Healing and Redemption

Something broke inside him. His father, sick with cancer, left Mickey with a police officer he trusted. That man did something to him, but Mickey never told. “If I did, Daddy would go kill him, and my daddy would have spent the last little bit of his life in jail.” So he kept it inside and became “a very highly volatile, violent person,” until God “got on to me and told me it wasn’t my right to judge people—my job was just to love people and let my light shine.” 

As a young man, Mickey went to prison. When he got out, he made one firm promise: “I knew there was one thing I never needed again. That was my DOC number.” He knew who he did not want to be. 

Mickey’s life held pain and miracles side by side. He began using drugs in 1993 while trucking and “fell in love with drugs,” until a near collision with a school bus in Oklahoma—while hauling “suicide coils,” massive rolls of steel so heavy and dangerous they can crush a cab if a load shifts—sent him into a ditch, an escape he believes God made possible. He says he has been healed of multiple cancers, deafness, and blindness, and was raised from the dead twice after a surgeon prayed over him. For Mickey, God is not an idea, but the one who pulled him back from the brink of death. 

Still battling addiction, mental illness, health problems, and unstable housing, Mickey heard a loud inner voice say, “Go.” He turned to Brother George, a church representative who had been urging him to seek help, and said, “Let’s go to Gospel Rescue Mission. God said go.” 

At GRM, Mickey has learned that “recovery does not mean drugs—it means recovery from mental illness, recovery from physical illness, recovery from life in general.” GRM has helped him see that his whole life—mind, body, and spirit—needs healing, not just his habit. What makes GRM different to him is what he calls a “healing property here.” He believes it saved his life: “I don’t think I’d even be alive if I hadn’t got to the Gospel Rescue Mission.”