By Jalen Jenkins –
Even today, Ian McDowall passes blood in his urine due to the anabolic steroids he used to build muscles in the 90s.
“It was a kind of a crazy lifestyle I had,” McDowall says on a Bob of Speaker’s Corner YouTube video. “I was injecting over 400 milligrams of steroids a day into my body, and it caused serious side effects to my health. It wasn’t surprising really that I went down a sort of a dodgy path, a crooked path. I grew up with seven brothers. We all had different dads.”
After years of chaos – a man threw ammonia in his face, friends were knifed in front of him, he faced a seven-year jail sentence – God began to woo his heart.
Coming out of a dysfunctional family, McDowall got into body building. At the gym, a man named Maddog asked him to be a bouncer at nightclubs in East London.
At the time, bouncing was an unregulated trade. There were no closed circuit TV video cameras to record crimes, so the guys who bounced tended to be thugs and hooligans.
To increase his musculature, McDowall abused anabolic steroids, even injecting animal steroids. Some of his buddies died of heart attacks from steroids. They did permanent damage to McDowall’s kidneys.
The money as a doorman at the nightclubs was good, but the environment of drugs and alcohol led to steady violence. With his steroid-addled physique, McDowall struck an intimidating figure, but that didn’t free him from the frequent melees.
“One night we threw a fellow out of the bar and he came back shooting,” McDowall recalls. “My pal got shot. A bullet hit him in the heart. He died that night in front of us.”
From then on, fear seized McDowall. He slept with a carving knife under his pillow, his hand on the handle. The nightmare of his friend’s death replayed in his mind, fueled by ongoing knifings and rampages on the street.
“In the silence of my night I would then start to hear my heartbeat and panic about death,” he says. “I knew that I was not immortal, that life could be over at any moment.
“I had a funeral suit,” he adds. “That’s how bad it was. I was going to so many funerals, I kept a suit just purely for funerals. It was a genuine fear. I had these nightmares; I’d wake up in a ball of sweat.”
One night, McDowall and a group of doormen fought with another gang of doormen. McDowall got ammonia squirted in his face and wound up in the hospital. His buddy got smashed over the head with a pickax handle. The result of the evening’s violence was a seven-year jail sentence.
The buddy who got his skull cracked went to church and got healed by God. He excitedly called McDowall on the phone and told him: “God is real. Jesus healed me.”
McDowall was skeptical. He didn’t believe in God, and if there was a God, why wouldn’t he heal somebody more worthy than his scoundrel friend. But he agreed to go to church with him.
Alone in his car that night, McDowall prayed: “Jesus, if you’re real, can you forgive me for the scumbag I’ve become?”
“At that moment, I got this incredible sense of peace and love as if everything was going to be all right,” he adds. “The tears were streaming down my face. I went home and fell asleep and felt like this darkness was lifting off of me.”
For the first time in his life, he slept without fear. He slept 14 hours.
He eagerly went to church. He began to read his Bible and grow in his faith.
As he grew, he formed a charity to share testimonies in jails and schools.
“I walked with the devil long enough,” he says. “I was now going to serve the Lord.”
To learn more about a personal relationship with Jesus, click here.
About this writer: Caleb Campos studies at the Lighthouse Christian Academy near Inglewood, CA.
