Series of Tragic Events Caught His Attention

“I grew up in a Christian home,” Jeremy said. “My dad was in the Navy so when I was a little kid, we moved around a lot. We settled in Virginia Beach, Virginia. I remember going to church so often. My mom was on the prayer team and my brother was on the worship team. I was that oddball that never connected well within church… I was a bad kid. When my brother was a worship leader, he was doing some of the same stuff I was doing and so I just began to have this idea of Christianity that it was this massive front to make you feel good about yourself. I had no want ever in my life to be a part of anything like that so I ran after the things that I wanted to run after.” 

Jeremy continued,  “Some of my friends started rapping together and battling people. What battling is, is having a beat and free styling right off the top. You would go back and forth and I was actually pretty good at it. I remember going to different areas and battling, and we'd win. We started building a reputation, getting in different studios, and started getting contract offers. I was really pursuing that lifestyle. But, within that lifestyle, there's just a lot of things that happen within that world. There's females, drugs, all that stuff. I didn't smoke a lot, but I smoked. I didn't drink a lot, but I drank, and it was just part of life. I love being with my friends. We all lived together and we were doing music a hundred percent of the time. This life made me think that I was invincible. When I would get up and rap and everybody would be cheering and excited, there were these moments that you felt like you were untouchable.” 

Then things started to change for Jeremy. He recalled, “As things started to progress in my life, I remember there was a season where my life just started falling apart. I had four friends get murdered within the course of two to three months. My license got revoked, I got in trouble with the law, and my car got taken away…I was just numb. One of my friends got killed for a hundred dollars. He was shot right in the face and was a good friend of mine. But to me, it was just a part of life. People get killed; people die…that was just my mindset.”

Then the intervention came. “My parents reached out to me and said, ‘Listen, if you move home, we'll give you a ride to and from work for free.’ So, I moved back home with my parents and that was really tough. I'm working at the shop and my dad's bringing me back and forth and one day, my dad couldn't give me a ride home. So, one of my good friends who battle rapped with me said, ‘Hey man, let's go to the spirit of prophecy class now.' I have no concept of what prophecy is at this point of my life. I was like, ‘Bro, what the heck is that?’ because I didn't want to go. The church was less than a mile from where I worked so I could walk there, and it wouldn't be a big deal. It was January, so it was really cold and so it was either walk home 10 miles in the cold or walk a half a mile to the church and he'd give me a ride home. So, the decision became quite easy to make,” he said.

“I sat there and said to myself, ‘I'm just going to get through this meeting. I don't want to walk home so that's the only reason why I'm sitting there. This big guy comes over to me and starts praying for me and my friend. But, he zeroes in on me and starts word for word telling me stuff that I'm doing in my life. He starts talking about some of the things I was doing with music and how I was running after certain things. I was thinking in my head, ‘please just leave me alone.' Then he says this statement, ‘Do you know the name Jeremy? I keep hearing this name Jeremy.' Internally, every bit of rationale that I could fathom at this point was gone. This guy doesn't know me, he's never met me, and I've never seen him before."

The roots of his Christian upbringing began to surface. "I remember thinking this reality that God is real, and I felt His presence, and I began to cry. I was thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, this is who God is. He's good. He knows me. He knows my name. My friend right next to me was getting rocked too, and at that point they stood us up and started praying over us to get filled with the Holy Spirit. I remember talking to one of the ladies who were leading the meeting after she said, ‘Jeremy, you were on the floor for over 45 minutes and you were praying in tongues, ‘Lord forgive me. Lord, forgive me.' I remember everything in my life that I thought would bring me joy and discovered that it was found in Him. Everything that I thought would bring me purpose and fulfillment was found in Him. That night was the beginning of my journey and it was just the glimpse of Him, the moment of Him, the bringing into reality all of the things that I've been trying to pursue and do, I realized that I couldn't do it on my own. It was His grace that empowered us to actually walk this thing out.” 

Jeremy started his renewed faith journey with an internship in the Philippines, then came back to the States and attends Pinecrest Bible Training Center. He met his wife there, got married, and they started pursuing full time ministry together. “We started doing Street Church for seven years. Every Saturday night we would go out and feed the homeless and preach. In those places, we saw miracles right on the streets of Norfolk, Virginia. We saw lives getting transformed through discipleship and practical things and in those moments, there was this birthing in me of a ministry called City Life. We got a group of people together and just really wanted to be able to minister to people who were my age. We started these rally-type services where we saw hundreds of people get saved in the first year. We went from 30 to 450 people in six months and essentially all we did was run after Jesus.”

Today, Jeremy is a full-time pastor in Dallas, TX and has four children with his wife. “Through all of these moments,” he recalled, “these testimonies are my history with God. I'm building a relationship that are monuments and are moments that I can look back to and be reminded that He's faithful when I'm faithless. He's good when I'm not. He is who He really says He is, and because He is who He really says He is, it allows me to believe that I am who I really am because of Him.”