AMAZING STORY
Billy's Last Hope
By Rob Hull
The 700 Club
CBN.com- “I had nothing. I was nothing. My life was worth nothing. I was dead. I was dead inside.”
Billy Lind wanted to die. His emptiness and desperation started he was five. His dad walked out on the family.
“I was lost, basically no identity. I was in search of my identity. I took a lot of blame on myself for my father leaving.”
By his early teens he had spent years in juvenile detention for repeatedly running away from home.
“I was raped and sodomized, amongst other things of a torturous nature and that was at the hands of the youth leaders that were supposed to be there to protect me. With all of those rapes came more and more emptiness.”
When he wasn’t in juvy he was on the streets. He learned he could sell his body for money.
“I lived completely on survival mode. At the same time I was very empty, lonely, lost and always looking for something to fill up the big black whole inside of me that never could be filled. Sex was almost 100% of my survival, what I had to do to survive. I numbed myself from feeling anything. What my self worth was at the time was so low that I believed that I was a human toy, for whomever wanted to fulfill a fantasy.”
In his twenties he became a male escort. He also got involved in pornographic movies and live sex shows.
“The pornography business is nothing what it appears to be and it does nothing but dig a big giant deep black whole inside of your soul. In order to get through that I started to use cocaine, and high doses of cocaine.”
He eventually traded cocaine for crack cocaine.
“The first blast I did made me feel like I was the engine of the fastest train in the world. But each blast after that I went back a car. Eventually years later I was the caboose. But in my mind, in the insanity of the drug and the addiction I believed that if I got a better hit off the pipe, if I just got some better dope I can become the engine all over again. That never happened.”
Billy spent his days and nights in his closet smoking crack and abusing his body.
“I cut myself. I rubbed my own blood on myself. I would stick pins and needles inside the nerves of my teeth so I could feel something. It was all about feeling something. I did anything to draw blood to cause me to feel pain. The pain is better than nothing. I was numb. I had no feeling of life.”
He lived in his closet for ten years. Only coming out to sell his body for money to buy more crack.
“This is where I was going to die and no matter how much crack I smoked how much alcohol I drank I was going to do it until I died. Nothing worked as far as suicide went. I had made up my mind that I was just going to get a gun and put it in my mouth and pull the trigger and I knew that would work.”
But before he could pull the trigger he saw something that stopped him cold.
“I had stopped looking at myself in the mirror because of such shame and guilt a long time ago. I happened to get a glimpse of myself in the mirror and I couldn’t see my eyes and it did something to me. In sheer desperation I said, ‘God if You're real You’ve got to save me right now because I can't feel and in 1.2 seconds I'm going to pull this trigger and I'm going to die.’
“That’s when I felt the spirit of God and His right hand reach down into my soul and touch me.”
“I felt this soft voice say 'Stand up.' and I stood up and I looked in the mirror and I could see my eyes again and I could see color in my eyes. I could see color in my face and I could see a ray of hope that was much more powerful than any cocaine, much more powerful than any lust much more powerful than anything in the world in which I lived.”
Billy was immediately changed. He cleared out his closet and threw away his drugs. He bought a Bible and spent the next year learning about the God who had saved him.
“No one saved my life but Jesus Christ! Couldn't explain it, couldn't understand it but I knew that God was real. He was alive and He just touched my heart. I just never had hope before and now I had hope. I knew that I was worth something. I knew that I had something that was better that what I had lived through for 40 years.”
Billy is married and lives in Florida with his wife. He shares his story with others who are desperate for a life changing encounter with God.
“Sometimes desperation is a wonderful gift. If you feel desperate because you've got no place else to go, cry out to Jesus in desperation. He'll meet you right where you are. If you do it with an open sincere heart, He will hear you. He will hear your cry. He’ll answer your prayer and He will come to your aid.”
“Jesus Christ can set you free. He can take your life and give you the desires of y our heart when you desire His heart. There's nothing impossible for Jesus Christ.”
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