Bryan  

It has been a long time since I shared my testimony, and the Lord has recently convicted me of it. So, here I am wrestling with what to say and how to tell it. Hmm what do I put in it and what should I leave out? (Some things are best shared on a more personal level). How is this going to affect my friends and family that have not heard it and how will it affect me, my wife, and my children. The one thing I know for sure is The Almighty wants me to share it, so let Him carry the burden of how it affects the people close to me. If you are wondering yes, my wife and kids know, however my wife's side of the family doesn't know and I'll guess that my dad's side of the family would prefer I don't talk about it. My wife comes from a great family so things will be alright; lets get started.

I was born in Hettinger, ND as a result of young love or maybe lust, and came into this world Sept. 1968, three months after my dad graduated from High School. My mom however, didn't get the opportunity to graduate. After a while my parents moved North of Lemmon near my grandparents and started life together. All the details are sketchy here because we have never talked at length about these things. I know that three years later my brother was born and shortly thereafter my parent were divorced. I must have been about four. Life with my mom wasn't good, and it still brings tears to some family member's eyes to talk about it. Soon after I went to live with my paternal grandparents, this is when I asked my dad for a new mom. Guess what? For my sixth birthday a got one. After a year or so my family settled back down in Lemmon, brother included. I lived a pretty normal life for the most part. My relationship with my biological mother was pretty much nonexistent; about the only contact I had with her was through my grandparents. My dad's company in the oil industry began to grow and life was going well. My parents always made sure to send me to church and I participated in church youth activities. I was also very involved in athletics, football, wrestling, and track. I played a little summer baseball and then got a job for myself. My mom and dad were always there for all my endeavors, but on a personal level things were empty and vacant. Mom and dad always said I could talk to them, but it never happened. My relationship with became mechanical, based on blood and loyalty to the family and not on personal dealings and the growing togetherness of family. This wasn't of my parents doing, it was mine. The older I became, it seems the wider the gap and more the rebellion. Of course my rebellion was out-right defiance; it was lies and manipulation. I developed a knack for being one person, while at the same time being another. It was important to me to look good but at the same time I was quite lazy. I didn't want to work for real respect. Even though I was lazy I knew how to work hard and did, when it served my purpose.

I was also a real good dreamer. I had grand plans for life, and make big dollars. You see, growing up with successful parents I grew accustom to a nice life style and I wanted a better one. I liked to party, hang out with friends, and being a typical teenager, acting older than I really was. I need to point out here that my life was absolutely void of any real meaning. I tried to fill that void with girls, friends, and having a good time. My successes as an athlete didn't fill the void either. With all this a pattern began to emerge. I would get in a little trouble; I would manipulate and lie to get out of it or get the least punishment necessary and then clean up my act. It was never with the law because that would be bad for my image. Well, my act never stayed clean to long and the next thing you would know I would get in a little bit of trouble again, this time just a little bit deeper. I would do the same song and dance and come out pretty much unscathed, each time getting better at lying and manipulating. Did I mention that I always turned to God when I got in big trouble? Oh yea, I would make all the typical promises, go to church every Sunday, be good, and do good things. Never lasted too long though; looking back, my view of God was self-serving and limited to the fact that I knew He existed; if He would work for me then great. Spiritually, I looked for anything that I thought would help me get what I wanted. I even checked out a book on witch craft from the local school library; it was on the shelf right next to the Holy Bible.

So let's see here.... In my High School days I was a lazy, manipulating, lying, girl chasing buffoon who believed in God and the supernatural, and that they could be used to get what I wanted. Yep, that sums it up. Then I went to college and things became worse. Now you need to add to the list thievery. It was just little stuff you know, nothing big. I couldn't risk getting caught, that would be too embarrassing. What's funny is I had this thing for lights, they where just cool; if it blinked, flashed, or danced I wanted it and would try to acquire it unlawfully. Too bad I didn't see the real Light then. This is when The Almighty fired a warning shot across my bow. One night I was out partying with some friends and we decided to go have some breakfast. Well, being the broke college students we were, and after having spent all our money on beer, we decided we needed some stuff for our dorm room. That is when I stuck a bottle of ketchup in my pocket. You guessed it; I got caught trying to take it out of the restaurant. Boy, you would have thought that it was the end of the world. I was taken down to the local jail, mug shoot and every thing. They even took a mug shot of the ketchup bottle. Guess what, I got myself out of it after making some promises to God and to the police, and after apologizing to the manger for getting her up at 2am, she agreed not to press charges. To sum up this year, I moved in with a girl just to show my parents they couldn't tell me what to do now, (boy was that a mistake). I bought a 1967 Ford Galaxy 500 2dr hardtop fastback. It was cool! I got my rear out of that apartment with that girl, tried to run college track, and barely made it through my first year of college.

Next was summer vacation, I tried setting a few land speed records with my car, drank a lot beer, and played softball. It was a good summer. This is when I qualified for the Navy Nuclear Power Program and decided it would be good because my dad didn't like the military. That backfired, when he found out what it took to get in it made him kind of proud, imagine that. So I quit: did I mention I was heartless and gutless. Oops should have done that earlier. By this time it was too late to go back to school so I ended up working for a year, and my dad pulled some favors and got me job with Chevron oil seismographing. This wasn't easy because by this time the oil industry had crashed and jobs weren't easy to come by, and my dad shut down his company because there wasn't enough work for him. I was actually contract labor until I proved myself and an opening opened up. I put my nose to the grind stone and put on my show and got on, I even received the second largest raise on the whole crew before I quit. This is when God fired a second shot across my bow. I was in a bar in Wyoming with a friend drinking and having a good time (there was a lingerie show). We left the bar in my cool car and I didn't let it warm up enough. I came to a stop light and the light turned green and the car tried to stall on me. Well, this caught the attention of the local law enforcement so I got pulled over. You guessed it, I was drunk. The policeman wasn't happy. Yep you guessed it again; I talked my way out of it again. He even let me drive my friend home and them myself home. So now I worked for year and thought it would be good to go back school.

I didn't want to go back where I was, so I transferred to South Dakota School of Mines in Rapid City, SD and decided to take up the study of geology. I had no money, no job, and a ton of new student loans. I started out right, I picked good friends, hung out with the right people, went to my classes. Then I started to go to some parties. I had a real good time and it was fun to meet new people and make new friends. Things started to degrade from there. My new friend and I were really into chasing girls, there was only one glitch though. How is one to impress a girl with a "plane Jane" dorm room. Well, in my brilliance I noticed all kinds of construction happening in town and I said to my new friends, "let's go late some night to a construction site and take some lumber to fix our rooms up." They thought that was a marvelous idea, who would even know if a 2x4 was taken here or a sheet of plywood there. Well we did it, I built a nice loft in my dorm room, but unfortunately that brought another dilemma. What do we do with all this raw looking wood? You guessed it; I had another stroke of genius. I noticed out in the million acres of the Black Hills that people had cabins. I also took note that these people did not occupy those cabins on a regular basis. So I say to my friends, "you know there are cabins out in the hills; I bet there are TVs, couches and refrigerators in them; and you know, since no one is living in them we won't get caught." What a wonderful idea; I soon had carpet, a TV, microwave, stereo, life was good. Girls were coming to visit, no longer had to go to parties because I had them in my room. So my friends and I went on a little crime spree. We eventually started breaking in to businesses and car washes to take cash, guns, and high performance car parts, even Christmas presents. I was getting in so deep that we came close to dealing drugs and physically assaulting people. If we could make money or get something without having to work for it, it was fair game.

This is when God killed me. One night we were out looking for trouble, literally. We wanted to get in a fight and we found one. It lasted all of about 15 seconds before about 5 cop cars come wheeling into the parking lot. You might think big deal, how much trouble can a person get into for fighting? Well, one of my friends brought a gun to the fight, a stolen gun, and since in was in my cool '67' Ford, it was a big deal and I was the one that got put in jail over it. Now mind you, the cops didn't know the gun was stolen yet, but I just knew they would find out. I went into my normal survival mode and made up a story about how we bought the gun from a weird guy etc, etc. My story was so good I almost believed it myself, but it wasn't a bullet proof story yet. My friends bailed me out and we got together. I told them everything that happened and all about the story I made up. They were called in for interviews because now the police knew the gun was stolen. Everything went great, they came out of the interviews, and we thought things were going to be O.K. Then we got called into the interviews again. This time things were not O.K. We were busted, and one of my friends spilled the beans. I was implicated in 19 different felonies with thousands of dollars in restitution and damages in two states, but I was not broken yet. I still had some magic to work. Have girlfriend, check; she might be pregnant, check; find pastor and get right with God, check; get job, check; get new friends, check. I did everything I knew that would make me look good, but it didn't check. I plea-bargained down to 3 felonies and received 6 years in the South Dakota State Penitentiary, with three years suspended for each one. My friends were sentenced to worse terms because they were so excited about my idea that they stole stuff on their own. It was such a big story that School of Mines students could do this that it made state wide news, but I still wasn't broken. Believe it or not I still had one last magic trick to save face. By this time I had lost everything. I embarrassed my school, my home town, my family, and my true friends. My father just about disowned me; who knows maybe he did, because of all the lies and deceit. I had nothing. I went to prison with a shoe box in hand, and in that were my court papers. I arrived at a place felons call the Hill which is located close to a meat packing plant t which had one of the foulest odors a person could imagine. I was given blue jeans, a white T-shirt, shoes and socks. What about underwear you may ask, the prison system at this time didn't hand out underwear.

It was time to bargain with God and remember that my view of God was that He was a source of power that people could use to their advantage and get the things they wanted. There was a difference this time though, deep down I knew this had to be for real and if I was going to get out of this mess, only God and no one else could help me. I started to read my little Gideon's Bible, I even remember coming across a p*rn*gr*ph*c novel with satanism in it and turning that away. I met a wonderful lady in a prison outreach by the name of Zora. I knew that I had to keep my nose clean and it went as far as staying out of a fight and taking a few sucker punches. I was heading in the right direction, but I was not there yet. I finally had the opportunity to transfer closer to home to be close to my family, but had to go lower yet. You see the county jail back home leased space out to the state to help with the prison crunch, and I could go back and be in that system if I could do one thing. What is that you ask? I had to put myself into PC. No, that has nothing to do with a personal computer but has everything to do with "Protective Custody" where the scum of the prison system reside. These people are the ones that other prisoners really want to hurt badly or even kill; people who usually are the r*p*st, s*x offenders, and narcs. I thought the only way I could start to mend things with my family was to get closer to home, so I did it. I put in the request to transfer and it was approved.

So I arrived back in Rapid City after a six hour drive in shackles, oh did I mention it was a six hour drive to the Hill in shackles too? I got my own cozy little cell that I didn't have to share and view of my school and every place that I used to have fun. Every time I looked out the window I could not help but be reminded of what I lost; then God began to work. I contacted Pastor Jacobson, the pastor in my check list above, and he brought me a bible that was a little bit easier to read then the good old King James I had. I started to read a lot and in the palms I read that God frees men from prison. Yes there it is, I know God is going to get me out of this mess. Then one day as I was talking to a fellow inmate, and he gave me a free bible study from Set Free Prison Ministries. It is with these Bible studies that real change began to happen in me. I could really see the pain that I had caused people and how it affected their lives. I began to understand who God really was and how He wanted each and every one of us to be restored with him. I then finally sat down one night and asked Jesus into my life.