kindled in me, and this, light bulb moment of all of what I had desired and wanted and all that my mom just continued to remind me of that one day you’re going to be a preacher of the gospel, a Proclaimer of the Word of God. And I was like, oh my goodness, it’s like, literally, this is it. I’m gonna give the rest of my life to proclaiming His name.

Commitment to Ministry and Miraculous Healing

When I graduated from the program, I went into an internship for about a year, and then I was on staff there just under 10 years. This is a really interesting piece of the story.

I mentioned that when I was born, my esophagus wasn’t developed, right, and so I almost choked to death a couple of times on formula. I almost died. I had to go to Cook’s Children’s Hospital, and they had to do surgery and all of that. And the doctor said that the damage that had been done that time, where I had gone that long without air, because I was like purple, that it was going to be pretty evident. And it was.

All throughout my years of early schooling and high school, I had horrible dyslexia. I had a very difficult time. I was in special education. I had a very, very poor reading level. I think my reading level, even as an adult, was below fifth-grade, maybe fourth or third-grade reading level, so I just basically couldn’t read.

All of that time at the Freedom House in the program I had learned to read by reading the Bible, and so, yeah, the Lord literally healed my mind. I remember when I was an intern, I was reading the unabridged works of Jonathan Edwards his thoughts and thesis on revival. It was written in the 1700s I was reading that and retaining it.

That first year of interning was very difficult. I would say that at the Denton Freedom House, I don’t think we had the most healthy work habits for any of the staff there. It’s a residential program. All the staff live on property and on the site. So it’s 24 hours a day, and I lived in the dorms with the men, and so, yeah, within the first year, I remember, I got really burned out.

Impact of Prophetic Ministry and The Call to Preach

I had a couple of profound moments where the Spirit of God began to anoint me in ways that I didn’t even know were real or possible. I was a brand new Christian. In one of those occurrences, there were these two men who would come to the Denton Freedom House. Their names were Andrew and Nicholas. Andrew was the caretaker of Nicholas. Nicholas had Cerebral Palsy and a real severe form. He wasn’t supposed to live past his teenage years, but he was in his 40s or something like that.

They would come to speak and they would do a time of preaching. Nicholas would preach. Andrew would kind of help him prop his Bible up, and Nicholas would preach. It’s probably one of the most powerful ministry experiences I have ever seen in my 15 years of ministry. And I’ve seen a lot.

They would come in, they would preach, and then they would do a time of prayer and ministry. I watched with my own eyes those guys. All the men would line up, the guys that wanted prayer. So most of them would line up, and one by one, Nicholas and Andrew would prophesy one by one, and they would be there for a couple hours at a time. I mean words of knowledge, like the the ability, supernaturally, prophetically by the Holy Spirit, to reveal the secrets inside of each one of those men that no one knew.

I’m talking about, specific details about their past, about things that happened to them, things that we as a staff didn’t know. I watched a number of them, I remember one guy we picked up from South Oak Cliff, gang banger. I mean, he had been, he had a really crazy story, very hard guy, very reluctant to be open or transparent. Nicholas, just in detail from specific times of his childhood, teenage years. I mean, just revealing things. And this guy was, on his lap, bawling his eyes out.

So they came one time and were praying. I was in a really rough place at that time. I wasn’t sure and I was starting to kind of get shaken in my desire to continue to do ministry. I think I was just burned out, and I decided that I was not going to continue in ministry or preach unless God told me I was going to through Nicholas and Andrew. No one knew about that, I’m in line deciding this.

This is unbelievable still to me to this day. I was last in line, and Andrew started first. He’s a black gentleman, real soft-spoken, real subtle, just a quiet soul. He said a lot of specific things about my personality that I thought were odd that he even was able to pinpoint so, you know, definitely caught my attention. And I was like, okay, yeah you know, anyone could probably pinpoint those things.

Then they started saying some other really interesting things that I really don’t remember, but it definitely had my attention. And then Nicholas began to pray for me. And, uh, Nicholas, he talked like this. I mean, not in any trying to sound disrespectful, but just to kind of give the listeners just the way, like it was. You could tell it was laborsome for him to even speak, very painful for him to speak.

So he started praying for me. And you know, he had a real hard time looking at you, but you could tell he was looking at you. I was watching him, he’s in his chair, very uncomfortable. You could tell that it had been very difficult for him to be there, that long, very extreme, extraneous on his physical body and all of that. So I couldn’t tell if maybe he was just uncomfortable, because I’m the last person they’re praying for. But he’s praying, and he goes, “Oh, hold on a second…Wait a minute. I’m hearing something.” And then he looked right at me and said, “This boy’s gonna preach the gospel.”

And I just instantly, just started sobbing uncontrollably, and I’ll never forget what he said right at. After that, it just continues to ring in my soul like a bell, like a, you know, old bells that were made out of metal, and when you would ring them, I mean, just the vibration of it, it just, it’s so piercing, piercing. Right after he said, This boy is going to preach the gospel. He literally said I didn’t do it. And what I always thought that meant to me was I’m not the one saying this. And what began to transpire in my life after that moment was something that still to this day, can only be explained by the power of God.