“I didn’t know where all this was going to take me,” Jorge remembers. How could he? He was only a boy.
At 13 years old, Jorge was already getting a taste of life behind bars.
By the time he turned 16, Jorge was selling drugs. He made up to $7,000 a day, and he was popular—and to a high school kid from a family of seven children, that was all that really mattered. Jorge was desperate for attention. And he was getting it in all the wrong places.
But deep down inside, he wasn’t happy.
The Seed Is Planted
Jorge married and had four children. He hid his life of crime from his family, but he didn’t give it up. But one day, a friend invited Jorge to church.
Outside, in the church parking lot, “I put my gun and my bag of cocaine under the dashboard,” Jorge admits.
What happened next planted a seed that God would one day use to change his life.
“People at this church were singing and clapping,” Jorge recalls. “It made an impact. I had never cried like that day,” he says.
But when the service was over, Jorge says, “I went back into my car and put my gun back under my belt.”
And then suddenly—after more than two decades on the wrong side of the law, and after spending the better part of his life in prisons in the U.S. and Mexico—Jorge finally hit bottom.
From a Prisoner and Worse—to Child of the King
Jorge’s wife decided she’d had enough and divorced him. As his family fell apart, the rest of his life began to crumble, too. “I started losing everything, one by one,” he says. “I didn’t even have five dollars to buy a hamburger.”
Confused and despondent, Jorge decided to end his life with a drug overdose.
When his friends found him and saved his life, Jorge said to them, “Why did you bring me back? I wanted to die.”
He tried to overdose again, this time in a local park. A police officer found him and rushed him to a hospital. “I’m not even any good at killing myself,” Jorge thought.
And then he prayed, “Okay, God, I want to go Your way.”
“I was tired,” Jorge explains. “That’s what made a criminal become a child of God.”
Over the next five years, “God changed me, little by little,” Jorge says.
No Life Beyond the Reach of God’s Power
“I thought that selling drugs was the only thing I knew how to do. But I discovered I had a lot of talents that I never knew I had.”
Within a few years, he was volunteering with Prison Fellowship in Los Angeles. Today, Jorge works as God’s ambassador, overseeing Prison Fellowship’s work in Mexico and Latin America.
As Jorge might say, God gives us all the opportunity to show what He can do.