Nothing stops god

A bandonné by my mother at the age of three years, I lived for a year in a foster home. A little later, my father, perhaps taken with remorse, decided to recover me and introduced me to Mireille, his concubine, with whom he already had two children.

My father, a night owl and high roller, owned a ready-to-wear store, a rather flourishing business, but he was annoyingly confusing income and profit.

During evenings drenched in champagne and shrouded in cigar smoke, he lavished blank checks, excessive conduct which unfortunately had terrible consequences on the family's finances.

Chased by his creditors, he quickly had to pack up and flee to Côte d'Ivoire, leaving me at Mireille's, like a memory of his infidelity.

The years that followed proved to be very painful for me, both morally and physically. Mireille, broken by bitterness and hatred towards what I represented, had taken to fighting me.

It was with punches and destructive words that she made me understand that I had no place in the family. Unable to send me back to the DDASS, she made me her slave, her handyman. The saddest thing about all of this is that to me as a child, she was nevertheless my mother.

We were poor and lacked everything at home  : electricity, food, clothing and social services had to come to our aid regularly.

Due to lack of funds, we lived in the most difficult suburbs of the Paris region and I therefore grew up in a climate of permanent violence, whether at home or outside.

Over the years, I have hardened and rebelled against any form of authority and this chaotic process will introduce me to prison from the age of 15.

The ten years which followed were for me a real descent into hell during which I will successively become a dealer, a drug addict, a father and finally a robber. In this downfall, I escaped death twice, lost my brother Frank, brutally murdered in a restaurant at the age of 30.

My meeting with Manu, a Christian who will accompany me in the last chapter of my ordeal inside the Bois-d'Arcy remand center where I was imprisoned for two armed robberies, will change my destiny.

It is during our visiting rooms that, through Manu, God will reveal himself to me. There, in this place so dirty and inhospitable, I will experience His grace and He will subsequently intervene in a miraculous way in my life.

After seven months of incarceration, the prison director called me to his office, he was furious. He tells me that men like you should spend their lives behind bars. he said to me: " Make your rings, you are leaving today ". He had received a fax from the judge and I was released on a provisional basis and, 36 months later, had to be taken prisoner in order to be tried by an Assize Court.

The penalty incurred for the acts with which I was accused was 20 years and, there again, His grace was not in vain towards me since it was as a free man that I emerged from the tribunal.

Therefore, God will turn my life upside down, my plans and give me the strength to give up my past, drugs, violence and my old relationships.

He will give birth in me to a strong desire to serve Him and to bear witness to all His benefits towards me, which I will hasten to do every day and especially in sensitive neighborhoods.

Five years later, by dint of constancy, I was able to access the pastoral ministry, to the delight of my wife Manu and our four children.

To Him all the glory  !

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YG