Armando V. Munoz

S.C.F Ministries, Youth Outreach

WHO AM I?

The magic question is who are you?  I could give you the hard stuff but I am here to encourage you with the love God showed me.  I know you think no one understands, but believe me I get it.  I am currently serving a prison term as it stands now of 43 years to life plus life plus life.  I was 25 years old when I killed a man who at the time I perceived to be an ally of my opponent who I was already engaged in a lethal fight.

Prior to this event, I struggled for many years with identity.  I felt rejection, abandonment, shame, guilt, anger and rage from a very young age.  I never quite fit in anywhere, but with other people doing bad stuff like me.  At the time, I believed only one person truly showed me unconditional love and acceptance.  This person taught me a lot from a very young age.  He taught me to be tough.  He taught me about guns and knives and to never pull them out unless I was going to use them.  He also taught me about respect.  He taught me to never let anyone disrespect me because if I did than other people will bully me as well.  If someone treated me bad, I treated them worse.  I was taught to make examples of people so no one would mess with me.  Yeah you know, these are the rules of THE GAME.  You know where punks, suckas, snitches, and marks have no place in the world.  Wow!

All that sounds good but I believed him.  In fact, I believed it so much that I lived by those rules.  Imagine my surprise when I found that none of this was true.  In fact, he did not even live by the rules I was taught.  It is all crap.  I remember coming to prison and finding myself all alone.  The staff try to force you into running with a gang and everyone else I met had the same rules I had been taught.  It was the criminal culture I was raised in where I was taught only the strong survive.

Since I have been here for the last nearly 18 years, I watched my young face grown old, my body start to hurt, and none of my friends that encouraged and affirmed my behavior around.  As I look back, I can only see all the wounded souls I left behind that have continued life in dysfunctional fashion where I was the primary contributing factor.  How do you make up for such mass destruction?  This is not who I wanted to become.  This is not who I was on the inside.  This was only who I wanted people to think I was.  I couldn’t let anyone see the pain I was feeling on the inside.  I was ashamed of myself.  I had no dad, I felt my mom chose everyone else over me and when I tried to express myself I was ignored or pushed away.  Don’t get me wrong, she did her best and I know she loved and still loves me.  The problem was that I was already hurting and broken.  Hurting people hurt people.  The more we hurt the more we hurt ourselves and others.  It becomes a cycle that once we get the momentum going, the centrifugal force of our momentum won’t let us of and we become numb to all the degrading things we do to ourselves and others.

The Bible says to love our neighbors as ourselves, but how can we love anyone when inside we hate our selves?  I needed help, but who would I ask?  Who would listen?  My inner life was in shambles and now it had been so long that I had been in my mess I did not know anything else.  The cultural environment I lived in glorified my conduct.  In fact, if some of my peers talked about me it would be about that life style with acknowledgment and acceptance.  It was so familiar to me it seemed normal.  Imagine the surprise when I learned that everything I believed in was a lie.  What if you found out your mom was not your mom or you dad was not your dad?  Everything you built your life on has suddenly fallen apart.  Your entire foundation pulled out from under you.

However, all along there was someone(s) in my life, little seedlings that God had planted in my life that established a few very basic truths that I know.  First, God is real.  Second, if I pray, He will listen.  As I sit here on my 18^th Easter in prison, I contemplate someday getting out.  I remember throughout the years each time I met someone who has been here many years before I came in.  I wish I could have met them before I came to be warned of the misery in these places.  Well, here is your warning.  I long every day to be out.  My desire has only increased as the years have gone on.  I can deal with where I am, but desire hurts on a daily basis from the inside out to be out of this place.  I don’t now how many regrets you have, but my life will never be the same even if I do get out.  If I don’t, I will die suffering like a caged animal.

I have three children all grown now, but they grew up like me—without a dad in the home.  Mom was left to do it all alone and all issuesare here that come with having to go it alone.  I’m sure some of you can relate, if not, all of you.  Then my answer to the question ‘Who Am I?’ was: a career criminal, cold calculated and violent with extremely prejudicial tendencies.

Today, my answer is that I am a child of God, a man of God in every sense of the word.  I had to change the way I think, speak, act, and ultimately my whole way of life.  I had to learn what true value is and what is worthless.  You see what the ‘homies’ think is nothing.  They are all hurting weak people trying to prove to everyone they are strong, down, and all that machismo. Anyone can pick up a gun, a knife, a bat or whatever and act like a cave man.  That’s why we do it because it is easy.  It takes a very special person to walk away knowing he can do all those things but cares enough about God, himself, and others to walk away.  It takes a very special person to be able to say I value my body too much to put chemicals in it or to injure it through risky behavior, like illicit sex and other risky behavior.  A weak person gives in to all these things, but strong ones can say no to themselves no matter how much they are being pressured.

In the beginning, I was not strong I was weak on the inside.  I gave in to everything.  I had to build myself up in every area.  I first needed to ask Jesus not only to be my Savior, but more importantly my Lord.  This means He is the boss, not me.  Then I had to get an understanding how He does things and how He would have me do things.  In order to do that I had to learn to listen to His voice.  His voice is not determined by sound, but rather by character and nature.  For example, if God is love then anyone who teaches us or pushes us to do things that harm or are violent is not of God.  Moreover, God’s character has many facets so I have to read the Bible to learn what He is all about.

If I wanted to see change, I need to begin to practice those things I learned.  I had to put it into action.  It is the same way when we began doing bad stuff.  It was all learned behavior.  We learned it, did it, practiced it, and got good at it.  Now, we are seeing noticeable consequences to those actions.  These are the signs we are going the wrong way.  The carnal solution is to do “bad” a better way.  This is not, however, the Godly solution, nor is it profitable in any way.  This is the primary reason why so many people come in and out of prison.  They want to keep doing bad and are just sorry they got caught and want to improve their ways.  This will only lead to stricter punishment and or worse crime next time.

We need to choose to believe God now, agree, and practice His word.  Then we will see change in our hearts, in actions, in our thinking, in our ways, and eventually in our circumstances and opportunities.  You may say, “Man that is a lot.”  My answer is, “So is 43 years to triple life!”  Are you ready to spend the rest of your life in prison simply because you feel lazy?  That to me is a clear sign of irrational thinking.  You can do what you want, but as for me, I am willing to do anything for one more chance with my wife and children and now grandchildren outside these walls and fences.  It is all up to you; it is all choices.  The story I have told you is mine, yours may be different.  However, I can attest to confirmation of my words by thoughts of life term inmates.  We all have left a wake of destruction behind us.  So now it is truly up to you.

I know if you call on the name of the Lord, He will hear you and will save you.  I know because the Bible says it and because I am a living testimony of it.  Many people I knew in the beginning only made their time worse by rejecting Christ.  Today, I have had no disciplinary action for the entire 18 years since I murdered one man and attempted the murder of two others.  I have no violence since then despite my commitment offense involving three victims:  one of a shooting, one of a stabbing/beating; and the third a beating/stabbing/shooting resulting in a murder and two attempted murder convictions.  God has truly changed my life.  My only wish is that my life had been changed before I committed such atrocious acts.  However, those were the choices I made.

You have a chance to get off your cycle before you get caught up in the momentum of your own criminal activity.  Since my turn around, I have been involved in Ministry for nearly 18 years.  I have created and facilitated self-help programs.  I have become a Certified Paralegal, started a Ministry, and have written a book called Radical Faith.  Truly with God all things are possible.  Get off the train before you find yourself in a predicament that only God can get you out of.

Thank you for listening.  I pray God touches your heart and changes your life through this message.  If He can do things in my life in this situation, there is nothing He cannot do for you.