The Mafia was the tool the Lord used to bring me to take up the cross of Christ. During one bleak night in southern California two guys with connections to the Mafia came to my house to compel me to purify cocaine. At the time I was totally alone feeling terrified as I knew they would go as far as dismembering someone I loved to get me to comply with their requests. Feeling cornered and full of fear I lost control of my emotions, jumped up and shouted, “Get out, GET OUT of my house NOW!” The one guy holding the sack of cocaine began moving toward the front door but stopped, turned toward me and said, “How about I leave the cocaine with you to work on and we’ll come back later?” I looked straight at him and shouted, “Take your &%*# and GET OUT NOW!” They both left but then the deep terror began to sap all the strength from my body; walking into the dark kitchen, I fell to my knees and began trying to pray a prayer that went, “God I don’t know if you are real or if Jesus is a fairy tale but if you are REAL, please save me from this terror.” In a split second all fear vanished leaving me in a deep wonderful peace I’d never before known, feeling like someone just took a heavy dark tarp off my body, I looked up and thought, “What just happened to me?” All my training in physics and related sciences at UCSD couldn’t provide an explanation. What I knew was there is some kind of awesome power in the name of Jesus. A week before this event, a Christian coworker “tried” to share Jesus with me, but as with many others who had tried, I told him to get lost; unlike the many others I looked up to see a tear in his eye as he spoke to me saying, “Mike I can see where you are going and want you to know that you need God in your life through Jesus Christ.” I would have physically pushed him away until I saw a tear in his eye as he spoke; I knew that unlike the many others who tried to share Jesus, that tear in his eye communicated MORE about his sincerity and love than hundreds of words from the many others trying to share some pedantic religious ideology. Since that time years ago I have learned that the above story is my testimony which along with the blood of Jesus Christ is my firm defense against Satan. After studying Scripture have found like the Apostle Paul such testimonies in the lives of other believers which proves the power of God’s all saving grace through His Son Jesus Christ. Before this event, I made every effort to avoid anyone trying to tell me about God or Jesus; now, having discovered the truth, I found myself wanting to tell the world about how God used organized crime to wake me up to His love and salvation in Jesus. Forty-four years have passed, now daily, faced with a world fill with lost people, find it a challenge to get around the obstinate sin that kept me fishing at the edge of a lake in hell. The main guidance I must remember, is to follow the direction of God's presence in His daily guiding grace and to keep in mind the words of one sincere Navy co-worker, without whose genuine tearful concern, about my life so far from God, I'd still be lost or forever dead.
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