Son

Lost Boy Found Man of God

I was born on March 20, 1987, In Quincy, Illinois to the parents: Michelle Diane Mangold age 17 and Lloyd William Fuhrman age 18. From the get go I was in a messed up situation my father and mother wasn’t married my mother was a grade a student, and my father was a drug dealer who was constantly in trouble in school and the law. My mother actually received an award for getting my father through school. My Mother’s side of the family are well educated teachers, construction foreman’s, C.P.As.

My father’s side is the type of people that would pronounce words incorrectly like “kmark” “walmark” and where party animals working in factories or dealing drugs on the street. My Father was a very verbally and physically abusive boyfriend to my mother, and would constantly bring other women into my mother’s home while she worked hard sometimes working two jobs. Working jobs like kitchen help, or working in chicken factories to just to take care of me. My mother moved back into my grandmothers when she finally had enough of my father’s abuse.

And we secretly moved into an apartment that was very tiny and in a bad neighborhood, on 11th and Lind in Quincy Illinois it was actually connected to the old Georges Potato chip factory and you could hear the tow motors all day and night. Four blocks up from the main housing authority in our town.

I was constantly getting stripped and beaten and molested and called a fat a**. I was an overweight child and began to get very angry and started doing stupid things to fit in with the kids of the neighborhood. One time my friend and I actually broke into an apartment just to steal ice cream, we set garages on fire, threw bricks through windows, would steal bags of chips from the potato chip factory.

I actually got expelled from grade school for sniffing white sand acting like it was cocaine and smoking newspapers, after my father found out where we lived he started getting me one or two times a month, and we were constantly going from one place to another to girls houses, and he would take me to the bar with him all the time. I can still remember some girl watching me in another room and looking in the other room seeing my father smoking marijuana and some guy doing lines of cocaine. When I was eight years old my Great Grandfather Elmer Mangold started taking me to Salem U.C.C. in Quincy Illinois a very beautiful church. He taught me very important points about tithing, and how you have to completely rely on God.

And that was all good till I got back to my neighborhood, and had to fend for myself, didn’t know where I fit in felt all alone, hated my mother for my father not being around hardly. I started to memorize the stories of the bible and knew that everybody said there was a god, but I didn’t feel him, couldn’t see him working around me, didn’t have a personal relationship, you can go to church all your life but if you don’t have a personal relationship with Jesus none of that matters.

I loved going to church and was actively involved but was constantly being misbehaved in the church. I can still remember watching pornals with my dad, getting drunk at the age of eight, losing my virginity at the age of ten; I began to have an obsession with pornals, and anything to do with sex.

In school I would constantly be joking around in class to try to hide the fact that I was obese. When I hit Baldwin school I was starting to steal from stores, and throwing stuff down toilets to make them overflow, people probably thought I was part of the custodian staff with how much I had to stay after to clean the school for punishment. Once I hit Junior High my mother could not control me, I was always out partying. But all that wasn’t me I was inside a lonely good-hearted boy looking for attention the wrong way.

I was always actively involved in student council, was in Youth as Resources which was a program that gave out grants for youth to do great things for their communities. I founded an anti-drug program that used illusions, puppets, and rap to give the message not to do drugs, but yet I was getting high before we would practice. I was in a group called Royal Rangers.

When I started Junior high we moved to the south side of Quincy on 7th and Washington next to and up above a boarding home for mentally handicapped adults. In junior high I went through confirmation at Salem, and was baptized, I actually felt my calling from god when we went to a seminary in Chicago, Illinois. He hit me quicker than I could blink my eyes and told me that I was going to become a pastor and spread the Gospel. I believed him but I ignored it because I didn’t want my dad and people to think I was weak or a goodie two shoes.

I was always getting in trouble at the lock ins and mission trips, I mean I once was caught sitting in the wine cellar getting drunk off of communion wine, and would go down the stairs in wheelchairs, etc. I actually was witnessed to by one of the mentally handicapped adults living downstairs from me, he came up to me one day and asked me if I would hang out with him and because I felt “sorry for him” (that’s what I thought at the time) I went into his room he put in a Michael w. smith music video, and then we watched cross and the switch blade movie, and it hit me if God can change that guy on the movie he can change me.

He invited me to his church Bethel Assembly of God; the first time I went there I felt out of place and was weirded out by people speaking in tongues and raising their hands. But I felt the conviction all around me; my mother didn’t want me going to that church because she thought it was a cult. So I would act like I’m going to a friend’s house and go to Bethel to church, and royal rangers, I actually fake signed a permission slip to get baptized at bethel and got baptized for the second time.

Also during my junior high years my father had his first aneurysm and he died on the helicopter on the way to Springfield, Illinois, and was brought back, and that is where god taught me that we must forgive others, because he forgave us. He was in comatose for two weeks and was pronounced brain dead, but I didn’t give up faith I prayed and prayed and put a cross in his pocket and a year later he came out of it and was able to walk, talk and think once again.

Then he got colon cancer. Once again, I prayed for him and put a cross in his pocket and he was cured from cancer. Then he had yet another aneurysm died again, was brought back, was in comatose for two months and we were a day from pulling the plug when he opened his eyes.

He once again had to go through rehab to get his functions back. Also in junior high my great great grandmother told me I was called to become a pastor and told me she wanted me to read her the bible once a week. And when she had her aneurysm she had me pray with her and as I finished and said Jesus take her.

Her body jumped up and I saw her spirit leave her body and head towards heaven. I was thirteen when I officiated her funeral, and it was their where the rest of my father’s family asked me to do their funerals when they pass on. Now in high school, I constantly was having sexual encounters, stealing merchandise from stores, homes, cars and selling them at the college where my mother was actually working at.

I was involved in a group that did back yard wrestling breaking boards, and glass over my head bleeding everywhere, streaking into YMCA, McDonalds, and other places drunk and high. I couldn’t stay in school I even got kicked out of schools for misbehaved students, ended up having to go to the board of education and get one on one education. Once I actually jumped out a second story window saying I was Satan and woke up bloody and vomit all over me, then another time I was selling stolen merchandise at a basketball game and they told me to get in their car and I did they sped off pulled out a gun and threw me out of their car.

That same day I got the news. I was sixteen years old. I found out a girl I was having intercourse with unprotected ended up pregnant so I went to my mother and told her I needed to leave town and change my life so I wouldn’t be like my father, (who now I love and have forgiven, and we have a close relationship). So, she started crying and pulls out this big box with all kinds of promotional DVDs of places she was thinking about sending me. And together we chose for me to attend Earle C. Clements Job Corps academy in Morganfield, Ky. The second largest Job Corps center in America, with 1800 students, 80 new students a week maybe 2 of each group staying and successfully completing the program. Job corps was full of mostly adults between the ages of 20 to 24 I was sixteen years old.

It was there where I transformed my life, stopped doing drugs and alcohol, stopped wearing clothes three times too big for me, and my pants down to my knees. I quickly became a wing leader, and captain of jrotc, Senator for student government association. While there, I would have these huge men with big muscles, and just would come into my room at two or three in the morning waking me up and scaring the heck out of me, they would start crying and telling me their whole life stories, and asking me to help them and bring them to Jesus.

While I was there I attended a Baptist church, and got involved in their ministry and in order to become part of their church you had to be baptized at their church. So for the third time I got baptized. I graduated with honors with a G.E.D. and a vocational certificate for Business technology.

I came back and got married to the girl I got pregnant, (not because I loved her but because I thought it was the right thing, first wrong thing in that relationship). Our relationship got mutually very abusive. I wasn’t allowed to go to church. I wasn’t allowed to go to college.

Couple years after I came back my grandmother got very ill and was diagnosed with cancer in eight different places in her body, and ten tumors in her head, they gave her six months to a year and she lasted a month and a half, during which time one night she came to me and we discussed what she wanted at her funeral and how she didn’t want a big service just graveside. So I didn’t get to play a song for her I wanted to play called holes in the floor of heaven.

After discussing the arrangements she told me she wanted me to pray with her because she had never prayed before. We prayed for a whole two hours, she started crying and said that’s all I needed and hung up. The next day I went up to visit with her at the hospital and she was talking about she just had a baby and sorry her house is a mess it’s because of the dog under the bed. She had hot pink fingernail polish all over the floor and all over her hands, we ended up putting her in hospice and two weeks later I’m working third shift finishing my sermon for her funeral and all of a sudden holes in the floor of heaven came on and not even 10 seconds later I got the call that she just passed away and I already knew, and was prepared for the services.

Then a little bit down the road my Great aunt Janice gets cancer, and has what doctors call split personality but I personally know she was processed because when I was taking care of her, I would talk to her about Jesus and we would read the bible, and she would talk about wanting salvation. Mind you she’s very weak at this time going through chemo, and all of a sudden her eyes would go black and she would get very strong and start talking about how she hates people like me always talking about god. A week before she passed away I constantly prayed with her and got her saved, and officiated her funeral.

Then a couple months later my Great Great Aunt on my father’s side fell and broke her hip and was in the hospital I prayed for her every day, and prayed her last prayer with her, and once again officiated her funeral.

To get back to my relationship with my first wife we ended up moving to Phoenix, Arizona on the hardest street their and was surrounded by people getting high off embalming fluid, and all kinds of crazy stuff we end up homeless roaming the streets for almost a whole week, and when we got back our relationship was just over, she was talking to guys on the internet telling them she loved them they where going to move here, so then I searched for a girl I dearly loved growing up but did her wrong, found her had to prove that I was changed and we have been married tell this day.

As you can see God has been using me through the years, but I wasn’t committed to him, so he kept putting me through all kinds of trials. Once I got with my current wife, I devoted my life to Jesus and got off the fence and have had an awesome ride with him. The Crossing Church actually helped me become fully devoted to Jesus and my family. I got baptized for my last time at the crossing to symbolize that I was getting off the fence, and I was going to stop running from my calling.

While attending the Crossing I was living in a very dark trailer park, full of violence, crime, alcohol, drug dealing, and low income families needing Jesus and no one was ministering to these people and that’s actually how I started Quincy on Fire Ministries. I was having Bible studies in my small trailer bringing in anywhere from 12 to 16 people every Wednesday, and baptizing 8 of them. I also had people coming to me at 1 to 3 in the morning asking for help and to come to salvation. I also dressed up like Santa Claus and passing out gifts to the children, with scriptures on them.

We went to nursing homes and did activities with them, helped an autistic child’s father whose mother left them because she couldn’t handle him find furniture, clothing, toys, and all kinds of stuff, we started an outreach program called Teens in Action which was originally just a puppet ministry we was trying to do too much so my old Mentor from Royal Rangers Mike Quigley took me under his wing and taught me to choose one ministry and that’s when we chose to do the outreach program, we have been harvesting it the last two years and a half and fine tuning it and are now ready to go out into your community and spread the gospel!

To sum it all up no I didn’t go to Bible College, or seminary, but I have the calling on my life to spread the gospel as a pastor and evangelist, and I am empathetic with others, and can relate to the struggles they go through. Recently one of my friends who was seventeen that I built a relationship with out in the trailer court just had a child, thought he was Mr. gangster like I used to, tried committing suicide and eventually dying from suicide enforcing in me that we need to get out there and let these youth and children know that they are loved and that Jesus is always there for them and that there is always someone to turn to and talk to.

Just to share with you some more information about me, I love to spend time with First God, secondly my wife and children and then my family. I have two half-sisters, my older sister Tiffany two years older than me we have the same father she was adopted by her grandparents, my older sister I didn’t know existed until I met her at my surprise skating party at the age of eight, what a great surprise, and my younger sister Ashley is seven years younger than me we share the same mother.

My favorite book is the Bible. I mean it is a beautifully written book full of miracles, not illusions, parables that teach us, and illustrate the love of Jesus, Proverbs that give us advice, I mean it’s beautiful. My favorite Artist is God. I mean how could he not be the best artist look all around you at the miraculous scenery he has made. Look at the universe with hundreds of million stars for each star there is a grain of sand on earth, and he knows each by name, he created perfect images of himself which is us. My Favorite kind of music is praise and worship music. I love to take pictures, edit videos, do Christian illusions, preach, write poetry, scrapbook, do projects with family, help others that need help, and much more.

See, I’m a city boy. Let’s talk about my wife. She’s country. She was born in Quincy, Illinois as well but was taken from her real mother. Her name before she was adopted was Barbara Lou Sanderson, and then she got adopted and her name was changed to Barbara JW Morse, and now she is Barbara JW Fuhrman. Eventually, she was adopted by Mike and Barbara Morse and lived in Coatsburg, Illinois.

She has a beautiful heart and soul, and her eyes will melt you in seconds, you can’t help but love this precious woman of God. She is a valuable part of all my ministries, and she has a heart for foster children, abused, and molested children, and the hurt in general. And as a team it is our goal to reach the hurt and lost and help them find. Jesus the one who can fill them with Joy and heal their hurt. She has three biological sisters, and one brother: Marlayna Speirs(marshall), Amber Marshall, Annabelle Sanderson, and Freddie (Alex Nokes). She has four adopted sisters, and six adopted brothers. We have many nieces and nephews: Elayna, bella, christabelle Tuter, Dale, and Dalayna Brooks, Henry Speirs the third,Josiah Speirs, Mariah, David, and Austin Baze, Madison and Emma Mcconnell, and many more.We have four children, Hailea, Leah, Zachary the second, and Amera. We can’t forget my dog cookie, dove’s Faith and Hope, bunny Floppy, and two gold fishes.

We love animals, Also I was recently ordained through National Association of Christian Ministers, my ministry is chartered through them as well. I’m also a member of the Fellowship of Christian Magicians. It is time for us as Christians to get out there forget about denominations, the way each other look, and all that stuff and build relationships between the lost and our Lord and Savior we are his ambassadors and its time we act like it!!! Please Join Christian Illusionist Zach Fuhrman as a donator, allowing us to perform for your organization, or church, or just by helping us bring home the lost, May God bless you!

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