How Crashing a Stolen Cartel Airplane Brought Me To Jesus
As a divorced mother with a violent relationship with a cartel drug runner, it seemed like Julie was a lost cause. That was until God showed up as she was falling from the sky in a drug plane over Florida. This is her story.
I was a first-generation Hispanic kid raised in the barrios of LA. Violence, drug addiction, abuse, immorality was just everyday life. I never had a moment where any of it didn't feel normal. But even growing up in the middle of all that, I couldn't shake this deep sense that this can't be all that there is. I had one rule: don't mess up.
For a while, I was doing a pretty good job. Then coming into my senior year, everything fell apart. I was pretty much alone and so angry. I met an older man who was predatory. He offered me a key to his house for when it wasn't safe to go home, and that relationship turned romantic. I ended up pregnant about 6 months before my senior year in high school, and so we made the decision to abort the baby. And it literally broke my heart in a million pieces.
At that point, I just gave up. I finished my senior year and married that person. About a year later, I became pregnant. He stayed till the baby was 2 months old and left and started a life with another woman.
I spiraled fast and hard. I got a fake ID, walked into my first bar, and four years later, there I was at 22; a divorced single mom, two-time college dropout, living with a man who did large-scale drug trafficking, was violent, and addicted to cocaine. I couldn't get through a day without drinking. I was in a position I never thought I'd find myself in.
Stealing the Airplane
We were asked to steal an airplane from another cartel that owed some money. Somehow I thought it was a good idea to go along for the ride. It was just the two pilots and myself.
We hit a freak electrical storm. All the electrical instruments broke. No visibility. It was about 8:00 at night, and it was dark. Then we literally ran out of gas. We were falling from the sky in this small plane in the middle of a storm over the swamplands of Florida. The pilots begin to fight. Like they're screaming, they're yelling, and then they're physically hitting each other, and I'm in the back of the plane thinking, okay, this is it. This is when I die.
In those moments, you do this inventory of your life. And then the thing you ask is: what's going to happen after I die? I had not answered that question. I had not spent any time in my life thinking about it.
I had this memory of sitting in a church and leaning over and saying, "Where is Jesus? He's not on the cross." And my friend said, "He's not because he's here. He's with us." So in the plane I thought, “He's here with us. Maybe there's a chance."
Then immediate shame and guilt: why would he be in a stolen drug plane with someone who literally walked away from him?
Being the personality that I am, I started to negotiate. Okay, God, if you're here, get me out of this mess. If you save me, I'll give you 50%. But at some point it was just this complete point of surrender. So I said the prayer “God, I don't care if I live or die. I just want to be with you. I surrender.”
And everything shifted. Instantaneously, I felt like God said, "Okay then." And I knew I had been accepted.
I started to feel joy. I had only known, like two or three Christian songs, but I started singing. And I was so filled with joy because I truly believed that no matter what happened, I was going to be in heaven with God. And I was so excited about that.
Then I heard something. Not an audible voice, but as clear as anything I've ever heard in my life, “Julie, when the plane hits you, hit it back. Hold on and fight”. The plane hit the trees. It was as loud as I've ever heard anything, it was dark, and I was being violently jostled back and forth. Then it just stopped.
My foot was caught. I couldn't get out of my seatbelt. The cockpit was filling up with smoke. The plane was on fire. Someone came through the smoke, undid my seatbelt, took my foot out of my shoe, and the next thing I knew I was out of the plane. In the end, I walked out of the hospital without one broken bone.
After the Crash
With no place else to go, I went back to live with my abusive drug dealer. People don't just leave the cartel with the knowledge I had. But I prayed, and within two weeks an opportunity presented itself to leave. I got in that car and thought, I know I'm not coming back. No matter what, I'm not coming back. Even if the worst happens. I'm not going back. I'm so grateful to God for his protection during that time because no matter what the cartel tried, they were never successful. Little by little, God put my life back together.
And here I am, 40 years later. That child grew up, and he's amazing. I met an incredible man in church and now we're getting ready to celebrate our 40th anniversary.
I dared to believe that God was there, that he was still pursuing me, that he hadn't given up on me, that I wasn't a lost cause. There's really no lost cause because if there was, it would have been me. There's always hope.
![]()
Why I Left the LGBTQ Lifestyle and Reclaimed my Faith
Jeffrey was living openly as a gay man searching for an identity. Lost in addiction, suicidal, and enduring demonic affliction, he discovered God is the only one who could deliver him.
I grew up in Paraguay, South America, for the first fourteen years of my life, in a German Mennonite community on a big farm. When I was around six years old, I was introduced to pornography by two grown men. That was the first time that, fundamentally, who I was as a person changed. For the next seven years of my childhood, there were exposures and abuses with other boys and men.
In 2016, my mom felt a sudden desire to leave. She took me to Manitoba, Canada, and I've lived there ever since. Now I was meeting kids who identified as gay or bi, which opened a whole world of questions about which way I was going to go.
In 2019, I decided to get baptized. It was the first time I chose it for myself. But I was still living a double life. I said yes to Jesus, but I hadn't truly surrendered. A student counselor asked me what I wanted to do with my life, and I said what I'd said since I was a little kid: I wanted to be a missionary.
I went to California for discipleship training school, then to Mexico for six months of outreach. I saw miracles happen. I saw demons cast out. I had this fiery, nothing-is-impossible kind of faith.
Leaving the Faith
But then I came home. And I was no longer in that bubble of like-minded people. I felt isolated and misunderstood, even by my own family. I moved to the city. I told everyone to call me Jay. I wanted to start from scratch, build a new identity, do it my way.
In the city, I went completely the other direction. I started experimenting with everything. A porn addiction, a marijuana addiction, nicotine, and these things were just gripping me. My mental health began to decline. I found, in the LGBTQ+ community, the validation I had been starving for my whole life. These were people who seemed genuinely loving, who grieved with me, cried with me. But that validation turned into my identity. I came out as gay and went public with it.
Over the next few years, four people in my life passed away, including one friend from the city who had committed suicide from the very drugs I was regularly using, and another from a drunk driving accident. Death just seemed to follow me everywhere. I kept a mental list of all my reasons never to follow God again, and every death added one more item to that list.
It got so dark that I wanted to end my life. I was terrified of dying because I knew in my heart that if I died in the state I was in, I was not going to heaven. But I also felt imprisoned in the pain, in the grief, and in the identity I had now publicly claimed. I was wearing makeup, heels, jewelry, presenting more like a woman.
Around that time, I felt drawn to a church called Bethel Community Church. People there wouldn't point out my lifestyle. Their goal wasn't to highlight my sin, but it was to point me to Jesus. And every Sunday, strangers would come up and say exactly what I needed to hear that day. Through that environment, and through the Holy Spirit, this hope began to grow in my heart. Maybe there's a way out.
Demonic Experience
But the darkness in my life had been given so much access that it was fighting back. I was hearing voices, seeing things, paralyzed by fear. I would see demons in my dreams. And so one day I'm having all these experiences, and I looked up a YouTube video on deliverance. As this guy is praying, I start to feel my chest tighten and I can't really breathe. I layed down on the floor. The only way I can describe what happened next is that from my chest upward, I felt something trying to crawl out of my throat. Right before it got to my throat, the video stopped. The sensation just stopped right there. And it came to me so clearly in that moment: you need deliverance, Jeffrey, because what you're dealing with is not just some little thing. You are under demonic affliction and the only way out is Jesus. This is going to take surrender. This is going to cost the lifestyle that you're in and it's the only way out.
Becoming Free
A few weeks later, a friend called and said he'd paid for me to go to a men's encounter conference. I shared the demonic experiences I'd been having. They took me through more than an hour of breaking it all down of what happened in my childhood, the abuses, the exposures, the soul ties. I manifested and began to laugh manically, completely out of my control. They spoke to this thing that felt like it was taking over my body. And as they’re praying, they’re commanding it to go in Jesus name. And all of a sudden I just have this peace come over me. Like I just felt like a feather. And I'm like, wow, I literally feel like a different person right now.
Since that day, it has been a journey. It has been a wild journey, a painful journey, but it has been a beautiful journey since then. Today, if you ask me who I am, the answer is very simple: I'm a son of God. That's where it starts and everything else is built on that. My identity is not based on what I do, what I feel, or what I look like. It's simply based on what he says I am. And that, for me, is enough. When you let God define who you are, there's this release. We all have temptations; that's not unique to anyone. The question is whether you follow the temptation or whether you say, my flesh desires this, but I know that's not God's best for me. That's what freedom looks like, walking it out on a daily basis.
God Restored My Marriage After My Wife’s Affairs
Brad had no idea how much betrayal trauma he would go through as a pastor whose wife had multiple affairs. But as he tried to pick up the pieces of his family and trust God through the gut-wrenching betrayal, he found hope in God’s faithfulness and realized that the story wasn’t over for his marriage yet.
I met Liz at a Christian camp, where we were both serving. She was beautiful, and we laughed together; we complimented each other. After about a year of knowing each other, we started dating, and eventually we got married. Our wedding day was just a celebration of God. He blessed us with three children and life was good.
I thought we were strong. Liz was a comfort and a blessing to me, or so I believed.
My Wife’s Affairs
I'll never forget one night after 18 years of marriage, after the kids went to bed. I looked across the room and her countenance was just scary. I'd never seen that before. I asked her what was wrong, and her response would be the beginning of the most hurtful things I could ever hear: I've been in the arms of another man.
We got counseling, and it helped, and I thought things were going okay. Then a couple years later, we were in the same situation; more confession. We would come to find out through counseling that she had a behavioral addiction, a sex addiction; A love addiction. I'd dealt with people who had chemical addictions, and I watched my wife doing things she didn't want to do, things that went against everything I knew her to be. This woman who was so smart, so intelligent, so wise, so Godly, was suddenly absent and lying. It was like a different person.
I was married to two people. The woman I loved, I slowly watched dying. And this other woman who was lying was someone I didn't recognize.
My Reaction to Unfaithfulness
It affected me physically. I was exhausted, depressed, developed a rash on my head that lasted a year and a half, went through periods of not eating and then overeating. Emotionally, I was all over the map. I'm a pretty introverted, private person, so when I was alone I would just bawl like a baby. And then sometimes I'd be so angry I just wanted to break something.
There were also fears about my job. I'm a pastor. I live in the church house. I wondered what was going to happen and was I even going to have a job? And if I didn't, and she was leaving, where was I going to go?
When she eventually moved out, I knew I had to tell the church. That was a hard day. I stepped down off the altar after the service, asked the congregation to take a seat, and told them without getting into details.
How I Made It Through
Through all of it, I had to be intentional about the things that kept me going. First, I had to let myself mourn. There's a verse in Matthew: blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. I realized I had to sit in that. I'd lost my wife, the woman I had committed my life to, the woman I dreamed of growing old with. I couldn't just stuff it. You can't heal it unless you feel it.
But I also couldn't stay there. I'm introverted and it's easy for me to isolate, and the enemy wants you to do that. So I was intentional about getting some guys together just to have someone pray for me, keep me accountable, and do some things with.
There was a song by Mercy Me taken from Daniel chapter 3 called “Even If”. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego tell the king: throw us in, God will deliver us, and even if he doesn't, we still will not bow down. I listened to that song constantly. It would bring tears to my eyes every time. That became my prayer: Even if you don't restore my marriage, even if this doesn't work out, I want to be faithful to you, God. Help me.
The Restoration of Our Marriage
I gave Liz an ultimatum. She couldn't do what I asked, and so I filed for divorce. I honestly thought it was over. I drove the papers down to family court myself. The day of the court date, I walked into the lobby and saw our names up on the marquee right there in public. I was just completely numb.
Sitting outside the courtroom, a court clerk came out and told me I was missing a paper from my file and would need to come back another day. On my way to file the paper, a woman in the elevator started talking to me. She'd just had a similar moment of relief about her own divorce proceedings. She told me her and her husband were starting to work things out, that they'd been going to church, and things were looking good. She asked if I was a believer. I said yes. She said, I just encourage you to pray for your wife, and off she went.
Then the court date was set for March 30th, 2020. The courts shut down for 15 days and we couldn't go to court. Things just kept getting postponed. And God was still working on her, giving me time to heal, giving her time to work through things. Eventually, maybe a year later, we had a family gathering and God started working and bringing us back together. Thank God He did.
Trust is a hard thing to rebuild, and it's still being rebuilt. But we are experiencing the laughter, more trust, the fun of just being together; the part where we’re partners in things.
It really kind of came to a culmination just recently when we were able to go together on a cruise. The whole family came and we ended up renewing our vows, it had a great impact on our children. Life is good. We’re facing challenges together in life and encouraging each other. God is good, and He shows up.
My Advice
When people ask me how I got through it, it's not because I'm a pastor, it's because of God. It's because He actually did it. That's the only reason. I had to turn to him and trust him. I couldn't do it on my own. He strengthened me, helped me to persevere, and his promises were true. He was faithful even when my wife wasn't.
If you're going through something similar, I'd say this: Look for those God-things in your life. Sometimes you have to sit in it and that’s not an easy place. You can't deny it, you can't run away from it, and you can't numb it. You have to feel it. But you can't stay there either. Get people around you who can really help, and be careful because even close people sometimes give advice that isn't Godly. There were people from the beginning who said Brad, you just need to end this now. If I had listened to them, we wouldn't have this story.
If you have some scriptures, turn to them and hold on to them. Don't give up what you do know for what you don't understand at the moment.
----
Support TruWitness
Our Mission: We spread radical video testimonies that challenge young adults to embark on a journey to Jesus.