Guns to God: My journey from drug dealing to deliverance

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Leaving his old life behind, he started to read the Bible and pray daily, and surround himself with people who would point him in the right direction.

When Claud was approached about becoming a mentor for high-risk young offenders for the local council, it initially seemed like a handy ‘respectable’ cover for his drug-dealing activities. No missing or damaged pages, no creases or tears, no underlining or highlighting of text, and no writing in the margins. Finally, the inevitable happened – Claud was arrested and, while being held in a urine-infested cell, he was told by police that he was likely to be going to court and to prison.Born into a Sikh family, Mindy Tagliente’s spiritual curiosity led her to experiment with new-age practices and eventually become a yoga instructor. Where I’d go out and pay for lunch every day, Pete wore a backpack and brought a packed lunch with him. He reached down into his pocket and took out a tiny little black ring-box, which he held gently in his hands before opening it. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

An expert panel discusses the introduction of Prayers of Love and Faith and blessings for same-sex couples. Claud hero-worshipped his brother, who left home in his early teens to become a violent drug dealer and was in prison by the time Claud was 7.

Full of anger, Claud felt ‘I wanted to somehow pay life back for all the hurt it had handed out to me, but against everything inside of me that told me not to trust others, I still wanted desperately to belong. And then this fella stood up with his chinos on, walked out in front of 100 people and produced the cross. We hope that you too, will catch afresh, the hope of the Gospel as you journey through Claud’s story. Before long, they were joking about how they were surprised I wasn’t driving faster in such a beautiful car!

I thought about when the teachers would segregate me in school, and I was made to sit on my own for hours in halls and corridors. In working with them, he recognised many of his own struggles as a young adult with issues of identity, self-worth, confidence, and need to belong, and the urgent need for positive role models. As he approaches 40, he is deeply grateful for ‘God’s truly amazing grace [which] took a once successful London drug-dealing street trader all the way from deliveries to deliverance, from guns to God’. You never think when you’re a teenager down the park, sitting on a swing and having a spliff, that dealing drugs is going to turn into this huge business where you’re making thousands of pounds. Claud was struggling at school and, having been bullied, he learned to fight back, believing that ‘with fear comes respect.Whether you read it in a day or take your time over it, there is a challenge in these pages to see the work of God in one man's life, and the hand of God over all our lives.