Bound and Broken

I didn't come into ministry with clean hands.

I grew up in a violent home. My father was an alcoholic, and our house was a place where no one felt safe. Everyone walked on pins and needles, never knowing when the next explosion would come. By my early teens, I had a temper of my own — explosive, unpredictable, frightening. I got into fights throughout high school. I started smoking as a child. By my teenage years, I was drinking, taking drugs, and sniffing paint. I was carrying wounds I couldn't name, driven by anger I couldn't explain.

In February of 1976, I married my wife Suzette. The following month, I went into the US Air Force and was stationed at Luke AFB in Phoenix, Arizona. Suzette was a believer when we married. I was not — and I made that clear. Every time she tried to talk to me about God, I shut her down. I wanted nothing to do with Him. For two years she tried. Then God spoke to her and told her to stop — to trust Him instead. She did.

The Night I Got Saved

A year later, I was lying on my bed one night thinking about my life. I was working 12-hour military shifts and two jobs on the weekends. I was also in night school. And I remember thinking: Is this all there is? Not suicidal — just empty. Wondering if life had any more meaning than the treadmill I was on.

That night, Suzette called from a live taping of the PTL program. She asked me to turn on the television and watch the evangelist who was about to preach. I agreed. As that man preached, something broke open inside me. When he gave the invitation, I came. I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior in May of 1979 — alone in our home in Phoenix, while my wife sat in a television studio audience, trusting God to do what she couldn't.

I stopped drinking immediately. And I began to see what God had done in me.

Saved, But Still Bound

But I also discovered how much baggage had survived my conversion. Salvation changed my eternity, but it didn't instantly rewrite decades of deeply ingrained pain.

Guilt was the worst of it. I would commit the smallest sin and spiral into a kind of endless confession — weeping, apologizing to God over and over, finding no relief. Because I always felt guilty, I kept pulling back from serving God. Shame whispered, "Who are you to do anything for Him?" and for a long time, I believed it. The sense of unworthiness was constant.

Then one Sunday morning, Suzette and I had a fight on the way to church. I was angry — she made us late — and when we arrived, I refused to go in. I walked to the front of the building and sat there, stewing. As I watched the traffic go by, I sensed the Lord speak quietly to my heart: "When you ask Me to forgive you, how long does it take Me to do it?"

In that moment, I understood. The instant I asked honestly and earnestly for forgiveness — I was forgiven. Completely. Immediately. The guilt that had clung to me for years lifted and was gone. It tried to come back, but I rejected it now, knowing the truth. False guilt no longer controlled my life.

Within six months, I sensed God calling me to pastoral ministry. I could barely believe it. I felt like such an evil person — so unworthy, so full of shame and anger and brokenness. But I accepted His call. Suzette and I moved to Eugene, Oregon, where I attended Eugene Bible College. Immediately after graduation in 1985, we — along with our son Josh — moved to Grand Forks, North Dakota, and pioneered New Life Foursquare Church. I have been its pastor ever since.

Fighting the Wrong Warfare

But the anger was still there.

For nineteen years as a believer, thirteen of them as a pastor, I treated my explosive rage as a flesh issue — something to be confessed, surrendered, crucified. The violent thoughts that rose in me when I got angry — thoughts about hurting people — I assumed were just the worst of my old nature fighting against the Spirit. I did everything I knew to do. And it never went away.

By December of 1996, I had already begun praying deliverance over people in our own congregation — laying hands on others for a freedom I hadn't yet found for myself. I could help someone break a curse or cast out a spirit of fear, and still have no idea that the rage inside me had a name.

Then in the summer of 1998, I attended a deliverance conference. As someone was praying for me about my anger, my fist clenched — and I wanted to hurt the person praying for me. In that moment, I finally understood: this is not my flesh. This is enemy territory. I began to rebuke it, and I felt something physically leave my chest. I was set free from a spirit of murder I had been carrying for decades — a spirit I had never recognized because I had been fighting it with the wrong weapon.

That same season, I attended my first Cleansing Stream Retreat. God freed me from a spirit of shame that had covered me like a cloak for as long as I could remember. He broke the power of rejection over my life. He severed soul ties that had bound me to people from my past. The freedom I experienced was unlike anything I had known.

The Birth of EHV

When you experience that kind of freedom, you cannot keep it to yourself.

I began serving on the Cleansing Stream ministry team in 1998. By 2000, I was trained as a retreat leader. I led my first Cleansing Stream Retreat in May of that year. By March of 2018, I had led one hundred retreats. I watched people walk in carrying shame, rejection, rage, and unforgiveness — and walk out breathing free. I watched the Spirit of God do in a single day what years of striving could not.

And I knew I had to build something that could reach further than a retreat weekend.

In August of 2016, I launched Experiencing His Victory. I chose that name with care. Not Experience His Victory — as if it were a single event you had once and moved on from. Experiencing — present tense, ongoing, something you walk in moment by moment. The victory Christ won for us is not a historical fact we believe from a distance. It is a living reality we are meant to experience every day.

A great friend, Jim Bredwick, who had walked beside me through many of those retreats, encouraged me to write my own materials and develop my own framework. In April of 2019, we held the first Experiencing His Victory Seminar and Retreat in Watford City, North Dakota. That retreat distills everything I have learned — about identity, about the invisible barriers that keep believers stuck, and about the practical steps God has given us to walk free.

This is my life's work. And I will do it until the day I die.