My Testimony
“The God of our fathers has chosen you that you should know His will, and see the Just One, and hear the voice of His mouth. For you will be His witness to all men of what you have seen and heard.”
Acts 22:14–15 (NKJV)
These are thirty moments from my life that became witnesses to the deeper pattern I would eventually come to recognize - that life is not random but unfolding within divine authorship.
One phrase, in particular, followed me throughout my life and eventually became one of the clearest signs through which I began recognizing that pattern:
“Familiar faces in unfamiliar places is my way of showing you that everything is going as planned.”
At first, these moments felt impossible to explain.
Over time, they became impossible to ignore.
Why I Share These Testimonies
Throughout my life, I have experienced moments too precise to dismiss as coincidence.
Familiar faces appearing in unfamiliar places.
Timely guidance that redirected me from danger.
Encounters, delays, conversations, and unexpected turns that only made sense when I looked back and recognized how deeply everything had aligned.
Over time, I began recognizing a pattern within these moments.
What once looked like isolated events began revealing a deeper order already moving beneath my life.
These testimonies are not written to force belief.
They are written as witnesses.
They are the moments I saw.
The moments I heard.
The moments I lived.
The moments that shaped how I came to understand faith, purpose, divine authorship, and the truth that life is not random.
Looking back, I can now see how each experience played a role in forming not only the person I was becoming, but the understanding I was being prepared to carry.
These are some of those moments.
My Testimonies
Seeing Beyond the Veil
Seeing Beyond the Veil When I was around nine years old, I had an experience that stayed with me for the rest of my life.
My aunt lived in a house where someone had died, and people often said the spirit of that person still remained in the house. We would hear strange noises and footsteps, and many believed the house was haunted.
One day my aunt asked my cousin and me to go upstairs and bring down a mattress.
I was the first person to enter the room.
When I walked in, I saw something my cousin did not.
There was a shadow of a man sitting on the edge of the bed.
I was the only one who saw it.
At the time I didn’t fully understand what had happened, but looking back I believe that moment revealed something important.
I believe I was meant to see it.
The Holy Spirit had directed me to that room at that moment for a reason. God had already given me the spiritual sight necessary to see beyond the physical world.
That moment became one of the earliest signs that my life would include encounters I could not easily explain.
It was the beginning of many experiences that would later reveal the deeper reality behind what we call life.
2 Kings 6:17 “And Elisha prayed, and said, ‘Lord, I pray, open his eyes that he may see.’ Then the Lord opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw.”
Miami
When I was twenty-six years old, I was working as a waiter at Olive Garden. One day I decided I wanted to move to Miami.
I told one of the waitresses, Mary, about my plan.
She responded by saying that she was also planning to move to Miami.
What made the moment interesting is that Mary was the only person I told about my decision besides my manager.
Even more interesting was how it happened.
Before I told her, I heard the familiar voice say:
“Tell her you’re moving to Miami.”
A month later I was driving down Ocean Boulevard in Miami when a woman suddenly walked across the street in front of my car.
It was Mary.
I was so surprised that I pulled over and followed her into the restaurant where she worked.
She explained that she was running late for work and had parked across the street, which caused her to cross the road right at the moment I was driving by.
Looking back, I asked myself:
What are the chances that the only person I was led to tell about moving to Miami would also move there?
What are the chances she would be late for work that day and walk directly in front of my car?
The voice that told me to tell her had already known I would see her again.
Moments like that made me realize that what we often call coincidence may actually be the unfolding of something that was already arranged.
Familiar Faces in Difficult Times
Around the age of thirty, I knew a woman named Kristy who worked as a VIP host in Las Vegas.
Because of the industry we worked in, we often crossed paths unexpectedly. In one three-day period alone, I was introduced to her five different times by five different clients.
But something even more unusual happened later.
In one year I was arrested three separate times for traffic violations and unpaid parking tickets.
Each arrest happened in a different place under different circumstances.
Yet every time I was sitting in the back of the police car, I looked out the window and saw Kristy driving by.
Three different arrests.
Three different locations.
Three separate moments.
And each time we made eye contact.
Looking back now, I recognize that those were difficult seasons in my life. I was struggling with addiction and making destructive decisions.
But those moments felt like reminders.
Even when I felt lost, God was still present.
Those familiar faces appearing in unfamiliar places became signs that my life was still moving according to a plan I couldn’t yet see.
During those difficult years I developed my deepest relationship with God.
Sometimes it takes losing everything to realize that God is all we truly have
Meko
In 2018 I traveled to Detroit to visit family before turning myself in to serve a one-year prison sentence.
The next day I thought about my cousin Meko and decided to go visit her at her store. When I arrived, she wasn’t there, so I returned to my hotel disappointed.
Later that evening I woke from a nap wondering what to do next. My friend Rod came to mind, so I called him and we decided to meet later that night.
For some reason both of us changed clothes before meeting—each of us ending up wearing almost identical outfits: black pants, a black shirt, and black shoes.
We laughed about it when we met and decided to go downtown to visit a few bars.
At one of the bars we sat outside watching people pass by while waiting for our food. Rod was facing away from the street while I faced toward it.
As I watched the traffic go by, a car drove past that caught my attention.
It was Meko.
At the exact moment I noticed her car, my phone rang.
It was her.
She had seen me at the same moment I had seen her.
What made the moment even more remarkable was that she told me she hadn’t been downtown in six years, but something had compelled her to go there that night.
Everything that had happened that day suddenly made sense.
My desire to see her earlier.
Rod and I changing clothes.
Our decision to go downtown.
The exact moment she drove past.
Every detail had aligned.
The moment reminded me of the passage in Mark 14:12–16, when Jesus told His disciples they would meet a man carrying a jar of water who would lead them to the place where the Passover would be prepared.
The disciples did not arrange that meeting.
They simply followed the instructions and found everything exactly as Jesus had said.
That night felt similar.
It was as if the details of the day had been arranged long before we recognized them.
The Cross In The Picture
About a month after arriving at prison camp, I asked my mother to send me some photographs.
She sent eight pictures. One of them had been taken months earlier while Carlee and I were in Jamaica.
I taped the pictures to the ceiling above my bunk so I could look at them.
One night as I was studying them, I felt drawn to the photo from Jamaica.
The Spirit said to me:
“There is something for you in this picture.”
At first I couldn’t see anything unusual.
Then the Spirit said again:
“Look closer.”
When I examined the image more carefully, I noticed something I had not seen before.
In the sky above me was the shape of a cross.
In the water below was the reflection of a rainbow.
My eyes filled with tears.
I realized something profound: the cross represented salvation, and the rainbow represented God’s covenant.
Even more astonishing was the realization that the photograph had been taken months earlier—before I had begun writing the book.
The Spirit then revealed something to me:
“This picture will be the cover of your book.”
God had already provided the image before I had even begun writing the story.
What seemed like an ordinary vacation photo had become part of the larger plan unfolding in my life
The Day I Went Home
On February 17, 2020, I was released from prison.
Looking back, I realized that the day I would be released had already been determined before I was even arrested in December.
I understood this because of something that happened in the courtroom.
Sitting beside me was a familiar face—the same lawyer who had tried to convince me to plead guilty in a courtroom situation many years earlier.
At the time we first met, I had torn up the letter the Spirit told me to tear up, choosing instead to place my faith in God.
Now, years later, we were sitting beside each other again in a completely different circumstance.
Life had come full circle.
That moment reminded me of the story of Joseph in the Bible. Joseph endured betrayal, slavery, and imprisonment before eventually seeing the purpose behind everything he had gone through.
When Joseph finally understood the reason for his suffering, he told his brothers:
“Do not be distressed… God sent me ahead of you.”
What once looked like hardship had been preparation.
Looking back on my own journey, I began to see the same pattern.
Every experience—even the difficult ones—had been moving me toward something.
And at the center of it all was the book I was writing.
The Sign
More than twenty years ago I noticed something that would become a personal sign in my life: a familiar face in an unfamiliar place.
Whenever it happened, it reminded me that life was unfolding exactly as it should.
One day after praying for guidance about my future, I stopped at Sam’s Club to pick up a few things.
While standing in line, a woman approached me and asked if I was Marcellous.
She told me she had been encouraged by my social media posts.
As we talked, I suddenly realized where I had seen her before.
Months earlier she had approached me in another store asking if I could help her find her daughter. Before leaving that day, I had felt led to give her one of my books.
Now here she was again.
Right there in the middle of the store she asked if we could pray together.
We joined hands and prayed.
When the prayer ended she quietly walked out of the building.
What struck me most was that she had no cart and no items in her hands. It seemed as though she had come to that store for one reason—to cross paths with me again.
Moments like this have happened many times throughout my life.
Each one reminds me that the people we meet and the moments we experience may be part of something far greater than we can see while we are living them.
Closing Reflection
Looking back across these moments, I no longer see a series of random events. I see witness, timing, guidance, and divine authorship revealing itself through the details of my life.
Again and again, life placed me inside moments too precise to ignore - a warning before danger was visible, a familiar face appearing in an unfamiliar place, or a delay, interruption, or unexpected turn becoming the very thing that positioned me for what was next.
For years, I experienced these moments before I fully understood what they were revealing. I only knew they carried a weight deeper than coincidence. Over time, reflection became recognition. What the moment concealed while I was living it, awareness revealed when I looked back.
As Proverbs 16:9 says:
“A man’s heart plans his way,
But the Lord directs his steps.”
That is what these testimonies taught me. I made decisions, followed instincts, changed plans, and moved through ordinary days, yet something greater was directing the path.
The same truth appears in the Qur’an:
“They plan, and Allah plans. And Allah is the best of planners.”
Qur’an 8:30
Looking back, I can now see that even the moments I did not understand were still held within a wisdom greater than my own. What seemed unexpected to me was never outside of God’s sight.
Often, the most meaningful moments came through details that appeared small at first - a conversation, a delay, a photograph, a meeting, or even the thought to go one direction instead of another.
As Alma 37:6 says:
“By small and simple things are great things brought to pass.”
Many of the moments that shaped my life did not look significant while they were happening, but later revealed themselves as part of something much greater.
That is why I share these testimonies - not to argue anyone into belief, but to bear witness to what I have seen, heard, and lived. These experiences shaped how I came to understand faith, purpose, divine timing, and the authored nature of life.
They taught me that what looks ordinary can be carrying something much greater. What feels like interruption can be direction. What seems random can later reveal itself as part of something already prepared.
Like Saul searching for donkeys while being led toward Samuel, I came to see that life was often moving with purpose before I knew how to recognize it. The road looked ordinary. The assignment looked small. The moment looked disconnected. But the story was already moving.
These testimonies changed the way I see my life. My prayer is that they invite us to look again at our own.
Because sometimes the clearest evidence of purpose is not found by looking ahead. Sometimes it is found by looking back and realizing that God was there the whole time.