Session 1 - The Testimony of Costi Hinn

Prayer for the Conference and the Glory of Christ

All right, let's begin with a word of prayer. Our Father, we are so grateful to You for the many blessings that we get to enjoy together here in freedom, in this place. Looking forward to a weekend of being fed from Your Word.

And it is our heart's desire that You would speak to us through Kosti, that You would speak to us in Your Word, that You would be magnified and glorified through our fellowship, our worship, and all that we learn here this weekend.

We pray Your blessing upon this time. We thank You for the faithful hands that have worked so hard behind the scenes to prepare this for us. And we pray that You would be honored and glorified through all that transpires through today and tomorrow and into Sunday morning.

We praise You for Your goodness, for Your salvation, and for Your grace, and pray that it would be magnified today in our lives, in our minds, and in our hearts. For the glory of Christ our King, in His name we pray.

Amen.

All right, a couple of announcements. Welcome, by the way, to our equipping conference. We are excited about this, and we have one of these a year. If this is your first one, we do this around the end of May, 1st of June every year, and you'll see announcements in your booklet as well as on the screen of upcoming conference next year.

Let me give you just a heads up for the schedule of events. In your booklet, you'll notice it just says session one, session two. Kosti didn't get the titles of the sessions to me until about two hours after I had printed these yesterday.

So I'm gonna just ask Kosti to give us the title of every session at the beginning, so you know what to write down in your booklet. I think that's all I have. So now I will introduce Kosti. Kosti grew up in a Christian, and I would use that term loosely and put it in air quotes, family, probably one that you have heard of, the hymn family.

And he has an inside view of a segment of Christianity that most of us do not. He serves as the teaching pastor at Shepherd's House Bible Church in Chandler, Arizona. He is a graduate of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and he serves as president and founder of For the Gospel.

He hosts a weekly podcast providing sound doctrine through digital media, and he is the author of Defining Deception, which was your first book, right, with Anthony Wood, and then God, Greed, and the Prosperity Gospel, which is the one that you got there.

And you can come up, and Kosti will autograph that for $100. That's it. Prosperity Gospel dies hard, doesn't it? He has a book titled, More Than a Healer, a book, Knowing the Spirit, and then two children's books, The King Who Found His Self-Control, and In Jesus' Name I Pray.

Now, one of those is not available yet, right? The King Who Found His Self-Control is not available yet, but In Jesus' Name I Pray, you can get on Amazon. And he and his wife, Christine, have five children.

Will you please welcome Kosti in?

Pastor Jim, thank you so much for letting me serve.

This is a real privilege.

And I have habitually called him Jim Osman, because that's just how I've been saying it. But I have been rebuked and corrected. Jim Osman.

It just rolls to Osman, it just rolls off the tongue.

So yeah, thank you so much again for your warmth, your hospitality, and your kindness. The sessions that we're gonna go through are all a little different. The progression is gonna work this way. Pastor Jim asked me to share my testimony to start.

If that's redundant for some of you, or if you heard the story, then just listen again and test to see if I'm still accurate and all of the details line up. Besides that, in the next session, I've titled it Three Historical Heretics, or Three of History's Heretics.

And what I wanna do for you in the second session is present to you three particular heroes that influenced my life, our family, the prosperity gospel, and the ministry, and walk you through bios on them so you have a good handle of that.

There are gonna be some moments where you're gonna sit there and think, hey, that's what this guy does, or that's what she does, or I have totally seen that play before. And what you'll come to find if I achieve the goal and if the material is clear, you will come out of that session thinking, wow, there's really nothing new under the sun.

These are just new faces and new modern strategies on one of the devil's oldest tricks. So that'll put a lot of us at ease while it doesn't change the fact that these are dangerous players and dangerous movements.

That'll help you. And then we'll begin to open our Bibles more and more throughout the sessions, all the way, of course, until Sunday when we'll walk through a biblical text.

From the book of Ephesians.

But the first two sessions are highly story-driven. Or history-driven. And so bear with me on that. It's been a number of years since I've done any type of conferences where I just share my testimony.

So this is really kind of you to entertain the story once more. If you haven't heard it before, I hope that it encourages you. But even still, in all those details, my joy is ahead as we open up God's Word.

And also in the Q &As as we talk through questions and the practicals. If you will, go to the Lord with me one more time in prayer. Let me ask for His blessing on this particular session and the one to come with the Q &A.

Grace, Sovereignty, and the Start of the Testimony

Father, I want to pause as well.

I know Pastor Jim prayed already,.

But I want to recognize that without You,.

I wouldn't be here.

None of us would be.

That You are the sovereign God who saves. You are a God of mercy. And Your grace, which is literally Your unmerited favor, has found us. That You would save us. That You would love us. That You would then give us the privilege of being a part of the body of Christ and be used, be given spiritual gifts, get to use those to edify and build up one another.

All of that is grace upon grace upon grace. And so in this testimony session, would You help me to be accurate, to be clear? Would You also edify those who hear? There is a side to this that we loathe and it is to go back down memory lane, but our purpose is to give You glory through it.

Our purpose is to think about where we've been and then give You glory and honor and praise for where we are now. All of the credit is Yours. All of the glory, the honor, the praise, every detail orchestrated by Your masterful hand.

And so what would we do but pause to say thank You and ask Your blessing on this session and the Q &A to come. I pray all of this in Jesus' name, amen. So to go back to kind of a point in time in my life where I felt like I was on top of the world would be helpful for you, and then I'll rewind the tape and we'll go back to my childhood.

But there was a point now some 17 to 19 years ago, I haven't thought about it. The last time I shared this with people formally in a setting like this, it was about 15 years total. So I think we're getting close on 17 to 18 years, but we were at the Grand Resort Laganese in Greece and we had flown into Athens.

We were on a ministry trip and used to do layovers in really beautiful places, rent a lot of suites or lease suites or in other times, houses and whatnot. But in this particular point, we're at this hotel where you have the presidential suite, you got prime minister suites, you got every kind of person in government suite.

So you can picture that. And I'm standing there and I remember vividly, I was wearing a shirt that was a Canadian shirt. It was a hockey shirt because I'm Canadian and love hockey. And I had these clear non-prescription glasses because I thought I was like Judah Smith before he was Judah Smith.

And everyone was looking trendy using those kind of cool glasses. And I'm standing there and we're at the Grand Laganese Resort. And I remember thinking that I had made it, like this was my life. I had arrived and I was young still.

And so I knew that there was some time before I would see the fruition of whatever I believed I was gonna be. But I was old enough to think like, this is my trajectory. I've got it made. And I was flying on a private Gulfstream jet regularly, staying in the nicest hotels in the world, working for my uncle who was Benny Hinn at these crusades and services.

I was a catcher, which is you catch the people who are falling. And I was his assistant on the road. So that meant carrying bags, checking out of hotels, helping with whatever was needed. And we had the Louis Vuitton luggage, the kind of whole deal if you ever watch one of those crazy reality shows and you see the Kardashians or these other people and you wonder like, who in the world spends five grand on luggage?

We did. So those are realities for me. And I'm just living the dream and thinking like, this is life. And I was so confident that it was the John 10, 10 abundant life. This was God's will. If other people didn't have it, our job was to go and show them how they could.

If they never really reached that, it was their problem. They didn't have enough faith. They didn't have a good belief system or they weren't believing and coming under our super anointed covering. And the irony that day and that trip is that we were staying on the Aegean Sea, which is connected to portions, bodies of water in which Paul is on his missionary journeys.

And the way I've always described it in post after conversion is standing there right near a body of water where Paul had preached the gospel many times. The only problem was we weren't preaching anything near what Paul was preaching.

And it was years later that the Lord would open my eyes, but that gives you a picture of what I imagined life would be forever. Growing up, my father, his name is Henry, pastored a church in Vancouver, British Columbia.

He had, along with the family, emigrated technically refugees. We found out just a couple months ago that they were refugees. They escaped war in Israel. They arrive in Toronto, Canada. And as refugees, they begin this life in which they go from having a lot in Jaffa, Israel to then having nothing in Canada.

It was my dad filing for his pension in Canada with my mom. And my mom called me and said, hey, I've got big family historical news that kind of changes the narrative. I said, what? She said, your dad is actually filed in this country, in Canada, as a refugee.

So it maybe helps you understand a little more of what life was like for your dad. They didn't immigrate. It wasn't like from Jaffa, Israel and a good life over to Canada, right into things. It's these refugees that come over from the Middle East and they are gonna make a life for themselves.

And that ties into kind of other ideas in which even for my uncle and many others in the family, proving themselves, becoming wealthy, achieving the American dream, climbing the ladder, if you will, of some sort of lifestyle is very normal for refugees or immigrants who come here and say, whatever it takes, we're gonna have a better life.

We're gonna have a new life. And so my uncle ends up finding his way through these kids at school having very odd experiences and he finds acceptance within the charismatic movement and charismatic circles.

Catherine Coleman becomes a big hero of his and he sees this woman who has this power and this aura about her, if you will, and he says, that's what I wanna do. That's my calling. In the meantime, the family is not at all involved with that sort of branch of belief.

They were raised Greek Orthodox and so that was the belief. They came to Canada for peace, not war. They came for education, not religion. And so my uncle goes kind of on his merry little way and slowly but surely different family members begin to buy into, at that time, preaching generally repent and believe gospel with a Catherine Coleman dream kind of hovering above the whole thing.

And in those days, there were a lot of guys that would preach the gospel, just like now. Justin Peters told me one time when we first started talking, he said, brother, I've heard your uncle preach a better gospel than some Baptist ministers.

It's just all the things that come afterwards if he would just stop there. That was very much a reality. And so in whatever version of the gospel being preached, the family starts one by one buying in, my dad being one of the last.

And when he jumps all in, he serves my uncle Benny. He goes into ministry following in my uncle's older brother footsteps. And that leads him on a path down to Orlando, Florida. That's where I was born, even though I was raised in Vancouver, British Columbia.

He goes down to Orlando and my uncle had started the church Orlando Christian Center. It was a mega church, all sorts of things going on down there. And from there, my dad plants a church in Vancouver, British Columbia.

It was called Vancouver Christian Center. And it was the same as Orlando Christian Center. It was just the Canadian version. And so we had healing services on the last Sunday night of every month. You bring the sick, you line them up on your right and left.

He would jet out once in a while and do healing crusades. The teaching and preaching was very similar to what you would hear from Kenneth Hagen, Kenneth Copeland. If you looked throughout history and read books or saw teaching from Oral Roberts, these were the heroes of the faith for the family.

And so I grew up in a very much word of faith, prosperity, gospel, mixed church. We were kind of up and coming. A lot of people would come to the church. They liked the church, but there were also a lot of problems.

We would have issues with what we would call dead churches, whether it was Baptist or other denominations, even some in the assemblies of God denomination. There was the revoking of papers. There was distance, even from some general Pentecostals from our family.

All of it labeled as, well, you guys are doing shady things or you've gone too far. Well, the way that I grew up dealing with that was really simple. We were attacked, criticized, ostracized, and separated from because we were being persecuted.

Ultimately, the devil had it out for our ministry. And these people who went to dead churches or these other types of Pentecostals that were really just jealous because we had better, more powerful spiritual gifts than them, were really all seeking to undermine our ministry, our power, our authority.

And we were just like Jesus, just like the apostles, we were being persecuted. I grew up in a home that was in the ballpark of 10 ,000 square feet. Everything we drove was a Benz and we lived the high life and enjoyed life.

I viewed the church as a family, no doubt. My friends were in the church. I was part of the youth group. I sang songs. I watched the Donut Man and McGee and Me and all of these other different shows that maybe some of you remember.

If you've heard of the Adventures in Odyssey, we listened to that too. Very much in line with things that other people would grow up with. We sang some hymns. We sang some contemporary music. We sang some Stephen Curtis Chapman and Michael W. Smith and whatever else was cool at that time.

And I remember even growing up that there was a radio station just over the border in Washington State. It was called Praise 106 .5. And they had this guy that would come on and he was called the Bible Answer Man.

His name was Hank Hanegraaff, which of course we all know. But he would criticize my uncle and he would criticize sometimes my dad. And we'd listen to him. And I remember my dad saying, this guy is just attacking us.

This Bible Answer Man is just a hater on all that God's doing at our church. There's another example of just a jealous leader who can't stand what we're doing. And all the while, I was in these early years of my life watching as my uncle grew exponentially in fame as my dad throughout Canada and traveling with my uncle and going different places around the world was very well known, very powerful.

We were very wealthy. And so I very much believed that everybody else was wrong and we were right. We were in the center of the universe. Over the course of my teenage years, my dad more and more traveled with my uncle because my uncle had left his church and began to travel full time and do crusades.

And it was around that time where we got heavily involved from an employment standpoint and become very close. We were always really close with family because in the Middle Eastern family and with the prosperity gospel ties running through it, I've often described it as a mixture between the royal family and the mafia because you had the wealth and the family attachment of the royal family and even the attention and the focus and the care that would happen there because we were kind of it, top of the hill.

And then you had the mafia because you just never turn your back on family. You always roll with family. Blood is thicker than water. Every other one-liner you could think of, you absolutely always side with family.

So throughout those teenage years, we traveled with Uncle Benny. He always treated me incredibly well. I was very close with him and most of my other uncles, very tight with my cousins. Everything was incredibly great, to say it in just a simple way.

But there were certain cracks that were forming in the dam throughout those years. In the early years of my life, there were kids that would say, your uncle's a false teacher. My dad says that your dad is a liar and a scammer.

And I would just think, these are these kids that go to dead churches. They just need the Holy Spirit. As I got older, things got a little more serious. There was a gal in my high school class who was on the swim team.

She was healthy, she was popular, and she ended up getting a form of cancer. And I remember asking my dad if we could just go heal her, like just go pray for her. She's one of our friends, like just go handle it.

And I remember that being met with kind of a, well, they don't really believe like us and they don't really have enough faith. And in my mind, and even in some of my responses with family, I would think and say, well, let's just go do it.

Then they'll all believe it. We'll just heal her. And I really did believe that we could heal. When I was at healing services, even at our church, and people would come up, imagine it would never happen here, but just imagine in your, what JP calls your sanctified imagination, keep it sanctified.

But people lined up on my right and my left. And as they come up, they're walking across the platform and you pray for them and they fall and the ushers are catching and the whole thing. And you're sitting there as a kid, just thinking, wow, like, look at these people.

Everyone's crying. You're singing hallelujah or whatever song just keeps playing. And you would invite friends and people would come. And I remember our church would grow by like 200 people on Sunday nights, because all the people from other churches would come to get their healing or to get prayed for.

And all that did was serve as more evidence that to experience the power of God, they've got to come here. And to experience healing and real church and real ministry, where do they go at the end of the day?

Here. And so I thought as even a young man, that a lot of people go to these different churches because they have to, or they've got friends there, family there, but really they all want to be at our church.

They all know who the best in ministry is, who the most powerful is, who has the real anointing and the real authority. And at that particular time, I didn't go against my family. I didn't think, oh, they couldn't heal my friend, but I call it a crack in the dam because it opened up just a small amount of doubt that what we say we could do, we're not doing.

I heard certain family members boast that they would, verbatim, they would say, I have all nine gifts. And if you read the New Testament, there's more than nine spiritual gifts, but there are about nine, let's say, miraculous gifts, or that's what they were referring to, those in particular.

And they would say, these family members in particular, that we can operate in all of these at any given time. And so the amount of arrogance and the amount of pride was so deep and so wide that it permeated every ounce of our conversations and the way that we viewed ourselves in ministry.

And so if we didn't do things, there was only one particular person to blame. It was never us. It was always the person who didn't have enough faith, who didn't believe like us, who wasn't obedient or submissive enough.

There were multiple moments throughout my teenage years, and these are stories I haven't told much yet because they were too close still and there were still some conversations I need to have, but I've had all those now, where particular people left our church.

And these are fascinating conversations for me to have now decades later. And at the time, whether it was our church or another family member's church, they would be threatened that death, heart attacks, cancer, prodigal children, their family losing their salvation, losing money, would befall them, would come upon them if they left our apostolic covering.

And I remember years later, I was at a particular concert and I ran into one of those families and we had a really big conversation and there were things that the Lord had done in their life and opened their eyes to, but that was the way it was.

And that's why I would say it was very much like the mafia in that if you leave this, you're done, you're dead, and divine judgment would find you. As high school was winding down, we were coming out of this era where a local newspaper came after my dad.

He hit the news nationally. There was a helicopter flying over our house at one point and I remember, because we were in the basement, we had this really nice built-out basement with ping pong table and foosball and bubble hockey because I was Canadian again, and we had this big theater room.

We were all in the theater room and we were basically watching the news about us. And there was a helicopter flying over our home and they released a magazine article that was titled Jesus, the Devil, and Henry Hinn and it was about my dad.

It was in a business journal and we were so proud of it that they would fly a helicopter over our house because they were jealous of how big it was. That God's blessing on a man of God was seen through how much money he had and how big his house was and the world needs to get with it and church folk are just jealous and so someone hired a helicopter to fly over our house because they're really just jealous about all that we had.

As I come out of my high school years, there's really only one thing I wanna do at that time and it's play baseball. I was playing baseball throughout high school. I wanted to play in college and eventually play pro or go as far as I could.

My dream was to be in the big leagues and so like any kid, I knew I had to go to college or at least figure out a way to get drafted. And before seeing my dream come true, there was something that I needed to do and this is, again, part of the belief system.

If I wanted God to bless me, if I wanted him to do what I desired, then I would need to make an offering of some sort or to give him my first fruits. And so I remember talking with family and seeking wise counsel and the wisdom was you should take a year and you should give it to Uncle Benny.

You should serve him in the ministry. Go work for him and then go to college, play baseball and it made total sense to me as I thought if I want God to give me the desires of my heart and I wanna play baseball and I wanna be in the big leagues and I wanted this and that and the other, then I need to sow a seed of faith into his ministry.

And money wasn't really what I was thinking of. I thought the greatest gift that I can give because I'm part of the family is to lay down my dream, to give my time and serve him. And so before going to college, I took a year off.

I joined his ministry and that's when I was a catcher and was serving with him. And that year in particular, it was a year plus, we ended up staying in some of the nicest hotels in the world. It's where I've talked about a hotel called the Burj Al Arab in Dubai.

We stayed in the Royal Suite. It was $25 ,000 a night US and we had other suites along with it and a lot of those other suites were around $1 ,000 per night. The reason I know those numbers and remember those numbers is because I was assisting helping to check out of hotels and checking in and I was standing with my dad in our room or his room actually, because I ended up staying in the Royal Suite because there were several bedrooms and it's a massive square footage.

And one of my, well, my brother-in-law's brother married my cousin. This is a side note, but there are two brothers, Michael and Theo Koulianos. That'd be another topic for another time. But Michael is head of Jesus Image and they're kind of a very up and coming.

They've already upped and gotten. They're absorbing a lot of my uncle's partners and a lot of his ministry momentum. Jesus Image is Michael Koulianos and Jessica, my Uncle Benny's daughter. And then Theo married my sister.

And so Greek brothers, well, Michael was on the road with us as well. So Michael and I were staying in the Royal Suite. Uncle Benny had his monstrous room and we had ours. And I remember just living the dream.

It was like living in one of those weird music videos where there's a bunch of nice cars and Bentleys and all these crazy hotels. And it's just, it's worldly and it's wild. And you're out there living the dream.

And then it's ministry. And you kind of turn the switch on and off where it's time to minister. So you go be spiritual and then it's time to live it up. And so you just go and enjoy yourself. And we flew all over the place.

At one point we stayed at this hotel called Villa d 'Este and it was on Lake Como, which is where like George Clooney lives. It's in Italy, beautiful place. There's a, one of the James Bond movies was filmed there.

And we're enjoying that. We're flying all over the world. We're staying in the nicest hotels. At one point we were staying at the Hotel de Paris in Monaco, in Monte Carlo. And I remember going to the casino next door and gambling and like hanging out and just enjoying the life there.

I shopped at Versace. I mean, everything we bought was just high caliber and high class. And this was the life. And during that season, there were a lot of prophecies made over my life that I would be next, that I would be the heir apparent.

I was the oldest Kosti. There's four of us. And one of them, one of my cousins passed away a couple of years ago, but there's four Kostis. And the way that it works in the family is you name your firstborn son after your father.

So my grandfather's name was Kostandi or Kostihen. Full name is Kostandi. And my dad had the first Kosti, that's me. And there's like significance to that. And so I'm to carry on the family name out of all the cousins and typical, like my big fat Greek wedding stuff.

It's like that times 10. And so traveling with him, working for Uncle Benny, being around the family, I would be prophesied over. And so I remember one time Oral Roberts laying his hands on me. And to give you a full picture, I wasn't fully bought in to, man, I gotta get Oral Roberts to lay hands on me.

The actual story, and I wrote this, it's in the opening chapter of the book. And it's about the most ridiculous story and the most childish story, but it gives you a picture of where I was at. I'm working for my uncle and I'm back in the green room and I'm eating Cheez-Its or something like that.

And my dad just comes bursting in and Oral Roberts is about to head out. And he wants me to be prayed for so that Oral Roberts can give me a double portion or whatever. I was getting really old. And I just remember his big sweaty hand, his big hands, he's a big guy.

And he laid it on my head and said something, I don't even remember, but it was some sort of prophecy, double portion stuff. And there was another night where this guy named Steve Brock, he was one of my uncle's famous singers, made this big elaborate prophecy that I'm to take over my father's church and then I'm gonna take the healing ministry from all the family to heights that it had never seen and all this stuff and everyone's crying.

And I'm like, sweet, I'm gonna be rich. I'm gonna be next. I'm gonna live in a big house. I really just want nice cars and okay, and I wanna keep flying in private planes. And all the while, the way that the ministry was framed, there were NFL players, big league players.

There was at one point where we were flown somewhere and a particular owner and I'll spare their identity on purpose just to respect them. I don't know where they're at now in life, but they owned a major food chain and two major sports franchises.

And we flew into where they lived. They came onto the plane and one of the family members had cancer and they had particularly given a massive donation and my uncle prayed for them. And so all the while, I remember going to Without Walls Church before Paula White and my uncle got caught on camera or whatever with a photo holding hands in Rome.

And on the stage at Without Walls was Carl Everett who at the time was playing for the Red Sox. There were multiple players that were around that orbit. Darryl Strawberry, before he hit the conference circuit, I don't know where he came from, but now he's everywhere.

I'm like, okay, as long as you're preaching the right gospel, but I remember you. There's this whole gauntlet of figures. At one point, I don't know how many of you guys remember Sister Sister. Remember Tia and Tamara, that show?

I watched it as a kid. They ended up on stage at a crusade because they were kind of in the circle. So you have celebrity, you have athletes, you have major wealth, and all the while, no matter what weird things you see going on or what scam you think might be happening based on what someone said is going on, how can all of these people who are famous, who are wealthy, who are influential be getting taken?

There's no way. And so I thought, living the dream, I'd seen some things, there were some troubles, but all the while, I would keep fighting those with, yeah, but all of these people, it must be true.

There was a couple of moments in particular that ended up being used by the Lord later on. One was in India in particular. There was over a million people at the service. This is on YouTube. We had leased out a bunch of land, and the people went as far as the eye could see.

True story. And there were barricades between the stage and us, and my dad one night took me down to the healing lines. He worked a lot of the healing lines. And he takes me down there, and I remember it feeling like a scene.

Of course, it's my younger mind, and it's all overwhelming, because I'm at that age, and I'm having these experiences emotionally where I'm like, something's going on, but I don't think it is, and I'm caught between family.

But I would describe it as one of those scenes from my private Ryan or a war movie, where it just seems like chaos is happening. Bullets are flying, everyone's yelling, things are tinging off walls, and there's a bunch of noise.

Except it was in this whole section where people were crying out for healing, they put the sick in one area. It's similar to the healing crusades in the arenas where they'd put all the wheelchairs in one section.

At this particular instance, they had put in this one particular section all of the sick. And it was not first world sickness in the medical term of things. It was more man-made and handmade, and smelt, and people were there.

And I just remember walking through with my dad, and it was like a war zone. And I looked up, and this moment seared in my mind. And my uncle was on stage singing or something like that. He's in this perfectly white suit.

The suits were made by Monsieur Bichon in Beverly Hills. Monsieur Bichon had a really nice yellow Rolls Royce, and he had a Bentley, a lot of other cars too. But the presidents would shop there. And we'd go get these suits custom made.

They had the little dove. He had the Nehru, the little Nehru collar that looks like a James Bond villain with the suit,.

And all that stuff.

And I looked up, perfectly white suit, the choir's all in blue behind him. And again, not in the moment, but years later, that flashed in my mind as the dichotomy between the man who could heal and who had the anointing, or if he was accused of saying he could heal, he'd say, I'm not the healer, only God is.

I just pray for people, all that stuff, all the masterful PR. And years later, that moment came to bear on my mind. But in all of that, I still pushed the thoughts, pushed the questions away. After all that, ended up going to play baseball.

I played in California for a few years at a community college there, lived with my uncle for a bit, drove one of my aunt's Cadillac Escalades, and lived the dream, and then started playing baseball. And my parents ended up moving there, getting another place.

And so now we're in Orange County in Canada, two places, two homes, living it up. At that time, I drove a really nice Hummer that had TVs in the screens that I'd turn on, even though no one would be in the car.

I had rims that, because I saw what Sammy Sosa was driving, who was a pretty famous baseball player at the time, I found out what rims he had, I bought the same ones. I mean, the whole thing was just all done up.

And I go, and the Lord opens a door, I didn't realize that he was doing it, although I thought he was, because I was praying to a God somewhere, that he would open the door for me to play baseball. So I end up at Dallas Baptist University.