Friday night, or should I say, early Saturday morning,
I don't know, I think it was like
around two o'clock in the morning,
my wife gets a phone call,
and it's from our evangelist brother, Ulysses,
who was part-time at that time,
and then he wants to talk to me, and he said,
because I had told him, I said,
hey, unless, you know, like our church gets blown up
or something like that, I said, don't contact me.
I don't want to know about people threatening me online.
I don't need to know about people
saying they're gonna do things to my family and I.
I was like, just keep that stuff to yourself,
just trash those emails, unless like the church gets bombed,
and I was like joking about it,
and so he told me, he said, hey, you didn't want me to,
he's a prophet, and I told him, I said, look,
or he said, you told me not to call you
unless the church gets bombed,
so I'm just calling you because the church got bombed.
Wow.
And I said, what?
He's like, yeah, I'm at the building right now,
and basically what happened was his wife
was just up in the middle of the night,
and she's just kind of going through her phone,
and I think like she looked at the security cameras
or something like that,
and we had just put security cameras the week before,
because I told him, I said,
we need to put security cameras
just thinking something happens, and they were offline,
so then he's like, what in the world?
So then he goes, and then he finds out that it got bombed,
and of course the fire department's there,
and then the FBI came, and then I had to come,
and they basically placed an explosive inside.
They put graffiti all over the walls,
and then they broke out one of the windows
hoping to throw a bomb all the way inside the building,
but because the windows were kind of gated,
they couldn't fit one,
so they put it almost like on the windowsill,
and it blew up the wall
along with the inside of the ceiling,
and so then that happened,
and then they were looking for a second bomb and whatnot,
but we have the people on camera,
so the FBI came, and then they questioned us and whatnot,
and I just remember thinking to myself,
this is crazy.
I can't believe this just happened,
and I think I text Pastor Anderson or something like that
at four o'clock in the morning,
and I just said our church got bombed,
because I was communicating with them throughout the week,
and I was just kind of pouring out my heart
just telling them like, hey, I'm not gonna quit.
I'm not planning on quitting.
I'm not gonna throw in the towel or anything like that,
but I'm just letting you know I need to tell someone
that this is really hard,
because they're threatening my family,
and they're doing all these things,
and so I feel like it's taking a toll on me,
and I told them, I was like, I'm not telling you this,
because I'm telling you that I need you to come help me,
or I can't preach.
I can't pastor anymore.
I'm just saying I just need to tell someone this,
and so he gave me some words of encouragement,
because of course Pastor Anderson's
been through that multiple times,
and so we're just communicating back and forth,
and then I told him that,
and I think he just responded with like, wow, sorry.
What do you say?
I mean, that's such a horrible text to get.
You're just kind of like, oh, man.
I don't even know what words to,
outside of just giving scripture or something,
I don't even know what I would say.
Yeah, I mean like, well, we ended up talking on the phone,
and he basically told me, he said,
well, this is what you signed up for
when you became a pastor,
and I said, no, this is what I signed up for
when I became a Christian.
That's, you know, this is what it's all about.
Yeah, there you go, I'm out of mentality, yeah.
I ended up going home, and I told my wife,
I said, I'm gonna go to sleep,
because I'm tired, just hold, take messages,
and I'll figure out what we're gonna do
in a couple of hours,
and I went to sleep, and then I woke up,
and I said, well, we need to find a place to meet,
because we're still gonna meet,
and so we found a location,
and we met under a tabernacle for a couple weeks,
and it was great.
I mean, it was an awesome experience, to be quite honest.
Obviously, during that time, it was very difficult,
and even weeks after that,
because weeks after that, they stole our vehicle,
my vehicle from my house,
they camped out in front of my house,
and a bunch of other stuff took place,
but during that time, it was very, very stressful,
it was very difficult, but looking back,
I mean, I wouldn't have, if I can go back,
and if I had the chance to go back and change something,
I wouldn't, you know what I mean?
I would do it exactly the same way,
because of the fact that it helped our church,
it strengthened our church,
it endeared the hearts of their church members
one to another,
and I wasn't the only one who was persecuted.
I mean, our church members, till this day,
are still being persecuted from family members.
They were persecuted by the sodomites,
a lot of the sodomites went after the jobs of the people
in our church, and tried to get them fired from their jobs,
and even tried to get them expelled from private schools
that their children were attending,
they would contact the principals,
and just a lot of wicked stuff,
and they would threaten them, and dox their address,
and post their address online,
things of that nature, but it strengthened our church.
So, when Michael Johnson says,
hey, the hedge of protection has been removed,
and God is judging me, well, that's funny,
because God blessed us with more church members,
more salvations, you know, we-
More baptisms, I mean, y'all baptize people like crazy.
More baptisms, yeah, so I don't know,
I mean, this is a pretty cool judgment,
if that's what it is, you know?
And so, I'm thankful for that type of judgment.
You know, I want the listener at home to realize,
you know, we're kind of laughing at all this now,
and kind of almost see me happy,
but it's not like we think that it's cool
to bomb church buildings.
It's not like we think that this is awesome,
or we want buildings to be burned,
or we want people to harass us,
or any of that kind of stuff,
because, you know, from a Christian perspective,
we shouldn't desire for evil.
The Bible tells us that we're supposed to pray
that we wouldn't be delivered to evil,
and we're supposed to pray that we're not entered
into temptation, and so we certainly don't ask for it.
You know, the Bible says, I am for peace,
but when I speak, they are for war.
So, you know, we definitely want to be peaceful
in the community.
It's these Sodomites and these God-hating atheists
that want to attack us,
but when you look at it from hindsight,
all you can do is just what the Bible said,
because in Matthew chapter five, the Bible says,
Rejoice and be exceeding glad,
for great is your reward in heaven.
So when the Bible talks about being persecuted,
or being reviled, or people doing evil unto you,
the literal commandment of God
is to rejoice and be exceeding glad.
So if someone's mad at us for laughing,
or enjoying reliving these experiences,
they're the ones that are not right with God,
because the right attitude, in hindsight,
is to, you know, have joy,
and to just see how the Lord works in mysterious ways.
But obviously, at the time, you know, when I first heard,
I wasn't laughing, or joyful, or anything like that.
I was very grieved.
I was very upset to hear
that your church was going through that,
and I know that, like you said,
Christians are affected.
I remember you called me, and I was at home,
and you were like vexed.
I remember you calling me, and telling me like,
I need to send security to your house.
What can I do?
Can I send police over there?
Can I send security over there?
And you're like calling people, like in Montebello,
and trying to get people to come and like watch over us.
And I was so mentally and emotionally drained.
I was just like, thank you.
You know what I mean?
Do whatever you can.
Like, I can't really even think of what we need to do.
But it was taxing.
It was a very taxing situation.