The long and short of it…

I was born October 10, 1958, in the Bronx, into a crazy, middle class Italian family. My mom and dad owned an Italian deli and worked night and day to become successful small business owners. After a few years, they did so well that they moved our family to Rockland County in upstate New York. I had everything a kid could want: a lot of land to play on, a built-in swimming pool, new clothes all the time, Cadillacs to drive around in, and family vacations every year in the tropics. Although I did not grow up in financial poverty, I learned at a young age that possessions, money, and worldly pleasures could not satisfy me. Do not get me wrong, I have had a lot of money and I have also gone bankrupt. I would rather have money, but money does not necessarily make you happy, it just helps make things easier. As I got into my teen years, I started to indulge in sexual impurity, drinking, and drug use. My drug habit got so bad that my brother and I became drug dealers just so we could have drugs constantly on hand and financially support our habit. Our great uncle was a connected man in the mafia, and he gave us the book in our county. That means we were bookies, taking bets over the phone in our pizzeria. I liked the feeling of being the big shot, until one day I saw the destruction of what gambling could do to a family. I asked my uncle to take me out of the book and he did. I did not know it then, but I was searching for happiness, my purpose, or as some say, the meaning of life. 

After that, I went to Las Vegas and became a blackjack dealer. My life got even more out of control as I gambled, kept sticking cocaine up my nose, and went from woman to woman just trying to fill up this empty feeling I had inside of me. Almost every time I was in bed, I would look up at the ceiling and say to myself, “What the hell is life all about? Am I gonna do this for the next 40 or 50 years and just drop dead? Is this what life is all about?” I was filled with the fear of death, thinking that after this life I would just stop existing but life would go on without end. Thinking of eternity freaked me out. I decided to go to New York for a vacation, but it ended up that I never went back to Vegas. It was during this time that I had become totally morally bankrupt. I started dating a married woman (not proud of that) and was a drugged out, out of control mess. There would be times that I would be stoned for days and not even know where I was or what day it was. My dad had sold his business, and he and my brother were relocating to Florida to start a new life and business. They invited me to come along, so I did. What happened next changed my life forever.

It was February 21, 1980. It was a cold winter’s night, and we went to have dinner and say goodbye to our cousins. These are the people who worked in the deli with us and went out with us to get stoned, so I thought this would be an epic night of partying. My brother quickly put me straight when he said, “Barbara and Sal have become Jesus freaks while you were gone, and there will be no partying tonight!”

That night as we ate dinner, all that our cousins talked about was Jesus this and Jesus that. We could not wait for this dinner to end so we could go to the city and party. After dinner, we declined coffee and cake, got our coats on, and ran for the door. When we opened the door, there was a flat tire on our car and it was freezing, so we went back inside for the coffee and cake. We decided it was time to change the tire and get away from these Jesus freaks so we headed for the door again. This time, as we opened the door, there was a snowstorm going on. The wind was blowing so hard that the snow was coming in the house. In the hour we were inside, about three inches of snow fell and there was no sign of it stopping. My cousin Sal looked at us and said, “Where you going? Come on in.” It felt like we were locked in a house with the incarnate Apostle Paul. All Sal kept saying was that Jesus loved us and would forgive us for all of our sin. It got late, and he said, “Listen, if you die without repenting to Jesus, you will go to hell. But if you repent and believe in Jesus and die, you will go to heaven.” He did not say this to scare us; he said this because that was the simple truth. My brother and his wife prayed with Sal and Barbara and repented to Jesus. Then I prayed and repented, and when I was praying, a power knocked me to the floor. I could hear everything that they were saying, but I could not move. My body filled up with heat, and when they picked me up off the floor, I was so filled with sweat that it looked like I just came out of the shower. My clothes were drenched and my hair was dripping. That night, Sal gave us Bibles. We stayed up until late in the night reading together, they prayed for us, and we all just fell asleep. That was the first night of my life that I slept with the lights off.

I woke the next day with a feeling of absolute peace inside me. I had no desire for drugs from that day on, and I became celibate for many years. I started to go back to the bars where I used to party and stand outside giving people gospel booklets and preaching to everyone waiting in line to get inside. I was a totally new man. I never did another drug again. I married a beautiful Christian woman, and God has given us two beautiful daughters, two wonderful sons-in-law, and one precious granddaughter. Jesus called my wife Terrill and I into the ministry after the first year of marriage. We gave up our pizzeria to follow God’s call. Terrill and I started to work for our church; for six years I was the pastor of youth and evangelism, and then in 1994, we left to work with Youth With a Mission. We planted a YWAM work in Baltimore, Maryland, pastored for YWAM Atlanta, and all the while the Lord was building through us a community development ministry in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. The Lord has also expanded my ministry of teaching, mentoring, and writing. It has been a busy and fruitful thirty-three years. My mother always asks me when I will stop traveling and retire. My response is, “Mom, you don’t retire from God’s call; you live in it until you die.”