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CBN.com – “My parents divorced when I was about eight years old. I think it’s hard for any child. I had lot of cousins that also came from broken homes. So we kind of congregated with each other when we were young. But I fought with that for a few years, which eventually lead to dealing marijuana and moving higher up the ladder, wanting and chasing money.”
Lance Foreman was the product of a broken home. As result he spent most of his time on the street dealing drugs. It was a road that led to a deadend and left him nowhere to go but up.
“I’d been in it for a few years, and I started knowing people. I started getting good at it,” Lance tells The 700 Club. “I got hooked up with more of the organized dope dealers in Monterey County, and I started making a lot of money -- more than I should have. I mean thousands upon thousands of dollars. We would get kilos of cocaine. We would make our own cut and make one kilo into two kilos. Then you just walk around with thousands of dollars all the time.”
But with big drug money came fear and danger.
“I got pretty big into it. I was making a lot of money and then comes the stress and the people wanting to get rid of you for doing it,” he says. “People owe you a lot of money. You owe a lot of money, which turns into a whole different level. Then the violence comes in. You have to protect your things; you have to protect yourself. People want your money.”
Who would have ever thought this eight-year-old boy from Salinas, CA, would end up here? Well, things got worse.
“I was young and it was starting to wear me out -- the stress -- and I started doing it,” he recalls. “Partying all the time makes it worse. Then a lot of my houses where I had dope were getting busted. That was costing me a lot of money. It was stressing me out even more. I started smoking heroine, and it just grabbed a hold of me like there was no tomorrow. Then I started shooting it, and I lost everything.”
Lance had reached the point of no return.
He says, “I could no longer keep anything together. I couldn’t collect money; I couldn’t do my business right. I started stealing robbing -- just a low form of life on earth. A lot of violence in that. Your mind doesn’t work right. Heroine can just turn you into a criminal over night.”
He was arrested for burglary, robbery, and assault of an officer. His sentence was four years in the state penitentiary.
“I thought I was going to be there a long time, and if I did get out when I was suppose to, I knew I'd be right back. So at the very best I was probably going to be a ‘lifer’ five years at a time. I know there was no way I could stop what I was doing. I had no power whatsoever to stop any of it.”
Then Lance saw something in the prison yard that changed his thinking.
“I seen this guy bench 600 pounds. So there he was right in front of me. The bar was bent. The record was 640, and here is this 50-year-old guy, tattooed all over, benching 600 pounds. I think maybe two nights later I seen this same guy walking down the tier carrying a Bible.”
Lance found out the guy had two life sentences and his Bible just wasn’t for show! Lance followed him right into a church service in the prison gym.
“So my curiosity got the best of me. I’m going in there. I want to know what this guy is doing,” Lance says. “I still could not figure it out. About 10 minutes later I met the Lord face to face. God told me, ‘It was your fault why you’re here. Nobody else’s. You made those decisions.’”
Lance gave his life to the Lord.
“I got delivered right then and there, and I walked out of that gym a Christian knowing there was a Heaven, there was a Hell -- knowing that once I get out I’m staying out. It was that fast. It took God 20 minutes to grab me, turn me around and change everything.”
Lance spent the next three and a half years serving his sentence. After he was released, he found a different world than the one he left.
“There’s a lot more on the street to deal with. There’s a lot of stuff coming at you," Lance explains. "I got a woman pregnant, and I started having children. I got a job, which my parole officer wanted me to have because I had no record of a job. I hurt my back really bad. I mean, not just saying my back hurts; it put me down in bed.”
As money got tight and with a baby on the way, he returned to selling drugs.
“I didn’t get into hard drugs. I didn’t hurt anybody. But I was making a little money.”
One morning, Lance found himself watching The 700 Club.
“I was kind of sleepin, which I don’t do much, and The 700 Club was on. I didn’t turn my TV off that night. I heard it, and I had never seen it before in my life. I believe it was Pat Robertson who said, ‘If you don’t knock it off, your son is going to end up in prison right behind you.’”
Lance was startled because his son hadn’t been born yet. But he felt the message was for him and decided to get back on track.
“I told the Lord, 'You’re gonna have to help me because I really don’t know what to do out here. I do not know.’ The Lord told me, ‘You’ve had a lot of dreams in your heart, and that’s what I want you to do.’”
Now Lance is living one of his dreams as a fight recruiter for Ken Shamrock’s Lion’s Den. He’s married and has four children.
“You know God gives every human a dream in their heart. We need it because that’s what we were born for… I would rather be a complete and utter failure with the Lord than have everything without Him. I wouldn’t want one day of success without the Lord. The guys locked up in prison. They know things have gone wrong. They know prison is not the place to be. Well, the Lord’s the way out.”
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