By Abdul Masih —
To go to church with his girlfriend, Mike Gomez smoked a joint, hit a line of speed and stashed bags of more drugs in his pockets.
“I went to church high on drugs. I had been partying for three days with no sleep,” Mike tells. “I walked in with a bag of weed and a bag of speed on me. I walked out delivered, sober, in my right mind. The power of God hit me and I’ve never looked back.”
Mike was raised in Fontana and was a feared street tough and drug dealer.
His sister, who had been touched by God, visited Mike and his then-girlfriend and invited them to church. Mike paid no attention while he consumed drugs, but his girlfriend was curious and quizzed the sister. Then both turned on Mike.
“I said yes basically to just make them be quiet,” he recalls. He got high beforehand.
“There was a dumb old movie at church that night,” Mike says. “But it was at the altar call where God met with me. I was the last person to answer the altar call that night, and I’m so grateful.”
Mike always assumed he would live beyond 25. But today he is almost 62, married and a grandfather. He’s been a pastor and and an evangelist with the Christian Fellowship Ministries, a church planting movement based in Arizona.
Mike was fighter who never backed down. One time, a guy pulled a gun on him. He went to a bar later to calm his nerves. On his way home at 3 a.m., two guys harassed him at a stop sign, and he took the challenge. He jumped out of his truck and rushed both of them, but they gunned the accelerated.
Mike found himself on the hood of their car. “Then I got really upset,” he says. “I tried to chase them in my truck, but my truck was too low gear to catch them.”
Enraged, he decided to take up the guy who had pulled a gun on him. He went to his house at 4 a.m., banged on his door and waited for him to come out. He didn’t answer.
“That’s the violence and rage I had in me,” he says.
