“I’ve been a victim of temptation and a prisoner of sin. For years, I was a slave to lust. January 1997 is when my story begins.” This is the first line of Preston Perry’s spoken word poetry that tells the amazing story of his deliverance from a lustful life.
Where it all started
Preston’s story began when he was just a 12-year-old boy. During this time his grandmother had a foster child who was a 14-year-old girl. Although she was young, she was already quite mature for her age because of what she had gone through in life. She was a victim of rape and the impact of it spilled over to Preston.
One day she led Preston into a bathroom where she taught him things a woman should only do within the confounds of marriage. This was his first sexual encounter, and he had been in bondage to sexual sin ever since.
He grew up dealing with perversion and sex to him had become like a drug that caused addiction. But despite all that, Preston was insecure and broken. He felt that he was too broken for God to fix, so sex became his fix.
His Turning Point
At the age of 16, Preston heard the Gospel for the first time. It was during that time that he heard about how his lifestyle was a problem and that he needed to repent. God started pursuing him, but he was still resistant to make a change in his life.
He wanted the fast life although deep inside he felt like a “rotting corpse desperate for a savior to breathe life into this dead carcass.”
When he turned 19, he had a friend who was shot dead in front of their house. It scared him, but God used the situation to draw him back to his childhood home in Chicago. There he met his old friend Gary, who used to be a gang member and a drug dealer, but wasn’t the same person anymore because God changed him radically.
God used Gary as an instrument to lead Preston to the Lord. He mentored him for three and half years wherein he finally saw the weight of his sin.
“God, I want to love you like Gary loves you,” Preston said. He repented of his sins and right then and there he experienced deliverance from his old perverted ways. Today he is married to one woman.
“His love is the only thing that defines our legacy. His love is greater than our pride and our sex drive. His love is eternal, so please don’t trade it in for a quickie…”
