Articles by
Steve Dennie

Travel Articles

An Angel in Need
of God's Touch

Steve Dennie

August 1998

About 20 of us were eating in a Mexican restaurant in Fort Wayne, Ind. Among us were eight persons, including five pastors, from our Hispanic work in California and Arizona. They had come to Huntington for the New Pastors' Orientation. When the two-day meeting ended, the Missions staff took the Latin American Ministries people, plus a few others, out for a meal.

I found myself sitting with Angel and Margarita Estrada, who were then eight months into starting a Hispanic church in Phoenix. In the course of our conversation, I naively asked Angel if the flight to Indiana was his first trip by airplane.

"Oh no, I've flown many times," Angel told me in good English. "That is how I used to take drugs into Hawaii and Alaska."

Juvenile delinquency was a natural fit for Angel. Growing up in east Los Angeles, drugs and gang life drew him like a magnet. By age ten, he was sniffing glue. At school he would throw away the sandwich his mother had wrapped for him, pour model airplane glue into the bag, put it over his mouth and nose, and start "huffing," as they termed it. Hanging around older kids led him to pills and marijuana.

At home, he had a lot of conflict with his parents. "I was the oldest of the nine children," he says, "but I was the one left out, the one who received less attention. I was very rebellious, and that brought a lot of discipline to me. But I would not submit to it; I just rebelled more. I was missing a lot of love. My heart felt the emptiness of not being cared for."

Educationally, those years were a blur of drugs, drinking, and trouble-making. He wasn't earning the grades, yet schools kept passing him to the next level, because he was already older than his classmates. By the time he entered high school, Angel was almost 16 years old.

Angel's father, out of concern for his kids--and perhaps seeing what east LA had done to his oldest--moved the family to San Diego. But it didn't help Angel. That's where the gang life really drew him in.

"I wanted to hang in the corner with Pendletons and khakis and shiny shoes and the name of the neighborhood tattooed on my arm, and take drugs," he says.

The school officials, realizing Angel would never graduate, sent him to a continuation school--which was worse. Most of his classmates had already been in trouble, and some were dealing drugs. So Angel fell deeper into that life. Eventually, he was expelled from continuation school.

One day, Angel arrived home high on drugs. His father pulled him aside to read him the riot act, and Angel decked him. He ran out of the house, an 18-year-old mess of a kid, proclaiming that he would live his life any way he pleased, and that he wasn't coming back.

He moved in with some friends. "I thought I knew it all, that I was ready for the world," he says. With some spark of ambition, Angel enrolled in training for auto body repair. That's where he met a fellow from Mexico who was a heavy drug dealer.

"Angel, I can help you make a lot of money. You can have a lot of things--cars, anything you want--and I can just give it to you on credit. You can have ounces of heroin, ounces of cocaine, kilos of marijuana--whatever you want."

That sounds good, he thought.

So Angel became a big dealer.

But he was more interested being a user.

One night he ran out of heroin, and his body began reacting in ways he'd never experienced before--alternating cold chills and hot sweat, gut-wrenching vomiting. Angel stood in the bathroom all night, realizing he was terribly addicted to the heroin he had been injecting with reckless abandon. Now he was out, and his body was demanding more. He found respite from a "friend's" stash, and to prevent a reoccurrence, Angel began stealing and committing forgery to finance his addiction.

Angel would sign his name to payroll checks which other people had stolen, and cash them using his own ID. Eventually, he would get caught and sent to jail. He would tell himself, I'm going to stop doing this when I get out. I'll change. But once out, he would fall into the same lifestyle. Buying and selling. Stealing. And heroin addiction.

This continued for 21 years.

"In my heart I wanted to change. I went to every hospital, to psychologists, to secular rehabilitation programs. My parents saw that it was destroying me, and they helped me the best they could. They would go looking and find me dirty, skinny, my arms full of tracks, pale from days and months of not eating well and just living in the streets, bound by this addition."

Imagine 21 years of that.

Meanwhile, God was working on Angel's parents. As they looked for a solution to their son's problems, they met a pastor who presented the gospel to them. Angel's father rejected it, but his mother grabbed hold, began praying, and eventually her husband, and then the rest of the family, came to faith in Christ. Angel's father even became a pastor.

And they prayed for Angel, their prodigal. Angel's mother held onto the promise, "Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved--you and your household." That included Angel.

Eventually, in 1988, Angel stood before one judge too many. He faced a lengthy prison term for forgery and other crimes on his prolific record. This judge told him, "Angel, there is no solution for you. You are a lost cause. The only solution is to put you away for life, because you are a menace to society. You have chosen this kind of life, and you're going to pay for it."

Angel's father told his son, "I'm going to help you, because I believe God wants to do something in your life." He hired a good lawyer, and Angel ended up with a mere six-year sentence in the state prison.

However, when Angel was released in 1994, he had no interest in God. Within three months, he was back on the street.

But God was waiting there in the form of an evangelist and a pastor.

"We have a place in Chihuahua, Mexico, a rehabilitation center," they told him. "Let us take you there, just for a week or two."

Angel had tried just about every type of rehab he could find, and nothing worked. Nevertheless, he agreed to go.

Two days later, after a 16-hour ride across the border, the two men delivered Angel to the Christian rehab center. Angel immediately noticed that some of the people there had tattoos on their arms.

"We are happy that you are here," the director told Angel. "We are more than happy. We welcome you. And believe it--this is the best choice you have ever made in your life."

Then he asked, "Can I pray for you?"

"Yes," Angel said.

The director put his hand on Angel's head. And in that moment, as he looked at the men surrounding him, looked beneath the tattoos on their arms and the world-worn faces, he realized there was something very, very different about them. He told himself, If what these people are telling me is true, there is hope for you, Angel.

The home was located about 20 miles out of town, secluded in the desert. Angel quickly began wondering what he had gotten himself into. The ranch had no electricity, no running water. The only shower was in a shack, with water heated in a worn-out five-gallon drum. The dormitory--his new home--had dirt floors. Nothing like he expected. This isn't for me.

Yet he stayed. Withdrawal started after a couple days, and his new friends helped him through it.

The 30 men living there had come for various reasons. Some needed a place to stay. Some had been sent by the court. Some had been kicked out by a wife or family. Some were there because they wanted to change. Angel desperately wanted to change.

The regular Bible teaching at the center gradually began soaking in during the next several weeks. One day the teacher said, "If you recently arrived here and you've been bound by drugs for many years, let me tell you that Jesus Christ can set you free right now. All you have to do is come forward and receive the Lord."

Angel didn't hesitate. He walked over to the man, knelt on the floor, and extended his arms.

"Before," he says, "I used to extend my arms to shoot heroin or other kinds of drugs. But this time, I extended my arms, my hands, and I just asked the Lord to come into my life, and he injected me with his love. I felt the Lord come into my heart, and I immediately felt completely different. From that day on, my life turned around. I never thought of going back. I told the Lord, 'I'm not leaving this place until you, Lord, show me that I am ready to leave.'"

Angel stayed with that ministry for almost two years--"the best years of my life," he says. It was a time of foundation-building. In that community of discipleship, surrounded by other guys giving support and examples to follow, deep roots developed.

"Everything began to change from that day on. I started to choose. My mind was being renewed."

The director and the evangelists in the ministry, seeing Angel's spiritual growth and enthusiasm, took him to places where he could share his testimony.

After a few months, he began working in the ministry's office in the city, collecting leftover food from restaurants and delivering it to Christian homes. That lasted six or seven months.

Then the pastor sent him to Durango, where he worked as a counselor and a representative of the ministry for another nine months. Then it was on to Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, for ten months. There, he began going out frequently with the evangelists to give his testimony.

And there, in Juarez, he met Margarita.

Margarita's background is far, far different. She was born in El Paso, was raised in Mexico--and yet, came across the border to attend school in the States.

The Peralto family was very musical, and Margarita's father saw his daughter's considerable ability. At age five, she began singing in public. As she grew, father, mother, and daughter became the Peralto Trio.

Margarita and her mother became Christians in 1975, when Margarita was 21. Her father also found Christ, and the family began attending a church. The pastor soon realized their musical ability. As invitations came to sing in other churches, a ministry took shape.

In 1981, the Peralto Trio started singing all over Mexico. Then invitations arrived from the States, and they found themselves performing from Delaware to Texas to California. They also ministered to convicts in prisons.

Every year, the Peralto Trio sang at a convention in Juarez hosted by the ministry which, by that time, had salvaged Angel Estrada. Margarita's sister was married to one of the ministry's evangelists.

Angel and Margarita were married, and began ministering together. He preached and gave his testimony, she sang.

In 1996, some missionaries with the ministry told Angel about a group called the United Brethren in Christ who needed someone to start a church in a Hispanic neighborhood in Phoenix. But Angel felt the Lord wanted him to remain in Juarez and continue the process of opening a new rehabilitation center across the border in El Paso, a home in which he could work with people who had come from the same lifestyle Angel had followed for so long.

One of those missionaries told Angel, "If the doors close on what you feel the Lord has called you to do, I think the Lord is calling you to Phoenix."

Two months later, the doors closed. Angel and Margarita visited Phoenix, met Denis Casco, and prayed about the possibilities. Angel was cautious, wanting to be sure. But after several months, he was able to tell Denis, "The Lord has confirmed it. We will come to Phoenix."

The Estradas moved to the Valley of the Sun on February 2, 1997. They began working with children, and through the kids they met the parents. Margarita sang in street meetings and Angel preached on salvation. Similar meetings were held at night in people's yards, and some parents came to Christ.

They began meeting as a church in May 1997 with about 40 people, sharing a building with the anglo Phoenix Faith UB church. In June they did a three-day crusade in the street. At first, it was mostly the wives who showed interest and openness, but on Father's Day--the last day of the crusade--a couple men came to Christ. Another family became Christians through a July children's Bible school. And so on. By fall, about 60 people were attending.

Angel's life today is so different from the life he knew for 21 years on the street. Sometimes, there in Phoenix, he sees other people trapped in the same kind of life, and Angel knows how they can be set free.

"I must never forget what the Lord brought me out of," he says. "That's what keeps me going forward, and that's what keeps me talking to people bound by sin."