“Jesus is My Giddy-Up and Go”

“When I started doing methamphetamines I tried it the first time and it was over, I loved it. It took me to a whole new reality. But it also took me to a real dark place as well.”

Gary Gustin grew up in Palm Dale, California where he became accustomed to violence at a young age.

“I was raised in an alcoholic family. My dad wasn't around very much,” he says. “My mom had an abusive boyfriend from the time I was three years old till I was about 16. He would beat my mom and I used to interject, you know, so he wouldn’t beat on my mom, and as I got older the beatings became more on me. I was bitter about it.”

Gary was barely in his teens when he began smoking pot. “It took me away from everything. When I was high I didn't feel anything. So I didn't have all those emotions.”

When he was introduced to meth, his life took a turn for the worse. Gary says, “I opened myself to demonic influences because I was so dark. I was open to anything. I didn't love myself or anybody else for that matter. Didn't care how I affected other people. I ended up dropping out of high school. I started getting into trouble.”
    
Gary spent eight years in the Arizona department of corrections and many shorter sentences in county jails.  The experiences there made him even more hardened. “All I did was fight. I loved the pain for the simple fact that it made me feel alive. Nothing in my life was, was fulfilling that hole in my heart.”

While in prison he longed for purpose and meaning in an empty life. “I dabbled with paganism and the multiple gods thing,” he says. “Odin, Thor, Loki, and everything else. And each one has an attribute that is supposed to control you. I always had in the back of my mind that, ‘Okay, there's got to be a God that's overseeing them.”

He often attended Christian services in prison as well. “I started going to church but it was to get out of my cell. We would go there and meet and sit there and talk while the preacher was up there preaching and stuff. But you know what? God's Word never comes back void. And, you know, all those times that I was just there to get – to do whatever I was doing there, God was speaking to me.”

After he served his sentence, Gary met and married Kim. The two of them shared their drug addiction, often staying in meth and crack houses for days at a time. “I thought I was going to be a drug addict,” Gary recalls. “I remember sitting there thinking to myself, ‘This is all you're ever going to be. There is no hope for you.’ Just thought that was it. That’s what I was going to do for the rest of my life. We ended up living in this trailer that had no power, no water. I was really at my end at that point with using. I needed something, and I knew it, but I didn't know what it was.”  

On New Year’s Day 2017, Gary decided he had had enough of this lifestyle. “I told my wife, Kim, I said, ‘Put on your shoes.’ And she said ‘Why? Where are we going?’ I said, ‘We're going to go find a church.’"
 
 Kim remembers, “He grabbed my hand, he's like pulling me. I'm thinking, ‘You're crazy. You want to go to church? I don't believe you.’” 

The couple walked around town and saw a sign that said, “Colt Baptist Church” and went inside.

“I grabbed ahold of that door and it was the heaviest door I ever opened in my life,” Gary recalls. We walked in that church and we were welcomed with open arms. And they just loved us and it was life changing, you know. I knew right then that's where I needed to be.”

After the service, Gary and Kim asked the pastor to pray with them.  “I got a huge dose of Jesus Christ--just the Holy Spirit just filled me right then and there,” Gary says.  “I remember sitting back there at that little round table just bawling and just pouring my heart out, you know, asking Him to forgive me and my life has totally changed. He took my addiction, He took it away. I have no desire – from that moment on, I had no desire to use, whatsoever.”
 
 Kim adds, “We met some amazing people that night. But we met Jesus that night and that was the most amazing feeling you'll ever feel in your life is Jesus. He took all those burdens, all those drugs, all that emptiness, all that hatred that we felt for each other, and there were no more drugs,” she says. “There was no more cussing. There was nothing but love for each other and for everybody else. Because we love Him, we can love everybody. And that's all our desire is, is to love.”

Gary and Kim are now clean and sober. they run a drive-through prayer ministry in Arkansas, and share their testimony everywhere they can. Kim says, “Jesus paid the price. He loves you. He's waiting with open arms and He's always been waiting for you. He loves you. He died for you. He wants you. And He loves us, and He changed it all.” 

“My purpose now is to serve God and to help others come to Christ so they can have that same feeling,” Gary adds.  “I love nothing more than me and my wife going and we tell our testimonies, and to see somebody get saved and be a part of that miracle is so fulfilling and so rewarding in my heart. That's my giddy-up and go!”