From peddling dope to pleasing Jesus

FONTANA, Calif.— As a young man straddling the cusp of adulthood, David Zamora saw two ends to his life: Either he’d be butchered in the streets by rival gangs or die shivering in prison as a drug addict who robbed, lied, and cheated just for a moment of drug-induced bliss.

Those two possibilities didn’t bother him too much. After all, drugs, gang-banging, and imprisonment were all he learned to expect growing up in Ontario, Calif., a predominantly Latino, working-class city 35 miles east of Los Angeles. His parents divorced when he was 8, leaving him to grow up without a father. He watched the men in his life rotate in and out of institutions.

“Guys like us, we don’t make it out of el barrio,” said Zamora, using the Spanish term for “neighborhood,” or in this case, “ghetto.”

He grew up in the barrio, living the barrio lifestyle, and he anticipated nothing more than a barrio-style ending to his life.

So Zamora followed that trajectory: He started smoking marijuana when he was 9, progressed to methamphetamine and PCP by age 12, and was injecting cocaine, heroin, and meth by the time he was 13. He dropped out of school in eighth grade. When he was just 11, he joined the Ontario Black Angels, a notorious 450-member Hispanic street gang that law enforcers say is aligned with the Mexican Mafia prison gang. His mother, Carolina Gonzalez, recalled running out the door whenever she heard sirens, thinking, “That may be my son!” Her nightmare eventually came true: At age 18, Zamora’s drug activities landed him in state prison.

After serving time in seven different institutions, a fellow inmate on fire for Jesus asked Zamora, “If there is one thing God can do in your life, what would you request from Him?” Zamora didn’t know who God was at the time, but he answered the question seriously: “This drug addiction. I’m tired of being a dope fiend.” The inmate then said, “If God could take that away from you, would you give him your life?” Zamora replied with despair creeping into his voice, “If you could take this away from me, I would give you my life!”

That night, Zamora couldn’t forget that conversation. He remembered his mother taking him and his three older brothers to church every Sunday when they were kids, even recalling the songs they sang in Sunday school. He remembered his mother’s miserable tears at home transforming into bright smiles after Sunday service. He even remembered the many discussions about God he had with his homies while smoking and sniffing, always concluding, “Well, there has to be something out there.”

So Zamora prayed to that “something out there,” this time with a sincerity sealed with desperation: “If you’re the God of the Bible, the God my mom says you are, then take this drug addiction from me. If you do, I’ll give you the rest of my life. And if you don’t, then I don’t need you, and I’ll die a drug addict.” The next morning, Zamora woke up without the slightest urge to use drugs. He has not touched a needle since. That day, he knew he’d just experienced a miracle.

“I can’t explain it, I just can’t explain, but I knew right then that nobody can tell me there isn’t a God,” he said.

When Zamora got out of prison at age 21, he started attending a local Hispanic church, where he learned and professed salvation in Christ. But he continued drinking excessively and smoking marijuana, excusing that as juvenile compared to hard drugs. But one day, he felt convicted to make the ultimate clean break from his past lifestyle. From then on, Zamora did whatever he could to serve the church. He swept, cleaned toilets, greeted newcomers, and became an on-call mechanic, while his wife Bianca (also an ex-addict) served in the children’s ministry. They both served out of pure gratitude for what God had done for them.

One Saturday afternoon, a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on their door, and Zamora eagerly welcomed them, thinking they were fellow evangelical Christians. Early into their conversation, the guests told Zamora that no, Jesus is not God, nor is there any scriptural basis for the doctrine of the Trinity. There’s also no hell, they said, and for every statement, they pointed to verses in their Bibles to prove it.

As a new believer who didn’t even own a Bible, Zamora was impressed: “Wow, these guys know what they’re talking about!” He called out to his wife, who had been listening in the kitchen, and declared, “We’re not going to our church no more. We’re going to their church.” That same day, his mother-in-law picked up a big, fat book from the discount table at a Christian bookstore, mistaking it for a Bible. The book she gifted to Zamora turned out to be a Bible commentary. That night, Zamora cross-referenced all the scriptures the Jehovah’s Witnesses had quoted to him with the commentary and realized they conflicted each other. Now thoroughly confused, Zamora decided to study the Bible for himself so he would know what he was talking about.

That one commentary expanded into a personal library of 1,200 books. He had an unquenchable thirst for biblical knowledge. For five years, Zamora spent 20 hours a week studying the Bible, and he started telling others what he was learning. Soon, an informal Bible study with his then-coworker, Rick Macias, swelled into a weekly Bible teaching session of 30 to 40 people in Macias’ backyard. Word spread across the Ontario neighborhood that a 25-year-old guy just like them was teaching the book of Colossians chapter by chapter, verse by verse.

Today, Zamora is the full-bearded, 37-year-old, senior pastor of Living Way Christian Fellowship, a 400-member, non-denominational church in Fontana, Calif., a majority-Latino city near Zamora’s barrio in Ontario. He’s also the second convicted felon in the state of California to become a state parole chaplain. Zamora used to buy his heroin in the alley behind the Living Way church building, and the church office across the sanctuary used to be the Fontana Parole Office where Zamora went for drug testing.

“It’s mind-blowing. It’s amaaaaazing! Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would do any of this,” Zamora said, still shaking his head in wonder, as he sat in the office. His former parole officer, a nonbeliever, later told Zamora, “Your story makes me believe there is a God.”

Many in the congregation grew up like Zamora: Chicanos caught between their Mexican and American cultures, many raised in broken families, in gang-dominated neighborhoods. Some of them are ex-convicts, ex-gang-bangers, or single moms without a high school degree, so the church helps run an adult education program for people who didn’t graduate high school. It also operates an accredited, two-year community college, and a Bible college. Its various outreach programs to the local community include a feeding program and an eight-bed residency program for ex-convicts. But Zamora also reminds his congregants about the neighborhood’s true source of hope.

“What Fontana needs is not another church or another guru,” he said. “What it needs is Jesus. We need a church body here that emulates Jesus in a way that gives people hope.”

Zamora used to always ask God, “Why me?” Now he’s stopped asking and just accepts the fact that he’ll never deserve any of the favor God freely gives for the sake of His glory.

“I know I can lose all of this—it only takes a second of compromise, and this can all be gone,” he said. “And I know this for sure: It’s not me, it’s never about me. My main objective is just to please Jesus.”