Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories. Up next, a
story told by a young lady from Chicago, Sarah Gonzalez,
coping with the loss of her father as a child.
Total rebellion could not stop God from pursuing her, even
after spending her time or taking an activities design to
(00:31):
instill hatred towards others. Here, Sarah Gonzalez.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
My mother was a school teacher and my father was
a prison jail chaplain, and so I grew up going
to Cook County Jail with my father. Instead of taking
me to school or kindergarten, he would often take me
to Cook County Jail with food and Bibles. And I
(01:06):
just remember locking in with the inmates in their cells
and we would have Bible study and my father would
tell me, Sadita, don't forget about your brothers and sisters
in Cook County Jail. And I loved to be with
my father. He truly took the role of discipleships seriously.
(01:28):
So I had a very joyful childhood. So at the
age of six years old, I remember we went on
a family vacation to Bermuda, and the last night of
our vacation, I got up from the dinner table and
I threw my arms around my father and I said, Daddy,
(01:51):
sometimes Mommy plays these worship songs and they make me
miss you. And my mom recalls that there were tears
in his eyes and she was thinking, why is Sarah
saying she misses him? He's right here. The next morning,
I remember we were getting ready to go to the
airport and I opened the door to the bathroom and
(02:12):
my father was there, and I saw him vomiting blood
into the sink, and I recall that's the first time
I ever experienced genuine anxiety and confusion, because it was
so traumatic to see this strong man who wasn't afraid
of anyone, very bold, now in this strange, humiliating position,
(02:38):
vomiting blood. And so we immediately flew back to Chicago,
and we went to the hospital and the doctor said
he'll be fine, it's just guard tissue. But ultimately he
had a serotic liver and hepatitis sea from using dirty needles.
(02:59):
Although he had been sober since the day he was born, again,
there was so much damage to his organs, and so
he died before we unpacked our suitcases. He internally bled
to death, and he died in August of nineteen ninety
six and I was just starting first grade and my teacher,
(03:19):
my first grade teacher wrote on my first report card that,
you know, I had all f's and that I would
just stay out the window all day. So I think
there was just a profound sense of absence that I
didn't really understand, and coupled with now the household was
so there was such a sense of hopelessness because my
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mother was wanting to die. She wanted to die, and
I knew she wanted to die, and so just a
lot of darkness. But now my belief that God is
good was challenged. If he is so good, then why
did he allow this to happen? And as I began
(04:04):
to grow older, even I remember second and third grade,
I started to become disdainful that my mother was still
a believer, even in her depression. I would still see
her reading her Bible. She was still fellowshipping with believers
in church. And I began to become very bitter because
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in my mind, how could you continue to serve a
God that I perceived had completely abandoned me. As I
got older, you know, I continued to entertain these accusations
against the character of God. And oftentimes, you know, as
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Satan is working in that way in someone's life, he'll
send other people to agree with your accusations about the
character of God. And so I gravitated towards years who
also were questioning their faith. By eighth grade, I was
already experimenting with drugs. I was getting drunk, stealing liquor,
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selling prescription pills to other kids who didn't know any better.
And so then by high school I was really dysfunctional.
I graduated with a one point two GPA. I gravitated towards.
You know, my father had been a gang member and
had been in and out of prison, and I began
to gravitate towards people who were in that category. I
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became very reckless, and I did not care about what
would come of my life. By college, I was exposed
to radical politics and just very anti christ ideologies, and
I embraced those because all of those idea gies communicated
(06:01):
the lie that you can be your own God, and
because I felt abandoned by God, and because I at
that point enjoyed my sin. I continued that way. When
I was in college, I began to explore my roots
or what I thought you know were roots, were my
(06:24):
roots that were worth exploring. My family, some of my
family is involved with witchcraft, and it was enticing to
me because although I rejected Christ, I was still there
was a certain allure to the spiritual realm. And because
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I had witnessed miracles, I knew that there was spiritual power,
and so I slowly began to gravitate towards witchcraft and
I would see results, I would see things happen, and
I had a sense, a false sense of control. I
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had this false sense that I was causing good things
to happen in my life because of these rituals, and
it became such a major part of my identity. In
the year twenty sixteen, I experienced several demonic encounters and
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the first one that occurred was unlike anything I had
ever experienced. It was horrifying, and I was also with
some friends who were involved with witchcraft and the activism
that I was involved with, and so I didn't want
to call on the name of Jesus. But the demonic
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encounter became so all encompassing that I began to sing
the words cover me Jesus. And as soon as the
name of Jesus came out of my mouth. The demon
retreated in God's mercy, he still rescued me from that
demonic encounter. But I woke up the next day pretending
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like it never happened.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
And you're listening to Sarah Gonzalez share her story, which
started off well. She had a happy childhood, as she
described it, going to Cook County jail with her dad,
who had a heart, a real heart for prison discipleship
because it had saved him. He was a former gang
member and heroin addict. That heroin addiction, it took its
(08:41):
toll on his body and her dad. She watched him
vomiting blood in a hotel on a vacation, and soon
thereafter her father passed, and that's when her crisis of
faith emerged and got mad at God because why would
he allow something like this to happen to her eighth grade,
she gravitated towards peers who questioned their faith too. By
(09:04):
high school, as she described it, she was totally dysfunctional,
and by college, well, she was exposed to radical ideologies
and continued down a dark path ending with witchcraft. The
story of Sarah Gonzalez, her real faith struggles and her
faith walk continues here on our American story, and we
(09:39):
continue with our American stories. Let's pick up where we
last left off with Sarah Gonzales.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
In August of twenty sixteen. I flew to New York
City with one of my friends who was an activist,
and my first night, I experienced an other demonic attack
and I remember being so exhausted by the weightiness of
(10:10):
this spiritual wrestling that was taking place, and I struggled
all night. I remember, you know, coming in and out
of consciousness. And when I woke up in the morning,
I had a text from my mother, who was in Chicago,
and she didn't know all of the things that I
was involved in, and in her text, she said, I
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want you to know that the Lord woke me from
a sound sleep, and I don't know what you're involved in,
but there's deliverance in Jesus's name. I called her and
she was expecting me to roll my eyes at her
and say you're crazy, because we had such a tumultuous
relationship because of my hostility. But I called her and
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I told her I've been up all night, and she
told me that the Lord had woken her up and
he gave her Psalm sixty nine, where it says, save
Mail God, the waters have come up to my neck
and John ten ten, the thief comes to steal, kill
and destroy. But I came that you may have life abundantly.
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What I didn't share is that she was awakened from
a nightmare where I was murdered, and the Lord told
her pray for your daughter and gave her those two scriptures.
And so I was processing all of this, the fact
that I came to New York City for no good reason,
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to do nothing good, and my mother is not even
in the same state, but the Lord, out of his love,
alerted her to pray for me. And I began to
think about my life up until that point. And although
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I had many accolades in life and all the right
people liked me, I knew that in my darkest, most
horrifying moments, with these demonic attacks, that none of them
could save me, that they could not do a thing
for me. And just witnessing how the name of Jesus
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had so much power, I believe that the Lord used
that to show me his authority because I was so rebellious.
I was so rebellious, and he used it to show
me I didn't know anything. I had no authority, and
it humbled me. He used it to humble me. And
most of all, or not most of all, but most
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touching to me, was that he showed me he had
been pursuing me. In my rejection of him, in my idolatry,
in my mockery of him, it just broke something in me.
As we know, his word says it's his kindness that
leads us to repentance. And so as I walked into
the hotel room, he just began to whisper these things
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to me, Sarah, You're not going to be the same.
I knew that I would never take a drink of
alcohol again. Would I had cigarettes in my bag, I
threw those out. I knew I would never touch drugs anymore.
I knew that this would not just be I'm going
to live a religious life where I go to church,
but I'm going to keep on with all the other things,
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and I'll just add Christianity to it. The Lord made
clear that I came to New York City dead, and
that he brought me to life, and that I existed
now to serve him for the rest of my days.
(14:00):
And I wanted nothing to do with my former ways
of life. I knew that as soon as I got
home to Chicago that I was going to raid my
apartment and tear down all the altars, get all the
books of divination, the sage, the crystals, and it was
going to go in the dumpster. The Lord put that
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conviction in me, and for the first time, I desired
to please him. So when I was born again, I
was a high school teacher at the time, and I
was teaching in a small alternative social justice high school
couple blocks from cok County Jail, which is where my
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father had been a chaplain many years before, and which
there was a lot of gang violence right there, and
so during this time I would end up having four
students who were murdered and twelve were shot within four months.
But even in that the surviving young people were starting
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to ask questions about eternity, about goodness, about how do
I live a good life, And for the first time
I had an answer for them. I had an answer
that there is a God who saves, that there is
no sin that cannot be forgiven. And during this time
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we experienced an outpouring of miracles because as I would
sleep and then wake up with scriptures on my mouth.
The Lord would whisper to me, pray that every gun
used against them jams, pray that the bullets ricochet, and
that they'll know the truth of Jesus and that they
will be set free. And so I would be walking
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home from school and they would see me on the
street and they'd pull over and I would have the
opportunity to pray that prayer, and they would just look
at me like I'm crazy. But then several days later
they would come to me and they would say, sada
when we prayed the other day, we went to go
do something, and what you prayed happened. What was that
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many of these young people were incarcerated during this time.
They would get arrested, and the Lord began to put
on my heart the desire to minister to them in
the jail. And eventually that led to me connecting with
Coynania House Ministries and Manny Mill, who I met in
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DuPage County Jail while visiting a former student, and we've
had the blessing of merging together. My father established a
ministry in Could County jail, and we recently merged. And
so this August for the very first time, I was
able to go into the county jail, into the women's
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service and lead that with my mother. And so now
the Lord has just been shaping my heart for men
and women who are incarcerated and the need for discipleship.
This year, I received audio and video footage of my
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father that I had never had access to, and I
watched it for the first time, and there's a clip
where my father is speaking somewhere at a church and
I'm one year old, and he says, you see, my
beautiful daughter, my little baby. She's not going to grow
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up with a gun in her purse like my sisters did.
She's going to carry a Bible. And one day she's
going to be with us in the prisons and jails
and she'll give her own testimony to Jesus. And when
I saw that, it just stunned me. And a couple
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months ago, I was cleaning my closet and I found
a drawing that I did in first grade, and at
the very top it says, draw what you want to
do when you grow up. And in the drawing, I
drew cook County Jail, drew a big cross on top
of it, and there's a drawing of me in front
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of it, and it says in the drawing, be at
Cook County Jail with a big heart. And so that
was really the icing on the cake. In Samo thirty nine,
it says, every day of our life is written in
his book. And so I have the joy of not
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only walking in the legacy of my father, but seeing
how my heavenly father has perfectly orchestrated all of these
things for his quory.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
And a terrific job on the production editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler. A special thanks to Sarah
Gonzalez for sharing her story her testimony, and a special
thanks also to Don Albert, who was a filmmaker and
storyteller and directed our only documentary, The Streets Were My Father,
(19:31):
And what a story we heard here, a miraculous story.
And on that flight to New York City, her mom
had a dream, and she dreamed her daughter was murdered.
As Sarah, the Lord made it clear that I came
to New York City dead. I wanted nothing to do
with my former life after that she'd been born again.
(19:51):
This happens to Americans all over this country. That's why
we tell this story because they're yours stories, folks, And
the story of that drawing, my goodness, draw the picture
of who you want to be when you grow up.
And she was reminded who she was and who she
is the story of Sara Gonzalez a beauty here on
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our American stories.