TheSourceDaily

How being shot at point-blank range by a hit man in Oakland, California, brought a Mexican chef to Christ

By Dan Wooding
Founder of ASSIST Ministries

TUXTLA GUTIÉRREZ, CHIAPAS, MEXICO (ANS) — The life of Abel Borges Reyes, a Mexican chef living in Oakland, California, took a turn for the worse when he was shot at point-blank range by a hit man.

But, as he told me in an interview in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, where he was the driver for the media team covering Festival of Life 2007, he found Jesus Christ as his Savior as he lay unconscious in the emergency room of a hospital in Oakland.

Abel revealed that he had moved to what he described as “the most dangerous part of Oakland” as a “death wish” following a traumatic incident that had occurred when was child in his home town of Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the capital city of Chiapas.

“When I was eight years old, I was with my little brothers and sister,” he began. “My sister was seven, and my brothers were five and one. One day my Mom had to go to work and she left me in charge of the family. There were two family members who came over to the house to see how we doing and, all of a sudden, they began pushing and hitting me and then they raped me and they also abused the others. They told me if that if I told somebody, even my Dad or my Mom, they would ‘do something worse’ to my life.

“Since that day, my life changed a lot because I wasn’t feeling secure. When I was fourteen years old, I tried to have my first girlfriend and it was the hardest thing in my life because I wasn’t sure about my sexuality. Every time when I talked with my first girlfriend she would try to hold me or kiss me and I felt so strange. So I was thinking, ‘What’s wrong with me? What’s going on in my life?’”

Abel said that he often harbored thoughts about killing himself.

Those dark thoughts went with him when he moved to the United States in the early 1990s after his parent’s divorced and he was given the responsibility raising the family and paying the bills. It got too much for him, he said.

“I arrived in San Diego in the winter and I remember that when I got there I used to sleep in the down town streets with the African American,” he said. “I didn’t speak English and they always make me feel nervous because I didn’t know what they were talking about or what they wanted to do with me.”

Eventually, Abel moved to Oakland and got a job cleaning a dinner bar there and eventually secured a work as a chef in a federal building.

“I had enough money to have my own apartment but I was still feeling bad and this deep depression I had wouldn’t go away,” he continued. “I wanted to kill myself because what had happened to me as a child and one night, someone who was supposed to be a friend, offered me a beer and I start drinking and all of a sudden I was drinking all the time and I got to be alcoholic.”

Abel said that eventually be met a girl who gave him some crack cocaine and soon he was well and truly hooked on that as well.

“I began working two jobs to pay for the drugs and alcohol,” he said.

A living hell

Abel said that by now his life had turned into a “living hell” and as his death wish got stronger and stronger, so he moved in a place on 35th Street in Oakland, which he described as “one of the most dangerous areas of the city.”

“I’ll never forget this place because I was the only Mexican living there,” he said. “The neighbors were all African American and when I moved there I was thinking, ‘OK, this is it; this is a great place to die.’ I could kill myself with my drugs and alcohol and nobody was going to know.’”

Abel said that the neighborhood was riddled with drug dealers and violence permeated the area.

“I knew that one of these days, something was going to happen to me, but I didn’t realize that it would be that soon,” he said. “One night, I had been drinking and getting high and I woke up to go to work early in the morning, and suddenly, as I went to get to my car in the parking lot, I saw this guy who came over to me and said, ‘Sorry Abel, but somebody has sent me to kill you.’ With that he took out a Magnum .45 and shot him three times – once in the head and twice in the chest.

“I found out later that he had been hired by a drug dealer who had been told that I had been ‘playing with his wife’ at a party. I hadn’t even been at this party.”

Able said that two people from the neighborhood found him bleeding on the floor and took in by car to the local hospital and left him outside, where he was able to stagger inside to the emergency room.

“He’s not going to make it”

“The doctors and staff put me in a bed and took off my clothes and started cleaning the blood from my body. I was soon unconscious and I could just hear a voice say, ‘He’s not going to make it.’ All of a sudden I saw this very small light and I knew that it was God and then I heard a voice say, ‘You want an opportunity?’ I said, ‘Yes. I want an opportunity.’ The light was by now getting bigger and bigger and all of a sudden, I heard that same voice say, ‘OK, there is only one chance to receive me into your life and this is it.’ The voice continued: ‘I’m going to give you one more chance and you’re going to preach my Gospel.’ I said, ‘Yes, I will do it. I want to do it and I don’t want to die.’

“Looking back, I was talking with God for two or three hours. The time was going so fast.”

As Abel began to recover consciousness he said that the doctor gave him 140 stitches around his eye, but amazingly there were no wounds in his chest area despite having been shot twice there. Eventually, he began to get well and the police arrested the gun man who is now in prison serving a thirty year sentence.

On his release from the hospital, Abel said he was still craving for drugs and alcohol and one day he cried out to God while on a bus journey, saying, “God, I know you’re powerful and the Bible says that you sent Your Holy Spirit and when you have the Holy Spirit you’re holy. I want to experience that.”

Abel went on to say, “All of a sudden, I was speaking in tongues on the bus and I was crying. I never had such a feeling in my life and since that time I have never had a drink or used crack.”

He said that some two years ago, he felt God’s call to return to Chiapas as an evangelist.

“When I arrived back in Tuxtla, I brought around $12,000 with me and with the money I bought a truck and started going to like the poorest villages around Tuxtla and I bought water and would give it to the kids,” he said. “I also started doing into the streets and preached the Gospel to the people.”

Abel says he has since been able to forgive the relatives that had raped him as a child and also plans to return to the United States to visit the man who tried to kill him and forgive him also.

“I want to go back to the same neighborhoods in Oakland where I used to get drugs and alcohol and talk with the people I knew and tell them that there is something better than drugs and alcohol. I want to share the Gospel with them and tell them how that God is good. I don’t care if they want to kill me again because God is good and I’m still alive. God gave me a chance to live and I want to show them how to live and if they don’t want to believe me it’s ok. But I want to try it.”