Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1118440
SiG MT 37 SiG MT 43 He was just 11 years old when he began fending for himself on the streets of Chicago, the son of a single mother with struggles of her own. Mike took care of himself – foraging for discarded food in dumpsters and seeking shelter wherever he could – until he fell into gang life at the age of 12. e gang became his family, and he was devoutly invested in keeping it strong. He was steeped in the violence, his mind young and malleable, and used and sold drugs like everyone around him. And so it went for 21 years. A stint in prison deterred him for a while, but he ultimately fell back into what he knew – the gang that was his family. He was fresh out of a fight that le a man in a coma when he started aending church. Mike readily admits that he didn't go there out of guilt for his actions or to find some sort of forgiveness – he went to church as a ploy to manipulate his parole officer into not sending him back to prison. But as time went on, something began chiseling away at the hardened shell around Mike's heart, and he started to realize that his life could become something different than what it had always been. He was 32 years old when he asked God the question that opened the gates to his new way of being. "I asked him, 'God? Can you deliver me from me?'" Mike recalls. "And he said, 'I got you, son.'" He collapsed out of his chair, and remained incapacitated on the floor for the next hour, he says. "When I got up, I was a new person," he explains. He soon realized that his journey was just beginning, and found himself ignited with a passion for helping those who were floundering in the same dark place where he'd spent his entire life. His mission continues today, 25 years aer it first began. Along the way, he met Sindy, a Honduran-born mother-of-three who's own relationship with God helped her to heal the wounds caused by domestic violence and moments of suicidal desperation. e Neubauers will celebrate their seventh wedding anniversary this July. eir devotion and enthusiasm for God and their fellow man are almost tangible. Branded by Fire and the Great Falls House of Prayer is open to everyone.