My Testimony

My name is Raymond Joey Hargreaves, everyone calls me Joey, I am 33 years old. I grew up here in Bakersfield. It is hard to identify an actual side of town I am from because I never really lived anywhere for more than 2 years. There were so many events that took place it is hard to pinpoint my transformation into a Christian. I could not have been more than 11 when I gave my life to Christ for the first time at Riverlakes church. They baptized me in the kern river when I had a giant green mohawk, I had fun there, and I recall being a shepherd in a Jesus play at the church. That was the first time I raised my hand and said yes to Christ in my life. I did not fully understand what was taking place at the time. I was bullied a lot growing up we did not have much when I was younger my mom was the youngest of all moms trying to manage her life at an early age. We got by and survived but I became very violent from the bullying. I think it was my sophomore year I had enough of being bullied and I fought everyone that made fun of me. I fought so many people I ended up losing a few fights to some members of the South High football team at the time, but by that time the whole school knew my name. I had a few close friends with who I regularly smoked weed with but after my reputation went to crazy popular, I was the hit spot to smoke weed. At one point I had about 16 people buying weed from me at the same time. I naturally started slinging weed from the apartment I was staying at, my mom’s apartment, and to say the least, my popularity went so out of control that people started to recognize my mother in public. I made a good bit of money from sales enough to never stop getting high on weed. I had a friend join me to help me sell the weed at school. We would get high before class and then hang out after school and get high again. Until one morning, my friend who was helping me make sales and viewing the inflow of money brought a line of meth over for me to try. I remember it hit me hard, a lot harder than weed. Some guy threw something at me during lunch that day at school, and I kicked him in the back of the head that day. Then I puked shortly after because I was way over the speed limit. I ended up on a whole other level of drug use. I went from being king of the forest to a giant game of charades. A lot happened in high school, my mom and stepdad divorced and I blamed my mom for the divorce. I took it pretty hard, but I had been in and out of Valley Bible Fellowship during Highschool, but my best friend at the time was sick of being treated unwelcome and said he never wanted to go back. I loved learning about scripture at the time, but I hated the people the church approved of as leaders. They were incredibly stuck-up, rude, arrogant, and mocked us every time we tried to get involved with church functions. I just never felt the love of Christ from anyone in the church, I never felt welcome, and I never felt accepted. I felt more love from my stoner/skateboarder friends, so naturally, I walked away from regular church attendance in Highschool. A house rule at my mom’s was that in order to live there I had to attend church so I ended up back in church when I was staying at home. I graduated high school high on meth I remember I could not sleep the night before I had to walk across the stage in 2005. My high school sweetheart, who I went to prom with, ended up going with me down the same road we became partners in crime. We were ride or die, but that quickly turned sour. The dope changed her moral boundaries along the way, and I had enough of being lied to. (tattoo expose) I had gotten myself into a few very dangerous situations during the drug use that almost cost me my life, and I turned to prayer saying, “God if you get me out of here alive I will go to church regularly and put you first in my life.” And I would, until my addiction drew me back into regular drug use. My lowest point was when my suspicions came to fruition about my highschool sweetheart. I hadn’t slept in quite some time and was starving. I was homeless pushing a shopping cart dumpster diving for things to trade for drugs. I was trying to get money for us to eat and stay high by collecting cans. Just one day things hit different I remember eating old McDonald’s out of the trash that day because I was going to pass out. I was trading cans to the can donation spot and I traded a lot of cans one day and received way less money than usual. Barely enough to get by, but later that evening I discovered drugs on my girlfriend that I was unaware of and that was the last straw for me just realizing I was all alone in my addiction, homeless and starving with a girl whose heart had left me. I remember the situation escalated quickly and I was going to harm her for lying to me. Instead, I called home and asked my mom for help to get off drugs and help to get off the streets that’s when she recommended Teen Challenge. When the smoke had cleared, I was a very lost soul from 2005-2007 I was 145lbs when I crawled through the doors of Teen Challenge after hitting major rock bottom. I did about 30 days and had to leave because I needed a cigarette and the girl, I was with was lying to me on the phone. I left only to find her back in the dope house still getting high and who knows what else, but I ended up coming back into the program, this time bringing her into the program for the first time and making it 7 months before I got into an altercation with another student. During my time in Teen Challenge, I had major heartbreak right before I was kicked out. The girl I had come into the program with, hoping that we would work out in the end, had left the program and ran off with a guy she met at fire camp. I had come to find out she never accepted Christ and was sneaking cigarettes into the facility. It was detrimental to me, mainly because I was forbidden to talk to her while we were in the program because she was not my wife. Teen Challenge faculty felt bad for me about what had happened they sent me to go stay at the Teen Challenge women’s home and help with some construction labor after the incident. When I was released from Teen Challenge I joined up with my church Valley Bible Fellowship and joined the single’s ministry there where I met Rebekah, the only person in my life who hadn’t dealt with drug and alcohol addiction, and she stuck with me for many years during my recovery. I was doing so good but I didn’t know how to handle major setbacks having my life in order managing my own apartment, working full-time when they fired me from the Oilfields I lost everything and had to move out of my apartment because I couldn’t afford rent was the moment I first relapsed after Teen Challenge the only way I knew how to handle the depression of losing everything I worked so hard for was to use drugs. I was too ashamed to move back in with my mom. My sobriety lasted about a year outside of Teen Challenge before too long I was strung out again. This process continued for two more rehabs New Harvest Men’s Transitional Home, and Lynwood Worship Center men’s transitional home. I would be clean for a year out of rehab and then relapse for a time until 2013. A man named Pastor Robert Erkheart gave me the tools I needed to stay sober and modeled Christ for me every day. I was able to stay clean and sober for three years. I had a basic concept of friendship with the people I had grown up with, and I never betrayed that friendship. I slowly began to learn that my friends did not carry the same viewpoint towards me, so I became the butt of every joke among my own friends and a target for theft. I had said that I held tight to for years during my addiction steal from a place, not a face, but every time I turned around my closest friends felt that my life was more successful than theirs, and I was the one being robbed. I had got into a bad fistfight with my younger brother as an adult that got me kicked out of my mom’s house. I moved in with a friend and ended up screwing that up and ended up on Rebekah’s apartment floor where she was staying with her roommate. I was able to stay sober, but I did not have any control over my anger issues. Things were always so tight living on my own there, with Rebekah being my financial accountability partner, barely making ends meet, until I met this guy at Intervarsity who had a disability. He got a lot of social security money and had no bills. So, he took it upon himself to spend crazy amounts of money on me to have a good time, eating, shopping, paying all the overhead that I had been stressing about. It got out of control because we were staying out late like a mad shopping spree with no end. When it ended this guy would come back over and it would start all over again until he broke the bank one day. He wanted to keep having fun spending money and just doing things. I told him I would take him home and call it a day, but he refused to come to terms with not having any money left. I was not a genie, but he was crying in my car. Me being kind of sarcastic remembered a way he could get money out of the ATM so I informed him that he could write a fake check and put it in the ATM and withdraw the limit. So, he did, and we spent the money, and then he wanted me to do it to my bank account. He convinced me to break my bank for 500 but I was not willing to spend the money for him and me to continue this shopping spree. I knew that I would no longer be able to use my bank account after I did that and that was the last of my money. He ran away from my car and that was the end of our friendship. But during the event, I had lost my way. I had money that Rebekah did not know I had for the first time in three years. I had made a bad mistake by ruining my bank account that I could not tell Rebekah about. I had a few things that belong to the guy who ran away from the car that I stole from him and lied about. I was already knee-deep in trouble at this point, so I got in contact with an old friend who just got released from jail. He got out of jail and was right back doing dope. He made it easy for me to get dope without having to play charades, but this game of charades was different. I had been out of the drug distribution for many years now buying 60 dollars’ worth of meth ended being more than two eight balls of dope. It was more meth than I had ever had in my lifetime. I tried to explain that it was a lot of dope to the guy, but he agreed that it belonged to me. I was very confused because I was just expecting three pinky size 20 sacks. I separated 600 dollars’ worth of dope and I kept 100 worth to me. I told him I did not pay for this, but he was tripping on me. Even after I gave him most of the dope enough to keep a man high for over a month he was not satisfied until he had robbed me for the shake at the bottom of what was the sack, he gave me. Pacing back and forth in my apartment getting ready to attack me I called my ex-stepdad since he divorced my mother but had raised me since I was 5 years old. I explained the situation to my dad, and he reassured me that he was going to deal with this guy trying to rob me for pennies on the dime. It was garbage dope anyways that is probably why it was so much for so cheap. I called a Lyft ride with my cell phone from the Taylor Pointe Apartments to a mobile home park on Union where my dad was staying. I smoked the meth that I had made it out of there with which was not much between my dad, his girlfriend, and me I. Anyways I explained the situation to my dad I showed him who the guy was and he looked him up on Facebook at which point he discovered that he was from the same gang in prison, the peckerwood white supremacy group, and realized he couldn’t help me deal with this guy. At which point my dad calls two of his friends to come to help him deal with me. There was a Pitbull in the house so any altercation inside the house would have gotten me eaten alive. His two friends arrive, and he shows them that the guy who tried to get violent with me at the apartment was in association with some peckerwood leader named Chad in prison and they were all bound by honor to defend each other which made me their captive. I tried to make a run for it at a nearby 7-11, but my dad seemed was ready to kill me and I had a feeling the cashier would have shot me. I used the same phone to call for a Lyft ride and grabbed my Bible on my way out. My dad following me like he is nonviolent tells my Lyft driver some made-up story ahead of me. I run around the other side of the car to jump in the back seat, but the Lyft driver will not drive, and my dad yanks me out of the back of the Lyft and slams me face down on the rocks and dirt. I pull my knife out of my pocket too fast and it slips out of my hand about a foot away as I am in full panic mode. His two buddies did not see the altercation because they were banging my dad’s girlfriend behind his back. I drag him across the rocks and gravel until I can reach my knife and I stab him at the weirdest angle in his kidney. He does not get off me, so I stabbed him a second time on the other side of his back. He rolled over and I had the knife to his throat I was going to kill him, but God said I was free to go and that was enough. I got off him and cussed him out as I ran down Union Avenue with hands full of blood, a knife in my hand, running for my life because I knew his friends would come after me. I made it a couple of blocks until I dove into a nearby mechanics’ car and handed him, the mechanic, my phone so he could call the police for me while I hid in the back of his truck because I was being chased. Apparently, my dad’s friends only had one truck and they used it to transport my dad, not my dad, to KMC to get stitches and did not have a second vehicle to come after me. I went to jail that morning. The worst comedown of my life in downtown jail. I get blamed for everything assault with a deadly weapon, battery, Great Bodily Injury, possession, under the influence of a controlled substance, I was looking at a lot of time like 15 years, but my mom paid 5000 for a lawyer, I took the deal and pleaded no contest, got me like 45 days in jail, 1-year rehab(Jason’s Retreat 6 months/LInks to Change 6 months), 3 years felony probation, 3 years anger management(Kern Probation Anger Management), 6 months of drug counseling.(CSO Behavioral Health) My dad did not do one day for what he did to me he walked away scot-free. Blaming me for everything, denying he was under the influence of meth, denying there was meth in the RV he was staying at, the police could not search the RV because there was a pit-bull inside. I have had a really difficult time not getting revenge but God reminds me of the verse vengeance is mine saith the Lord. I want revenge, but I have had time to work through it though. I have been clean ever since walking with God as close as I possibly can so that I never have to deal with the consequences of what the enemy has to offer. Today I am no longer addicted to cigarettes, weed, beer, or any mind-altering substances. Instead of allowing my walk with God to become idle I kept seeking the Lord in my pursuit of the gifts of the Spirit and exercising prophecy within a small worship group. I rejoined the InterVarsity Club at CSUB. What of the things that I have had to come to terms with is realizing that I don’t have any more laps left to run with the devil that everything is a trap to take my life away from me. The enemy will use anything he can to get me to kill myself, get me in a situation that will get me killed, or put me in the wrong place at the wrong time that will land me in jail doing life.