The Plot: Drug Dealer / Gang Member gets Saved.

Music, Church, and Family Background

Rap, big part of my life. Music was a big part of my family. We played jazz, Motown, old school records like that. And gospel was played, you know, also in my family. I was raised up in church. I was in the Pentecostal movement, if you will.

The church of God and Christ. I was born in New Orleans. I moved to LA when I was five years old. Lived there for a couple of years and moved out to the Burbs. Moved to San Marcos or Escondido on the border of San Marcos.

Very nice place. I was very foreign to it, you know. So I stopped going to church really at the age of seven or eight when I moved out there. We really kind of stopped going to church, me and my family.

I remember hearing things about the gospel. I remember hearing things in my house about Jesus. And I grew up in a home with my mother and my father. It's not likely heard, you know. But I was one of the minorities that did.

Family Breakdown, Trouble, and Gang Life

But at the age of, it's like 12 years old, 12 years old, my mother and my father, you know, they split up. They split up for about five years. And when they split, it really did something to me. Escondido, California is mainly the suburbs, but you have your little places there like every city where there is trouble.

And I found trouble. I became one of the ones that was boosting up the crime rate, if you will. And I started getting involved with being affiliated with gangs. Got to smoking weed and things like that and got into alcohol.

I was pumped up on gangster music and now I'm around gangsters. And now I'm kind of like, this is where I want to be. You know, I want to be one of these, one of the, you know, one of the cool cats that's respected.

You know, that's actually, you know, feared too. And just, and cool, you know. I was dibbling and dabbling in the crime, but it started progressing little by little. I started getting serious with the music, but also started living out what I was rapping about more.

You know, I have my big homies that would be like, you know, you can't rap about it if you not about it. I wanted to be everything that I rapped about, everything that I saw, everything that was intriguing to me.

I wanted to be that. And I saw it just unravel in my life. I saw that I could be all these things. I had the right connections, I had the right people. And as I'm traveling down this road, the road gets darker.

Violence, Fear, and Relocation

Things started getting a little rough for me in California. When my big homie, Haji, was alive, we was getting some colossal burglars. Next thing you know, we walking back to the car and hit shots. And they were so close.

Real quick, I hit the ground. Them bullets is coming for any of us. You know, any of us could have got killed that night. That experience that night was like, dang, no wonder why, and this may seem extreme to a lot of people, but it's true, but no wonder why there's the AK -47 in the closet.

There's a .357 on top of the refrigerator. There's a .25 underneath the couch that, you know, I carry to the store sometimes just to walk right across the street. So I felt safe a lot, you know, with them, and also a little vulnerable at times, and that's why, of course, there was guns in the car when we would ride, and there was just one particular time we pulled up at a stop sign, and this dude over to the left of us, he's mean mugging.

So my big homie mean mugging back. Next thing you know, they both start reaching underneath the seat, and it was about to go down, and then they recognize each other. And I'm like, man, praise God. Now, I wasn't like, praise God, but I was just like, man, that could've went the wrong way, that could've went bad.

I had to, just had to get away from Los Angeles, and had to get away from Escondido, period. I was like, man, you know what? Fine, let me try to go see if I can get some help out there in Syracuse. Ended up staying there for two years, and when I stayed there for two years, I was the same me.

I still couldn't keep myself from trouble. I couldn't get out of trouble, you know? I was around trouble, I was causing trouble. Started getting into selling crack cocaine, cook up crack right there in my kitchen.

It's like I struck gold. The thing about selling crack cocaine, it tripped me out, because I saw a part of me that I didn't know that was there, which was like more of a monster. Through all this, my conscience was just bothering me.

I knew what morals was. I had a mother and a father that taught me right from wrong, but also knew that in my heart of hearts, no matter how rebellious I was. Conviction was hitting me like crazy. I always knew God was real.

I thought I was a Christian, like a lot of my friends, like a lot of gang members that I was around thought they was a Christian. We used to sit around, get high, get drunk, and talk about God, and we thought we was Christians.

Even killers could point to somebody worse than themselves. Ended up going to church. Conviction was hitting me like crazy. I finally heard the gospel, like for the first time. God's grace is amazing.

It is truly amazing. I see how God intervened in every single situation in my life. Gonna shoot up a house with an elderly woman and a pregnant woman over a cell phone. So ready to go and even murder someone, and even help murder someone, try to.

I'm sitting there, take it, take the gun, let's get rid of this. And God intervened. God came to my house and tried to rob me again. God's providence that he used a heathen that was in my house, his presence there was like enough to have the old boy switch up his story and leave from my home.

My mom found one lawyer that would take my case, and won, and got me out of there in two months when I should've been in the penitentiary for years. All the dumb stuff that I've said, that I've done with these hands right here, don't you understand it was God's hand in all of that to cause you to believe the gospel, to cause you to see what Jesus Christ have done.

Christ's Obedience, Atonement, and Resurrection

God now has changed my heart of stone into a heart of flesh to care for the guys that are out there doing some of the dumb things that I was doing. One man coming to this earth, fully God, fully man, obedient, because none of us could be obedient, but obedient to the T, every tittle, every jot of the law, he fulfilled it, perfect in every thought, every word, every deed, in all of the sin of all of his people that he intimately knew from the foundation of the world.

All their sin, all their filth, all the things that is in their hearts, and their minds, all the corrupt, everything you can imagine that is so abominable to God. He hates sin because he's so holy, he's the expression of love to the point to where his son went to the cross for the first time in eternity past, the Trinity Union, the Triune God, that fellowship was broken.

Christ was abandoned on the cross, suffering the wrath of his father, the full force of his wrath. He drunk the cup, paid the penalty that I should have paid, and after bearing that wrath, buried in the tomb, his body, stayed there for three days and resurrected, proven to the whole world that he was God, that he's the only one that could be just and the justifier of the wicked, of wicked men like me.

So the plot is his plot, he's the writer, Christ, and he wrote me into a story, Ivy Connolly, a heathen, a hustler, a sinner, career criminal, and he was gracious enough to save someone like me, thank God for that.