I met a man on the streets one time that was coming off of heroin and going through severe withdrawal. I wasn’t sure how to help him, but I made him get in my car before he died on the scorching streets in the middle of summer. I asked him what happened to bring him to that place in his life. He freely admitted that he had been sexually abused by someone who was still allowed to be in the home, and his mother and sister were so angry with him for being on drugs that they told him he couldn’t come home anymore. He wasn’t trying to do wrong. He was trying to escape a reality that was too painful to endure on his own. He was blamed and accused by the people he thought he was protecting by not telling them what someone from their family was doing to him, but it was destroying him and the enemy was using it to keep him in bondage of fear. God set him free that day. I never saw him again, but when he got out of my vehicle four hours later he was able to speak clearly and had fresh hope and faith in a good future. He could barely speak when I made him get in my car. He was shaking and manifesting all sorts of crazy demonic spirits that were tormenting him so severely that he seemed like a monster with the noises and facial expressions coming from him the first few hours .
Philip was his name. He lived in apartments in Mesa and when I went to his apartment complex to drop him off, the drug dealers rolled up in their car and these two big men got out wearing gold chains looking like stereotypical drug dealers! As they walked from their car the people looked like cockroaches coming out of their hiding places to get their food for the day.
A boy who was maybe 10 years old came up to my vehicle and knocked on the window. I looked at him and he flashed the drugs he was selling as if to let me know I could get some from him. I was appalled by what was happening to that community by those two self-serving thieves working for the devil unknowingly to destroy the lives of even children who should have been playing and enjoying their summer break.
I told Philip that he could either get out of the vehicle or he could leave that place with me and we could find him a place to recover and never go back to the hell that had tried to invade that apartment complex.
He chose to leave with me because he said that he knew he would not be able to resist if he got out of the car in that moment.
I tried to get him into a program where he could recover but no one would help us. They all had some technical issues or something that he needed and didn’t have to qualify him for help. It was one of the hardest things I had ever experienced up to that point, and I eventually had to drop him off at a QT gas station and just pray that God would help him from that moment forward.
I knew very little about the heroin epidemic at that time but would learn about it as I was sent out to help the people on the streets day after day.
As I drove home that day from QT all I could do was sob uncontrollably over the suffering of so many lives in our community.
I prayed and asked the Lord to have mercy and rescue them all because they didn’t know what they were doing and they didn’t know how to be free.
Grace, Mercy & Miracles 
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