By J.P. Spitz — 
I knew Jonathan from the day he was born. His father was a very close friend of mine. When Jonathan was eight to ten years old, he held the world’s record for killing the biggest boar with a bow and arrow. His dad was an avid hunter and taught Jonathan how to use a bow and arrow. They would go all over the world game hunting. Jonathan had so much charisma, but he got into drugs at an early age. There was one point in time his parents didn’t know where he was for close to a year. He was out of control.
Jonathan recalled being raised in a Christian home. “My parents went to Believer’s Chapel in San Clemente with J.P and Carol, so I was raised in church,” Jonathan said. “But I was a bit of a knucklehead from a very early age. I was very mischievous and got into a lot of trouble.”
Remarkably, he sensed there was a spiritual battle for his soul as early as five-years-old. “I remember having a magnified view of the devil in my life and a very diminished view of God. I always thought the devil had so much power over me and every time I cried out to God, I heard nothing. My prayer was always ‘change me, make me a better boy so I’m not always upsetting my parents.’
“I had a war going on inside myself. So, by about nine-years-old I made a conscious decision to walk away from the Lord, completely.”
Even as a pre-teen, Jonathan thought the gap between a holy God and his own sinful behavior was insurmountable. “I loved the Lord and always believed in Jesus. My impression of God was, he’s too good for this junk. I don’t want to present my body as an offering to Him. Since I can’t get it right, I’m just gonna walk away and take my medicine because if there’s a God out there, he’s holy and he wants nothing to do with me, because I’m junk. I made that vow to myself to not concern myself with trying to be good anymore.”
In Jonathan’s neighborhood in San Juan Capistrano, there were 21 kids, ranging in age from 10 to 18. “It was during the 80s, the punk rock era, and it was just mayhem,” Jonathan recalled. “The older kids would drive us around and buy liquor. The older brothers would buy their younger brothers hard liquor, so liquor and marijuana were a constant, at a very, very young age.
“I continued on that path, tried to put high school together, but failed miserably on that. When I turned 18, I started getting arrested a lot, locked up for drugs and other things.”
Jonathan spent most of the 1990s in prison, from the time he turned 18 until age 26. To survive as a relatively young man in prison, he joined a white supremacist gang. “When I got there, I was terrified. It’s all these older men, who were crazy, and I was a knucklehead. Out of fear, I did the thing that made the most sense to me, which was joining a gang, to have their protection and be part of a family,” he explained.
Three months into his first prison term, Jonathan’s father passed away. I remember that excruciating moment. Jonathan’s father was overweight, went running, and overdid it. He dropped dead of a heart attack at 39. Jonathan had to go to the funeral in handcuffs. It was a big embarrassment for him, but he wanted to be there.
Whenever Jonathan was paroled, it was usually short-lived. “I would get out of prison with all hopes and dreams of doing well and I would be back in within a week, maybe two weeks tops. I had no money and had to start all over. During this whole long season, I was not talking to my parents. When my dad passed away, our relationship was very rocky at the time, so that was hard.”
Drugs were omnipresent in Jonathan’s prison experience. He observed criminal activity, extortion, violence, and got entrenched in the white supremacist lifestyle. “For the most part, the divisions are very racial,” he noted.
On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, Jonathan was paroled. He was determined to never return. “I felt like I was done with drugs and done with the prison lifestyle.”
After his release, he contacted his high school sweetheart. “She kicked me to the curb years ago because I was dumb and I was getting in trouble. And she said, ‘You know, I’ve been waiting for you all these years. Are you ready?’
They were married within three months of Jonathan’s parole. A year later, they had a daughter.
“We always loved each other, and she knew me prior to me getting into big trouble. We had a good relationship before that, but we were both still really dumb. We were both still drinking; I wasn’t doing any drugs or crime. But suddenly, we have this new little baby.”
When Jonathan held his daughter in his arms for the first time in the hospital, he knew she was a gift from God and that he would have to make significant changes in his life. He looked at her precious, tiny face and said, “I promise, you will never see your dad in prison.”
He recognized the enormity of this gracious gift, but not the gift-giver. “I still wasn’t walking with the Lord had no relationship with Him. We started having problems in our marriage after our third child. This whole time, I had been sober, just on my own willpower, because I didn’t want to go back to prison. But I was still in communication with all the gang members because I had friendships with them. The thing is, you don’t really get out of those things. They’ll let you do good, but as soon as you step back into that lifestyle, you’re back in full force, so then my marriage started falling apart.
“Some stuff happened in the marriage that was pretty bad. From a lack of knowing what to do, and not having a personal relationship with God, I turned back to my old ways. My wife took off; she split with another guy. So, I was literally raising my kids. I didn’t really get it for about the first nine months.”
Jonathan had his hands full fathering three young children. At the same time, he had come down with hepatitis, and was giving himself shots with interferon to try and get rid of it. “I was in a bad place. I was hurting for my marriage, and I was injecting myself with these things.”
Interferon therapy is used to treat multiple sclerosis, some cancers, and hepatitis B and C. When used to treat hepatitis, patients often see reductions in liver damage and cirrhosis.
In Jonathan’s case, however, he believes there was an unwelcome side effect from the therapy. “Interferon triggered a lot of psychological issues and cravings that came back. I was by myself, raising these kids, and it just was too much for me. I ended up relapsing at that point,”
“Things got really bad, and my kids went to live at my mom’s house. I was just running on empty, strung out, and everything like that.”
On Christmas Eve, 2007, Jonathan found himself at a witch’s house. “I was hanging out with some really dark people, and she was one of my friends. She offered to read my tarot cards. I was messed up and we were doing drugs together.”
The witch asked if she could read Jonathan’s future, using Tarot cards.
“Yeah, whatever,” Jonathan replied.
She began to read each card after she flipped it over.
Suddenly, a still small voice spoke to Jonathan’s heart with a blunt warning: If she turns over the next card, you will die right here in your seat.
The witch began to turn the next Tarot card over, but Jonathan’s arm lunged forward and slapped the card out of her hand before it could be turned over.
He jumped to his feet, knowing he must leave immediately. “When I got up there was a manifestation of a full-blown demon, standing between me and the doorway. It was the most horrific thing I had ever seen, with a body that looked like a big, charred piece of charcoal, with a mutilated, melted face and a goat horn in the middle of his forehead. It was about eleven feet tall and smelled like hell, like sulfur, eggs, and rotted carcass.”
He looked back to see if the witch was seeing what he was seeing. She looked at Jonathan and let out a fiendish, diabolical laugh.
Jonathan put his shoulder down as if he was about to go through an imposing football lineman, reached through the demon to grab the doorknob, opened it, and fled down the stairs, with the smell of hell lingering on his clothing. “I couldn’t get the smell off, after walking through that thing. I drove straight to my mom’s house and I went in her garage. I hadn’t talked to my mom in months.”
Jonathan’s family had gathered at his mother’s house to celebrate Christmas the next morning. “My kids were there, but I didn’t interrupt them. This was a bad moment, and I was in bad shape. So I just opened the garage door and went in the garage, I got one of the sleeping bags out of the attic, laid down in the garage and went to sleep.”
No one knew Jonathan was sleeping in the garage until he emerged the next morning, like a mummy returning from the dead. They greeted him with saccharine smiles and expressions of ‘Merry Christmas,’ but he knew immediately he had disrupted their peaceful gathering. “I could see the pain I had caused everyone on their faces, from my kids to my mom, to every family member.”
He went in the kitchen and began to ruminate. “They were all trying to have a good Christmas and I felt like I ruined everything just by being there.”
“I felt the enemy on me, and I grabbed a sushi knife, snuck out the back and got in my van and drove down to the landfill. I was going to kill myself. I had a Sharpie marker in the car and I wrote the word ‘peace’ on the dashboard of the van. I walked up the road probably two miles into the landfill.”
He wanted everyone to have peace and thought if he ended his life, the nightmare he brought upon himself and others would be over.
After he walked two miles, he ducked behind a bush and retrieved the knife from his pocket. “I don’t remember thinking about praying; I don’t remember thinking about God; I don’t remember anything. I just wanted it to be over.
“I immediately swung the knife as hard as I could at my wrist. But something grabbed my arm in midair and would not let me do it. I was fighting with this thing. Totally unseen, totally invisible. I thought I was having a mental breakdown, fighting with this thing.”
Suddenly the presence of God fell on Jonathan. He felt a warm sensation and the landscape appeared wavy. “He took me in the spirit through my whole life, all these places where bad stuff happened to me, where hurts happened. He showed me resentments and unforgiveness I had been carrying that were killing me, consuming me.
“He showed me he was there with me the entire time, and he never left me.
Then the Lord impressed on his heart: This unforgiveness is killing you. You have an opportunity to give it to me. Do you trust me with it? If you trust me to make it all right, I will set you free right now and I will walk with you every day for the rest of your life.
Jonathan broke down and started weeping. “Take it, take it, take it…” he sobbed.
“Then I felt like a waterfall came out of heaven and it showered me and I felt the darkness leave my body, in every way, shape and form. It felt like I was being delivered from a legion of demons. I was washed and clean!”
The last words imparted to Jonathan’s heart were these: Go back where you came from.
When Jonathan stood up, he felt like his spine had been strengthened, as if it had been refashioned with titanium. “My gaze went from looking at the ground to looking straight ahead down the path. I had been holding my head down in shame for so long.”
He walked back to his van, not knowing how much time had passed. “People were still at my mom’s when I got back there. I walked in the door and I was completely sober, completely in my right mind. supernaturally delivered and healed.”
After he walked through the front door, his mother rushed over to him and said, “I’m so glad you came back!” She immediately noticed a dramatic change in his countenance, as did others at the family gathering.
Later, Jonathan reflected on the dramatic events that changed the course of his life. “I encountered God for myself, and I knew he loved me. I knew he covered my sin. I knew he made me a promise that he was going to be with me the rest of my life, no matter what.
“It took a lot to get my attention.”
If you want to know more about a personal relationship with God, go here
Jonathan’s story is excerpted from the book, Cracked Vessels: True Stories of Real Life Restoration by J.P. and Diana Spitz with Mark Ellis. To order the book go here
