AMAZING STORY
Endangered Child Brings Father to Christ
By Randy Rudder
The 700 Club
CBN.com -Greg Hanserd once thought he was bulletproof. “At the time, I was a hothead,’ he says. “I never thought I would get shot at.”
But he was wrong.
One day, a stray bullet hit him while he was standing on a street corner. “I got hit in the chest, but the bullet went to the arm,” Greg says. “That was just a mind-blowing experience. I’ve been in so many situations where I should be dead, or I should have been in the pen, and I walked Scott-free.”
Greg was raised in a tough neighborhood in East Nashville. His parents were Christians and his mother tried her best to shield him from the influences lurking outside their door. “She was very strict,” Greg recalls. “She drug us to church every Sunday. She didn’t allow me to go near the projects.”
As a young man, Greg became curious when a friend of his seemed to be making a lot of extra money. Greg remembers the exchange: “I was just hanging out when he was making money. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ and said, ‘Just selling this little white stuff.’ I said, ‘That’s all?’”
Greg began selling cocaine when he was still in high school. Always a hard worker, he used his lawn service to hide his drug dealing from his mother. “It was done as a cover,” he says. We had lawn services. We pretty much didn’t cut any grass, but that gave me an excuse to be away from the house. You leave with a lawn mower in the morning, and you come back with so much money, and she didn’t know how many yards you cut,” Greg explains.
Soon he had created a small drug empire.
“As I started making money, I would run shifts. If I had seven guys wanting to sell drugs, as long as you buy from me, I could put you up in a house and you could sell the dope out of there for a certain amount of time, or you could have the whole block,” Greg recalls.
As his reputation spread, women began throwing themselves at him. He fathered six children with four different women. Later, he married one of them and the two began raising their children in east Nashville.
One day, Greg heard a noise while his children were outside playing. “There was some shooting outside,” he says. “There was a guy running through the alley. And I looked around the house for my kids. I didn’t see them, so I came outside and saw my kids outside. They were just caught up in the crossfire. So I went to grab my kids, and I was trying to get the other neighborhood kids out, too.”
Greg pulled them to safety amidst a flurry of gunfire. Once he had them inside, however, he realized that a bullet had grazed his forehead. “I felt my head and there was blood. My wife came and grabbed me and we came in the house.”
This second near-miss was a wakeup call for Greg. “I was mainly worried about not seeing my kids anymore because they were so young.”
Any time he was arrested for selling drugs, the charges never stuck. He did, however, end up doing time in the county jail for traffic violations. While he was there, Greg began to examine his life.
“I had like an out of body experience, meaning that, I’m in jail—I’m there physically, yet I could see myself standing on the outside of it, and I could see how I played a part of what’s going on,” Greg says.
While he was in jail, two men shared Christ with Greg. “We were praying every day, reading the Bible every day and when I got out, I said, ‘From this day forward, I will serve the Lord.’ And that’s when I started making changes. I changed my environment. I went through what I call a two-year detox, where I just went to work, home, and church.”
The change in environment helped mature Greg. Over time he was able to grow in his faith and today, he volunteers his time ministering to inner city kids. “We just talk about what’s going on out here in the world, and how to deal with certain things: drugs and sex, gunfire, robbing, stealing, grades, school, hip-hop. We’ve got a curriculum of stuff we just talk about,” he says. “I wrote a program and based everything on the Book of Proverbs, because that’s the book of knowledge, and wisdom. And I just teach kids that you have a choice. No matter what your situation is, you have a choice. And I feel that if you teach kids –or even adults—that, if they understand what their choices are, and the consequences are, they’ll start making better decisions. ”
Greg believes that God spared his life so that he could share his story with young people.
“Now that I understand that Jesus died for our sins, my purpose in life is to give my testimony,” Greg explains. “Whenever you get down, don’t turn to men; turn to God and God will get you through whatever. If you got God, He isn’t going to let you go.”
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