Thank you for your interest in what God did in the life of Shane West!
It is my prayer that God ministers to you through “My Story” – Shane West
I wish you could see where God’s brought me from. The best testimony that you can have is your own, whatever God has done for you. Let me start by saying that on July 25, 1966, a big bouncing baby boy, 5lbs. 6 oz., was born in Fresno, California. I don’t remember much about a family life but when I was about 5 years old my father, Carl West, sat at the kitchen table with me at my home in Fresno and with tears in his eyes he said, "Son, your momma and I are going to go our separate ways". At the age of 5 years old, I looked up at my daddy and there was a look in his eyes that I knew things would never be the same. He told me how much he loved me but still today I can’t see how a man like my daddy can leave me all alone.
When they separated I started seeing things that I would love to say I’d never seen. I saw things like a father that would pick me up and take me over to where he was staying and introduce me to his girlfriend. The divorce was not yet final and he had met a woman sometime before he told my mother. The woman’s name was "Elaine". She had the same name as my mother. My father told me not to mention her to anyone and I hurt because I knew my father was doing wrong.
Through the young years of my life I was in the hospital most of the time. I was a very asthmatic young boy and spent several weeks in oxygen tents and I believe a lot of it was my nerves, the things I was seeing and feeling. I can remember being rushed to the hospital in the midst of a foggy night. They would throw me in a tub of ice to get my temperature down and put me in a little oxygen tent. I will never forget and cannot explain this but I will tell you what happened. At the age of six I was in an oxygen tent with my family members sitting around spending the night with me. My mother was off work and sitting next to me. She has been a waitress for 49 years. She had to work because my daddy wasn’t around and she had to put clothes on my back and food on the table. It seemed as though I went to sleep. I saw a countryside, hills, a meadow and grass waving in the wind, the sun was so bright and the day was so pretty, and there was such a peaceful feeling coming over me. When I came to, the doctors and nurses were by my side working on me. To this day, I don’t know what happened, except I’ve never felt that feeling since that day. But I was sick most of the time and I remember my father getting mad at me because I was always having to go to the hospital, always having adrenaline shots. Once the doctor told me that my arm looked like a pin cushion.
When I was eight, I remember going to my father when he was on a bar stool. He threw some change down, cussed and told me to buy him some cigarettes in the machine. I bent down, picked up the change, put the change in the machine, hit the button and the pack of cigarettes came out. I carried them to my daddy and he looked at those drunk men around him and said, "See, I told you my son was worth something". That’s what sin will do to a family. There were times my father would get drunk and come over and beat on my mother, even though they had been divorced for years. I would pretend I was sleeping. Christmas was not about a big tree, family get togethers and happiness. Every holiday I would dread and fear because I knew that Thanksgiving and Christmas meant people coming over and drinking wine at the dinner table. Soon that wine would be drunk in excess and there would be drunkenness and then fights. My mother had men who lived with her and she would be fighting with them, scratching their faces. They would be beating on her. I remember when I was about 11 or 12, seeing a man that lived with my mother slap and knock her down. She would yell for me but I could not do much at that age. I would just look at him and he could see that if I could, I would have ripped his face off his head. I had bitterness and hatred in me. Every time I’d walk away my mother would get back up slapping and cussing and he would knock her down again. Christmas time would come and we didn’t have presents like other kids, we had fights. We had people calling police to our house because of the disturbance. We had momma being beat up and daddy coming over drunk trying to pick me up for Christmas and he’s beating up on momma’s boyfriend and everybody’s fighting and this is supposed to be the time of rejoicing. I never had any Christmas’s as a young person. One time, my father came over drunk at Christmas, and my mom’s boyfriend, Elliott, walked out of the house and my father asked him what was in his back. Elliott had a big down jacket on and a knife was hanging out of his back where someone had tried to knife him. That’s the kind of holidays I had.
Right before my 14th birthday my dad came over drunk in his big Ford Ranchero that had a big stripe on the side. He made me ride with him through town. We ran over curbs, tore up swing sets. All in all, I always loved my daddy. He was a hero to me. My mother wanted to put me out of the house at 12 years old because I looked like my father. She’d tell me to go live with my father, but he did not have a home.
At 14, my sister flew me to San Francisco, California. On July 25, my fourteenth birthday, she gave me a line of cocaine for my birthday present. That was the first step to a wasted life, the first time I’d ever taken any drugs. My sister was a dealer and I remember seeing people come in and do exchanges. We’d sit hour after hour playing backgammon and cross word puzzles and snort cocaine. My sister would send me packages in the mail wrapped up and I would deliver these packages to members of my family in exchange for free drugs. It seemed everything was going for me because the drugs would give me an altered state. I would not think about my mother and daddy. I take full responsibility for taking drugs, I knew better and should have said "no", but it was a way of escape. At 16, I thought I was cool, 165-170 pounds, working out, Adidas T-Shirts, high top tennis shoes, etc.
The consistent taking of the powdered cocaine started eating up my nose and I couldn’t even inhale because of congestion. I met some black brothers and began hanging with them. One of them, Ralph, let me know that there was another way we could party that would not hurt my nose but it would be a little more intense. It’s a thing called rock up. What that means is you get a vial or a glass container and put some cocaine powder and some baking soda in it, and boil water under that vial. After it comes to a boil, you throw it in cold water and it purifies the cocaine. It comes out in rock form. This was before they had crack on the streets. They would take the cocaine rock and throw it up on the pipe. You then took a cotton ball and dipped it in alcohol, light the cotton, then you hit that flame on the pipe and you sit there and inhale that. This was the first time I had ever freebased cocaine. It makes your head ache and your chest start caving in. We’d sit there for hours and do that, but by this time I didn’t care. That pipe became my god, my girlfriend, my job, my family. My troubles took an even deeper plunge because I would do drugs for days, not hours, but days, be wringing wet with sweat, paranoid, looking through drapes and curtains over every noise, thinking it must be the cops. That drug got me hooked and I started realizing where sin had taken me.
After two years of taking drugs, I began thinking about suicide for the first time because I’d get strung out and my addiction would start overriding what was given to me and I had to start paying for more dope which caused me to start stealing and being scandalous. Some nights I crawled to get an extra $20 out of my mother’s purse to buy another piece of rock. She probably had to wait on 20 tables to get that money, but cocaine had become everything to me. It had control over me.
One night, my dad came to me and he was sobered up. He had started getting sobered up when I was sixteen but by that time I was a drug addict. He wanted to make up for time lost. He was ready to help me and give me something, but it was too late because I was hooked on drugs. He was sober now, but I was the one strung out. He did the worst thing he ever could have done to S.K. West. He bought me a new car, a new Camaro with personal license plates on it. I didn’t have to pay for it or make the payments. He was sober now, trying to make up things to me. He didn’t know his son had such a drug problem. The Camaro did not make up for the time lost as a child. I started running the streets big time now because I had the car.
Driving to go to work one night I thought to take my life because I had no control in my life. I got the Camaro at a high rate of speed and was going to run the car into a tree. I went off the road and when I hit the dirt something made me turn the wheel at the last minute and I hit the tree sideways. I came out unhurt and daddy found out that I was a drug addict. After that, I told my brother, Steve, my mother and my daddy that I was hooked on cocaine.
How did S.K. get this way? I was young, had never hurt anybody. My family took me to a drug rehab, an alcohol rehabilitation center and checked me in. After several meetings they started bringing out things about my childhood. These programs never did anything for me.
In high school I got involved in marshal arts. Before I would let someone hurt me, it was easier to hurt them. I sought popularity, girlfriends, the in-crowd.
In May, 1984, I had another sports car that my daddy had given me. Memorial weekend had passed and I was sober that day. Three of my friends and myself got into the car and we headed to school. A truck hit me doing about 70 mph and I went into an apartment building with my sports car. I woke up on the sidewalk as they were cutting my shirt, removing glass and I did not remember what had happened. I saw a man crawling out of a pickup that was overturned and the medics ran over to him. As he took a couple of steps, he fell and died of internal injuries. They charged me with vehicular manslaughter. I surrendered myself after I got out of the hospital. Come to find out, they proved I had innocence in the accident. The man ran the red light, all charges were dropped, but still a man lost his life. If I hadn’t have been in that corner, in that intersection, even though I was sober, the thought kept coming over and over that the man would not have lost his life. Now I realize that all my friends were not my friends. They were there for the good times, the free cocaine, the drugs, the partying, but now when West needed somebody, nobody was there. After the accident, my mother and daddy completely washed their hands clean of me.
I started roaming the streets, living on the streets of Fresno, looking at people in condemned building projects, smoking crack and spending their welfare checks on the last little bit they could get a hold of; babies eating cold soup out of a can for there was no electricity to burn a flame; women taking one hit off of a cocaine pipe and selling their bodies to get another $20 piece of cocaine. These things I have seen with my eyes. I have felt the hurt of watching people sell their bodies for a piece of cocaine that lasts no more than 30 seconds.
Once I went to the west side to score some dope and was in the wrong place at the wrong time without my backup. Four brothers that didn’t know me jerked me out of my car and put a knife to my throat. Three brothers were saying, "Cut ’em, cut ’em." I was sweating and tripping on cocaine and the knife was at my throat. Out of corner of my eye, I saw the guy and knew him. He had come into my brother’s gym. When I made eye contact, he threw me down and told me to take off and I did. I ran and ran. I heard them start beating and kicking my car, cutting my tires and laughing. When I found a phone booth, I dialed 911. When the police arrived, they called for backup and we went to my car. The t-top was crushed in, the dash had knife marks in it, the tires, the side, the engine, they had totaled my car. The police officers waited for three cars to come before they would go into that area. A total of four cop cars drove with spot lights and put them on my car. The tow truck came and the cop said to me, "I don’t know what your game is tonight, but West, the good Man upstairs has to want to keep you around awhile." The mercy and grace of God was watching over me.
Right after that, I realized there is no life, no hope and started to think about suicide again. The only thing that kept me from committing suicide was thinking about momma and daddy at my funeral around the casket. On November 5, 1987, I was strung out in the garage of my mother’s house at 3:30 in the morning with a pile of cocaine and a revolver with bullets in it because I didn’t want no one coming and stealing my dope. My nose was congested and full of blood and I knelt down by my bed and said, "I don’t know what to do, where to turn. I’m a loser." I thought that I would take my life that night. Then it didn’t matter what mother and daddy thought around my life, they weren’t there for me when I needed them. But, if there was a god out there and I cried, "God, this is Shane West calling tonight and there has to be a reason I’m still alive. God, if you don’t come into my life right now, if there’s really not a god, I’m gonna pick this revolver up and put it to my head and pull the trigger. God, would you come into this room and speak to me?" On my knees, God came into that room in His mercy and grace and I heard the voice of God in my heart. He said, "If you will pick yourself up and follow me, I will show you what happiness and joy is all about." I stood up and said, "God, I hear your voice. Show me, lead me." That night, God came into my heart and life. In the midst of drug addiction, sin and turmoil, the mercy of God reached out and touched my heart. I felt such a clean feeling. I threw my cocaine down and put my gun up. I had just heard from God and he said He loved me how I was. There is a God out there.
Quickly I ran into the house, woke my mother, and told her that God had just spoke to me. She told me to get out of there, she thought I was playing a game. I left her bedroom, went to the bathroom, ran the water, washed my face, and started going through the living room looking for a Bible. I had never read or picked up one before but thought there might be a Bible in the house. I found it covered with dust and asked God to confirm that he had just spoken to me through the Bible. After opening the Bible, this is what I read: "For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I. If then I do that which I would not, I consent unto the law that it is good. Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not." (Romans 7:15-18) There is no good in my flesh. Jesus is the one that gives me the victory. The sin in me is the one that provoked me to drug addiction. But there is a remedy and there is hope and it is in Jesus. I found what I had been looking for and for the first time knew that there was a God that loved me. Can you imagine how I felt after 21 years of not knowing God, to then have the God of all creation reach down and speak to me in that little room. The first thing I did after reading that scripture was to kneel down and pray again. Soon the sun came up.
The first person I called was a girl named Teresa Smith because I dated her in high school. One night I had picked her up at her church and when the doors opened I saw people running and dancing in that church to loud music and had thought that was weird. I told her that God had just spoke to me and I wanted to know what church she went to. So I went to church for the first time on Sunday morning. Teresa explained that the church was a charismatic church. I was introduced to the pastor who said I needed the Holy Ghost. Someone carried me into a little room and explained that I needed to baptized with the Holy Spirit. He instructed me that if I did not speak in tongues to not worry that I had already received the Holy Ghost and they could teach me how to speak in other tongues. It did not register with me, nor did it seem right that someone would have to teach me how to speak in tongues, I shook his hand and left.
Driving home, a few days after the night I repented of my sins, I pulled my car over and began to pray, "God, I don’t know anything about the Holy Ghost, but whatever you’ve got for me, I want it". I started walking on a golf course and cars were passing by, and I said, "God, I want the Holy Ghost". Then all the things I had done started coming to my mind and I thought that I was not good enough to get the Holy Ghost. But it had been four days since I’d taken cocaine or alcohol, since I’d cussed, lied, stolen or been scandalous. I began to praise God for the best four days of my life and just then I began to feel something coming on me right there on the side of the road. I lifted my hands and felt something like I’d never felt before and God baptized me with the Holy Ghost and I began to speak with other tongues as God gave the utterance. I started leaping for joy! Those cars passing by were honking and making fun of me. They probably thought I was high on drugs ! They didn’t realize that I had just been delivered from drugs and was feeling a power like I’d never felt before. God put me on a high that cocaine could never give. God gave me joy like sin never could give. The power of the Holy Ghost is greater than anything in the world! It is peace, joy unspeakable and full of glory. This is what I had been searching for, this is what I had been longing for, and now I finally found it ! Yes it was the power of God !
I want to reach for someone here tonight that perhaps you can relate to my story, you have been searching for that thing that will fill the emptiness inside, the void inside, well my friend you’re not going to find it in drugs, you’re not going to find it in alcohol, sex, rock music, or any other device of the world ! The only real peace, the only real joy, the only real happiness is found in Jesus Christ ! Call on Him now, He is as close as the mention of His Name !
John 9:25
He answered and said, Whether he be a sinner or no, I know not: one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see!
Acts 5:39
But if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God.
Acts 2:38
Then Peter said unto them, Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. (King James Version)
