A Life Hanging in the Balance is Restored

“It was always staying up till maybe 12:00 in the morning, just fighting going on in the house, you know, worrying about if my mom's out cheating on my dad or what my dad's going to do, and cops showing up. My home environment--it was very unhealthy.”

Dante Grady grew up in a home filled with dysfunction and despair, where he was physically and mentally abused by his father. He says, “There would be times where I'd be trying to get some sleep for school in the morning and he'd just wake me up and hang me by my feet and beat me with whatever he could find.”

The abuse warped Dante’s sense of safety and self-esteem. “I was fearful at home and of the outside world. I didn't feel like I had protection. I felt like it was just kind of me and myself,” Dante says.

The family often attended church together, but it was more of a social activity. “My conception of God was more so a religion,” he adds. “My family, we kind of went through the motions. But there was no – there was no fruit. There was no, ‘Jesus loves you.’ There was no seeing the gospel in people's lives.”

Dante and his sister sought ways to deal with the pain of their home life. Dante turned to drugs and alcohol as a teen. “These things provided an escape for me, an escape from what I was experiencing, what I was living, I'd say the worst was the LSD. The effect of that was taking you to another world. I'd walk around school with acid tablets in my socks just waiting to get home.”

One evening, he says he encountered some very dark entities while on an acid trip. “My heart sank. I felt I was having a heart attack,” he says. “There were demons coming in all four corners of my room. I hid under my blanket for like 30 minutes.”

When the family moved from the Pittsburgh area to Florida, Dante was introduced to pornography. “It was our next-door neighbor. He showed it to me one time and it was like a hook in my mouth. And it just – as soon as I went home that night, that was the first thing I went back to was porn. It became an ongoing cycle ever since.”

He lived this roller coaster life of addiction to drugs and pornography until early adulthood. One evening Dante, seeing no hope, considered ending his life. “I think, that was after coming down from an acid trip, and I think I had just smoked too, and I walked home," Dante recalls. “And I’m just numb in every way possible. Like mind, just completely lost. And I was just like ‘this is it. You know, I'm going to cut my throat.’ And I got that call.”

The phone call was, surprisingly from his father, telling him about a visiting speaker at a nearby church. “I was like, ‘I really don't want to talk to him right now. But okay, this is kind of my last resort. You know, what can go wrong?’ Let's get this over with,” Dante remembers. “I'm sitting in those pews – old school wooden pews, and he says, ‘There's a young man in here that's been crippled by pornography.’ And a few seconds later, it was like the Lord just dropped down a mirror in front of me and just reviewed my whole life to me. It was at that moment where I felt the Lord grabbed a hold of my heart and pulled me up there. There was nothing I could do.”

Dante went forward and knelt down at the altar, praying to God to give him hope. The next thing he knew he was lying on the floor. “I've had the experiences with religion and legalism and all that stuff, but that was my encounter with the living God. And he was up there prophesying over me and I just wept like a baby,” he says. “I remember I went down after the Lord was filling me with His precious spirit and I was out for like 20 minutes.”

Dante was instantly delivered from his drug and porn addictions and set free. “When I went home, I deleted all the drug dealer's numbers out of my phones, blocked them, and threw everything in the garbage,” he says. “And just tried to get healthy habits in my life. The reason I knew it was a heart change, is because right after I got up off that ground, I couldn’t wait to go home and throw away all my smoking utensils and stuff and get rid of the junk that I knew was so harmful to me.”

He also was able to forgive his father and reconcile with him. “God has definitely healed my father wounds. It's been a process. I wish it was something that went away like that. There's still those times, some memories that have flashed through my mind and it will bring me to tears. But He's definitely, definitely healed those wounds.”

Today he has a ministry in the Orlando area, helping young men and the homeless overcome addictions.

“I want to be present with people. I'm willing to go out into the dangerous neighborhoods and love on people and share the gospel and give people hope because I know that this life is not my own,” Dante says. “Jesus is different to me now because I had an encounter that changed me for the rest of my life. There is nothing that anybody can say that would steer me away from that. I experienced that love, the Father's love, the Father's embrace. I experienced chains breaking. And that's when I knew that I had an encounter with the living God. My advice to young people caught up an addiction would be it's going to leave you empty. It might fill you temporarily, but I promise there is a void in your heart that only Jesus can fill.”