Born Feb 7th 2003, I was born into the foster care system. At 8 months old, I was ripped from my family along with one of my brothers, whose name was Isaac, and 2 sisters. My siblings and I have been separated. My brother Isaac was placed into the family that we have now been adopted into. But at that time, I was in another family. The funny thing was that both our families attended the same church. So, we started to play with each other when I was about two or three. And he was about four or five, and they thought it was weird that these kids who had never met automatically had a bond. So, they did some digging, and it came to be that he and I reunited through attending the same church….
So, the foster care agencies told his family that they can only adopt him if they adopt me too, so that there is no separation between us too because we were biological brothers who have been reunited. They wanted to keep us together. So that family adopted me later down the road, and as I started to get older, I started to realize that I am stepping into the role as the black sheep of the family Because they were forced to bring me in that they did develop a love, but it was still forced upon so by that time, as I started getting older, I started to be very angry at the world because I felt that small sense of rejection.
Most of my life, I felt rejected by my biological mother rejected by my adoptive family. As they started getting older, I held onto that weight of feeling unworthy and unwanted. So I started to hide my feelings with anger, which caused me a lot of pain further down the road. I was a very curious and very smart child so I started to explore things that I shouldn’t have been exploring, and I didn’t trust people because I felt rejected, the feeling of being rejected developed from the consistent bouncing from family to family, family or place a place to place or home to home to home nothing ever felt consistent and always there.
When I got adopted, that family was a family that put their faith in Jesus, who introduced me to the word of God. But from all of my trauma and all of my rejection and all of my heart and betrayal, I never allowed anybody to get close. And doing that, when they got close, and I felt like I could bring my walls down, I would push them away. So as I got older, I started trying to find outlets to release my anger and the pain that I was holding on and at a young age I started playing football and used football as an outlet, and as I got older, I kept on switching schools from first all the way to my high school year so nothing in my life was ever consistent.
I had a lot of trust issues because I never felt secure. As I started getting older, I was introduced to alcohol and drugs at a very young age. Then I reconnected with my biological mother. I tracked her down. I went through over 800 different phone numbers, 923 different emails, and so many countless addresses in the different files of criminal records, and I found her. I felt as if I wasn’t a normal kid. I thought the role that these foster parents took on, I never allowed them to have a closeness with me as their son, because I didn’t feel safe and secure with anyone. So I went, and I looked for my mother again. When I found her, it was probably the most traumatizing revelation I have ever encountered. Once I reconnected with my mother, I found out that just as I was getting older and getting involved in a criminal drug gang, my biological family was already heavy into it. They are related to one of the most notorious and violent criminal drug gangs in the USA. So, when we reconnected, I wanted to be accepted, so I started to gain their respect by going harder into the gang life that they were already living. As I started to become more involved with the criminal drug gang, I began to lose things in my life. My first girlfriend and I began getting involved with using and selling drugs and drinking alcohol. I started to use drugs and drink alcohol daily. I was in high school at the time, and I was a very good football player. I was still playing football at the time, and that was my outlet and my dream was to play football professionally in the NFL. I was going to be an NFL superstar.
But God’s plans are always different. My first year in high school came and went, and by that time, I was already in a school named McClintock High School. All my school friends were very diverse, and they were all affiliated with many different gangs. Fist-fighting at school was a normal daily occurrence. There was a lot of violence in my community. Many people got shot and arrested, and everyone was drinking and using drugs. I sank further into the criminal drug gang lifestyle and started to use and sell drugs more, and commit more crimes.
During this time, I lost my football career to an injury and could not play anymore. All my dreams were shattered, and all I had left was drugs and gang life. I did not have football to balance everything out. When I lost football in my junior year in high school, that’s when everything changed. I had a horrible leg injury and I was never the same again. My senior year, I hurt it again, and I could never play the same. I had lost the one thing that made me good, my speed and agility. With my leg injury, I could not perform at a high level on the field like I could before the injury. I lost all my college scholarship offers and any chance of playing football in college.
That’s when the whole direction of my life changed. I chose to stop going home. I dropped out of high school and began getting engulfed in drugs and chasing women. By that time, I had already been kicked out of my house by my adopted family about seven different times. The police would have to come and remove me. I was an angry young man. I was full of rage and felt unloved. I felt like nobody ever wanted me. So, I turned even more to drugs, women, gang violence, and criminal activity. At least within a gang, I felt like I had a family and I belonged.
That is when I began to smuggle drugs across the Southwestern United States border. I learned that I was really good at bad things, and people began to accept me, and for the first time in my life, I felt like I belonged somewhere. During this time, I began to transport guns, illegal immigrants, and drugs across the Mexican-American border. Because I knew my biological family was doing this same thing, I reconnected with them.
Through my determination to be good at smuggling weapons, people, and drugs, I started to grow in reputation as a successful criminal, drug gang member, and earner. I was not a normal young man doing normal activities. I was committing crimes daily and involved in a dangerous lifestyle and occupation, running drugs and other things. I was intelligent, and I attended good academic schools with great reputations for the smartest students.
Most of my childhood, I acted out often and was labeled as a bad kid! I made bad choices, and I wanted to be accepted. My grammar was good. I knew how to play chess, which is a difficult game of intelligence. I had all kinds a different attributes in my life, but when I lost my focus on the positive things, I always began to focus on the wrong things, and I believe that is when God allowed me to self-destruct my life.
So, as I turned to alcohol, drugs, and crime, and all this crazy world had to offer, I started running with some people who weren’t making the best of choices. At one point, I was arrested, smuggling illegal guns across the border. I had some younger friends of mine with me, who trusted me to keep them safe, and I totally let them down. Then I started getting older, and I got involved in a lot of gun violence and different things that always led to more trouble. I was living the fast life with fast cars, fast money, fast women, and all the trappings of this world. I was going to jail consistently. I knew about Jesus then, but I still didn’t want to hear what he had to say about me and my life. People kept on telling me who He was, and I kept on running from Him.
My life started to fall apart, and I became addicted to drugs. I was using Meth, Cocaine, Ketamine and other dangerous drugs to a point where I became homeless. They were destroying me and changing me into someone I could no longer recognize. At this point, I was all alone once again, and nobody wanted to be around me. I was sleeping at different apartment building pool areas where there were lounge chairs and little rooms where I could find some shelter and a place to lay my head for the night.
I was always a kid and a young man who felt rejected by this world and all the people in it, and I was angry! I kept running and running, deeper and deeper into the darkness of a drug addicted, lonely life. I thought I was always having to run from something so terrible that it was always out to hurt me. It was only later that I finally realized that I had been running from the greatest love that ever existed.
During my years growing up, I saw a lot of people get hurt. I witnessed many people dying, but God saw me through it. He never left my side, and I did not know then that He was always with me. I have been shot and stabbed. I hurt so many people in my own community because of my criminal behavior and addiction to drugs, and I was tired. I did not want to cause any more damage to others and to myself. I was on the road to self-destruction, heading towards a terrible end. I thought that when my life finally exploded, it would be all over for me. But the moment that I fell apart and reached the end of the road, that was the moment that it all began. I had decided I was going to end my life by suicide. I believed if this world did not want me, then I didn’t want it. So, I put a loaded gun to my head, and as I went to pull the trigger, my gun jammed, and the gun would not fire. I took the bullet out and saw the mark on the bullet where it should have fired, but it did not. In that moment, I cried out to God and began seeking Him.
I began to seek God because I was open-hearted and curious to find out more about the One who stopped that bullet from firing into my head and me killing myself. I began to see Jesus openly, for who He truly is as the Lord and Savior of my Life. I may not have known a lot at the time in the beginning, but I knew enough to cling to Him. I was sitting in the back of a church, and I was high on drugs, and somebody approached me afterwards, and they said, “You cannot kill a man that God doesn’t want dead,” and then they just walked away. The man who said this did not even know who I was. But God used him, in that split second, to bring me closer to Jesus. So I began to open up to God and His word.
At the time, I was still homeless, and I was “couch surfing,” which is consistently sleeping with different women to get a roof over my head and a bed to sleep in for the night. This was the first time that I ever sat down and opened up a bible to read, and I opened it up to Jeremiah 29:11. I was asking God to show me what the plans he had for my life. I asked Him, “If you are real, why would you allow me to go through all of these things? Why would you allow me to be chewed up and spit out and broken and not know how to be loved? Why, why, why was all I could ask? It was all that I could say was, WHY? And God, through His word, answered me with love, mercy, and grace. And as I opened up the word, and understood that all the things that God allowed me to go through were for a reason. It was so he could prepare me and mold me like clay, so he could prepare me for my purpose in life. Once I realized this, I kept seeking him and reading His word.
Then I had a dream. In the dream, I was face down in front of the cross, naked in front of thousands of people, but they were hidden under a shadow. The dream was in different stages. The first stage of the dream was me naked on the floor, faced down at the cross, and there was light shining on me in the cross. The second stage of the dream was the light shining on the people, and in that moment, I understood that God was trying to tell me that for me to be used by Him, I must be completely humbled.
There were times in my life when I had all the money I wanted because I was selling and smuggling drugs, weapons, and people. I was living in sin and accepted by the world. This made me feel like I had power, which reminded me that I had to be completely humbled in front of the cross, and I had to die to myself every day in front of the cross. It showed me that I had to take my pain and leave it at the cross because what people don’t understand is that at the cross, it is the only place death can generate life.
So, God was telling me through this dream that I had to be completely humble, and in our most humble state, we are naked. In the second stage of the dream, God said he could use me, but I must be humble to be used. It was at that moment that I made a public proclamation that I am unashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I thought to myself, how can I do that? How can I bring people together and show them that I am unashamed to be walking in the name of Jesus? So, I created a video ad on social media. The video was about the dream that God gave me. I felt like he was calling me to bring unity.
Then I started to think about when Jesus called the fishermen to become His disciples. How does that work? Just like with fish, you can’t always use the same bait, so I thought, if I look at people as fish, how can I get all these fish to come to me? Can I sit out, and I started watching the people, so I gathered together things that I knew that I myself would think were interesting. I also used my own child. His name is Ezekiel. I made an ad on social media, and I said that I was going to have a big event with all of these different things on Saturday, September 27 of 2025. I didn’t realize I had to get permits and licensing for a lot of these types of things. So I go into the parks and recreation department at the city, and I tell them that I want to do an event on Saturday, September 27. They told me, I don’t think we can do that because we have to go in the calendar and book in advance because it could be booked so we opened up the calendar and we took a deeper dive into what the month looked like and we looked at three months before September and three months after September and the only available date was Saturday, September 27. So, I sat out, and I collected the materials that God asked of me in this dream. I got Jumping Castles vendors, musicians, influencers, and officials. I started to promote everywhere. Tell everybody about what God‘s going to do here soon, and that’s where Revival City began. Revival City is a movement that God uses people who come together for his glory through all of these things that the enemy has intended for evil. God allows us to use for good, and from that moment on, he put me in a seat to influence thousands, and it’s spread across the United States of America. On the day of Revival City, so many things tried to stop it from happening. It’s a story that we would have to sit down and go into details. And from that moment on, I called myself unashamed Gabriel and I continue to walk unashamed it’s a story that needs to go into a little bit more detail of a story that comes to foster care almost being killed multiple times losing a lot of people in my life drugs it’s a story about a kid where all the odds were stacked up against him in God still pulled him through in his continuing to use him.