My name is Michael Bowen and I am originally from Dallas, TX where I was born and raised most of my early life. My family lived in a nice neighborhood and my parents always provided me with a privileged life. As a young man, I excelled in all sports and especially in American Football. In 1986, I was one of the Top High School Running Backs in the State of Texas. Once I graduated, I decided to play American Football for Southern Methodist University and my first year as a true freshman, I made the starting team. That year was the year of the “death penalty” for my university where they closed the football program for 2 years for rule violations. Because of this, I left that university for another opportunity to go to school and play football. In 1987, I transferred to the University of Georgia were once again I found success. That year, I was given the Olin Huff Award and named the most outstanding walk-on athlete at the university on a team that finished 13th in the nation and was the Liberty Bowl Champion. I was homesick for Dallas and loved my former school, so after one year at Georgia, I decided to transfer back to Southern Methodist University and help resurrect their football team from the ashes of the “death penalty” that was one of the top sports story of the decade and one of the most talked about events ever to happen in the history of American College Football. I finished my college football career at SMU in 1990 as one of the top receivers in the country and was named All Southwest Conference – Honorable Mention Receiver, Team Captain and Offensive Most Valuable Player. In 1991 I was drafted into the Canadian Football League by the Edmonton Eskimos and signed a six-figure contract. I did not make the team during training camp and they cut me from the team and I was given a one-way airline ticket and sent back to the United States. I came back to the states dejected and defeated and began drinking and using cocaine to hide my disappointment.
During my high school and college years, I began experimenting with alcohol and marijuana which later opened the door for the harder street drugs of cocaine, heroin and meth. Football always came first in my life and as long as I was playing the game, I never let my alcohol and drug use get too far out of control. I would drink and do drugs when I was not playing football, but as soon as it was time to train for the upcoming season, I would put the drugs away and focus on the task at hand to be the best football player I could be. During my college years, I began using cocaine more frequently and soon discovered what would become my drug of choice, crack cocaine. I would leave my college campus or my house in a North Dallas Texas suburb and sneak away by myself into the projects of the inner city where crack was flowing like water. I was totally out of place and completely out of my mind as I would find a crack house to hold up in for the evening and usually stay until the sun would come up. I did this with a great amount of control in the early years because I did not want it to interfere with my greatest love which was the game of football. Man did I love this game! After my failure in the Canadian Football League with the Edmonton Eskimos, addiction quickly set its hooks into me and I found myself lost and overcome by the violent and unpredictable crack cocaine epidemic that was raging across America during that time and destroying so many lives. I became a hopeless drug addict and street criminal, living in abandoned houses, disgusting drug dens and run-down roach infested motels.
For the next 25 years, I fought my addiction with all the strength I had going to dozens of treatment centers, numerous 12-step programs, a few mental hospitals, countless jails and prisons and doing everything my family could think of to try to solve this devastating problem but nothing ever worked. During this time, I was able to get married and have three children, but my addiction was always there to ruin any success I would have in my life. Through the years, I frequently attended church and always considered myself a religious person, but I never completely surrendered to God and always fell back into addiction under my own strength. My life was a broken record playing the same lopsided song of rebuilding my life after my last relapse on drugs only to disappear once again without a trace into the very dangerous and unpredictable world of crack cocaine. My life was an endless series of getting high, getting stuck in a crack house, spending all my money on drugs, giving away all my valuables to the drug dealer, emptying my bank accounts, abandoning my loved-ones and later my children, losing my job, losing my vehicles and ending up on the streets as a homeless street criminal hopping from crack house to crack house, stealing anything I could get my hands on to pay for the drugs that I could not stop using. This pattern plagued me all through my 20’s and 30’s and finally in 2007 at the age of 40, I was arrested for stealing a car and taking the police on a high speed car chase and then wrecking the car into a van and running away on foot through a neighborhood only to be captured by the helicopter and a group of very angry police officers. I was arrested and sentenced to 14 months in the Maricopa and Pima County jails in Arizona and then put on intense probation. I made it through one year of intense probation and then transitioned to regular probation, but I could not handle the new freedom and relapsed on drugs again and went on the run from the law. I knew that I was going to get prison this time for breaking probation, so I ran hard with an “I don’t care” attitude and was running wild through the Tucson Arizona city streets using drugs and stealing from stores and people trying to keep from getting caught. One night I was walking down the street and a man in a truck pulled up to me and asked me if I knew where I could get some crack cocaine and I said yes and jumped in and headed to the drug house. He gave me the money and I bought the drugs and took them back to him. Once I got into the truck, I broke a piece off for myself and gave the rest of the crack to him and I began to smoke. That man happened to be an undercover police officer and as I began to smoke, a police car pulled up behind us with their lights on and they pulled me out of the truck and I was arrested. I received a 2-year prison sentence for narcotics sales and was taken to the Florence Unit Prison in the Arizona Department of Corrections.
I did my time in Arizona and was released on parole to Austin, Texas in December 2009 and believed that the experience of prison was enough to keep me from ever doing drugs again! I truly believed that I was done with my addiction and that I would never go back to jail or prison again. It worked for a little while as I settled into my new drug-free life in Texas. In 2010, I was featured on the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary called “Pony Excess” about the death penalty that happened back during my college football years and it was shown on ESPN television all over the world. That same year I began working in real estate and thought my life was headed in the right direction. I also began coaching youth football in my community and ended up becoming the league’s football commissioner and coached my son’s team to 3 back to back championships. We were poised and ready to make a run at a National Youth Football Title in 2013 with one of the best teams in our region. Unfortunately, I did not make it to the 2013 season. In March 2013, I went to the bar for some drinks and never came home. I disappeared once again into the world of crack cocaine and now this time its evil twin, Methamphetamine!
During what would be my final decent into addiction, I went to the deepest and darkest place that I had ever been and I thought there was no way out. At one point, I was convinced that I had died and I was in hell and this addicted life and the crack house I was trapped in was my eternal torment. I was convinced that I had died. I began gnashing my teeth and my body felt like it was burning with fire. I began to panic and started looking all over my body for bullet holes trying to figure out how I had died and how I had ended up in hell. I was devastated. I was terrified! That moment passed and I settled into my new reality that I was too far gone to ever return to a normal life again. The devil had me convinced that I had fallen so far and disappointed so many people that I could never return to them again and that I was hated by all. The demons tormented my mind continually making me think I was worthless and a horrible person. I had abandoned my children, my family, all my friends and nobody knew where I was for 3 months. During this time, I was smoking crack, selling crack, stealing from stores and people and I had started shooting methamphetamine into my veins because I did not care anymore about my life and I was going to run it as far and fast and get as high as I could before my certain end. I believed that I was going to die and that it was the only way that I would ever stop using drugs and I was okay with that. I thought it would be better off if I was dead. Once again, I had turned back to my old ways of stealing to pay for the drug addiction that had consumed my life. I was living in my car and in crack houses and stealing anything I could get my hands on to keep the drugs flowing because I could not face the reality of my broken life! I was at the lowest point in my life. One night I was in a crack house, high on drugs, and had not eaten or slept for over a week and something not of this world happened. In a drug induced vision, the spiritual realm of wickedness opened up to me and the devil showed himself to me through a man in the room and I could see the devil in that man’s face and hear the devil in my mind as that man spoke, just as if the devil was in the room with me. The spiritual had invaded the physical and I could not tell the difference between the two. The combination of the chemicals in the drugs and their dark magic properties, the unyielding emotional stress and the fasting and no sleep for a week had opened me up in a perfect storm to allow for the devil to show himself to me and make his proposition. Once he knew I was aware of him, he asked me to give him my soul. He told me if I gave him my soul that I would not have to suffer any more in the darkness on the bottom and that he would make it to where I could have all the drugs and money I ever wanted. He told me he just needed a place to shine from time to time. I will never ever forget what he said next. The devil said, “Because when I shine, you shine!” He told me that people would see him in me and would give me anything I wanted. The devil is a liar! I know God was protecting me that night because when satan asked me for my soul, I did not say a word. I went blank. I could not respond either way, yes or no. After that happened and I came out of the vision, I got out of that drug house as quickly as I could and found myself a place to lay down and sleep. I think I slept for a couple of days. Finally, about 3 weeks after this encounter with the enemy of my soul, my drug run came to an end. On May 19, 2013, I was arrested for six counts of felony theft. That day I now refer to as the day I was “Captured by God”.
Praise Jesus! He brought me out of the streets and into the Travis Unit Prison in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice for a one-year flat sentence and I was able to finally surrender my life to Him and now I am changed. Jesus rescued me, delivered me, healed me and showed me the Truth that there is no addiction in Him and that His rest is the cure! In prison, I was able to repent of my sins and fully surrender to my God and finally let the old addicted man inside of me die. When I surrendered my life to Him, God gave me the precious gift of His Holy Spirit. I became a new creation in Jesus Christ which brought me into the understanding, truth, knowledge and wisdom of who I am in Jesus as His victorious child. Jesus showed me that through Him and His Power, I have victory, absolute authority and dominion over all addictions, demonic spirits, principalities and over my own flesh that was totally out of control and where my addiction set its hooks into me at any early age seeding in me the wickedness of the darkness of this evil fallen world. I was blind and now I see. When I was released from prison on May 27, 2014 into a Christian Drug Rehabilitation Discipleship Home in Austin, Texas and I joined a Spirit-filled church where the Lord began to teach me His ways. I was obedient to God’s Word and was baptized and began to be discipled. The fire of God burned my addiction away and replaced my desire for drugs and alcohol with a new desire for His presence. I put all my hope in Jesus and He had to be who I was hoping He would be or I was finished. He was my only Hope after trying everything in this world and nothing ever working except the same old failure and back into addiction and then prison. I am here to tell everyone that Jesus is far more than I could have ever imagined and has certainly over delivered on all that I believed I was promised. I just cannot put into words the life He has provided for me and how amazing it is! I have my three children back in my life and I am a great dad to them. I have a good job that I love that provides me to live comfortably and the ability to help others. I am a man who puts God first in all things and now I am the head and not the tail. I serve in several ministries, one of which takes me out into the Austin city streets praying for the lost and blind and those still suffering in their addictions and showing them first-hand the love of Jesus Christ. Shortly after being released from prison, I enrolled at Life Christian University and earned my Bachelor’s Degree in Theology and have been licensed and ordained into the ministry as a Reverend into the office of Evangelist in the 5-fold ministry. Now I go back into the Texas Prison System to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ and share my testimony. I preach to prisoners in the very same room where I once as an inmate laid on the floor on my face weeping and crying and surrendering my life to Jesus. Under the floor of that room is where my old man is dead and buried and who is never coming out. When I preach there, I sometimes go over to that place where I once laid crying and I jump up and down on that dead man’s grave and give glory to God for changing me and making me new. Every day now, I have the opportunity to work with addicts and those that are incarcerated or just being released from jail or prison and I am currently mentoring several young men.
Jesus has blessed me with a ministry called Sons and Daughters of Thunder that preaches the Gospel of Jesus Christ to those that are living in defeat of Addiction and Habitual Incarceration and showing them that there is Victory over all things in Jesus. The ministry is growing and will soon facilitate a Spirit-Filled Discipleship Program in Austin, Texas called Thunder House where we will give men who are being released from prison and being delivered from drug addiction who have given their life to Jesus Christ a place to live, a sanctuary and stronghold where we can teach them to become disciples of Jesus and build them up in the Lord until they are ready to stand in Christ on their own. The Lord has also opened up doors for me to take the gospel and my testimony to other parts of the world. Currently I am involved in leading mission trips and holding crusades and leadership conferences for the people in Liberia West Africa. In Liberia there is a group of people called Zogos who are the street criminals and drug addicts who are homeless and have nowhere to go. The Zogos have taken over a 13-acre graveyard called Palm Grove Cemetery on Center Street in Monrovia and the surrounding ghettos. They have broken open the crypts and tombs and live inside with the bones of dead bodies. The Zogos of Liberia are the former child soldiers from the civil wars, disadvantaged youth of the country and castaways, who many believe will never change and will always be criminals and drug addicts like I used to be. We are here to show them that Jesus hasn’t forgotten them and neither have we. I have organized a ministry team in Liberia and we have established a non-profit organization (NGO) called Liberation Center Liberia which is a deliverance, healing, rehabilitation, restoration, vocational training and discipleship program for the drug addicted people who live in the streets, ghettos and cemeteries in Liberia. Jesus is bringing them out of the streets and tombs by the power of the Holy Spirit. We have already constructed two drug rehabilitation discipleship homes called Thunder House, one for men and the other for women. We also have plans for the first ever of its kind, Juvenile Boys Diversionary Discipleship Home. This program will allow for the judges in Liberia to have another alternative other than sending the boys to prison with the adults. God is blessing the people of Liberia through us!
The Lord has called me out of this world, addiction and habitual incarceration into Him and into the Spirit of Truth commissioning me to spread His Word to those still lost and living in defeat and showing them there is Victory in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. This is my charge! Praise God for He is my “Everything” and I am His witness who He saved from the captivity, darkness and hell of addiction by His Mighty Right Hand! There is only One God and His name is Jesus. He is an awesome God and I want to share Him with others who are in bondage to addiction, prisons or anything keeping them from living their purpose in Him. I found true freedom in the most unlikely place, in prison when I surrendered all to Jesus! You too can find freedom from whatever has you bound by surrendering your life to Jesus as I have done. In Jesus Christ alone, I finally found the success I had always searched for in this world but could never seem to find. I have finally been set free.
John 8:36 ~ Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.