“Desperation. There’s power in that word.” — Lonnie Frisbee
When we are desperate, we become hungry for God. Desperation is birthed in suffering.
The crucible of suffering is a season in our life when we experience circumstances so profoundly challenging that they transform us. The suffering causes us to question our beliefs and to wrestle with our understanding of ourselves and God. If we truly engage with God, as Jacob did, this crucible can be used to refine our hearts to bring out our true identity in Christ. This fiery process draws impurities like pride, anger, fear, and selfishness to the top to be removed, leaving behind pure gold or silver. The Bible is full of stories of Kingdom leaders who made tremendous impact but first had to walk through the crucible of suffering. They came out tested, refined and equipped to walk through fire to expand the Kingdom of God. There is no great testimony without a great test.
The story of suffering and desperation you are about to read is that kind of story. It is profoundly deep and rich with revelation and insight that will inspire, teach, and encourage you. This is the story of one who has risen from the ashes like the phoenix and is still rising for a time such as this. Jackie Turner, also known as Jackie, the Street Preacher, is a force to be reckoned with. A pioneering woman of God; called, chosen and tested in the crucible of suffering. She is called to roar as a mouthpiece for God.
Jackie’s story in her own words:
The Lord has been the anchor of my soul all my life and it hasn’t been an easy way or in easy fashion. From the time I was born, it was like I entered into the world and lived up to that version of we are born into a world of sin. And when I came into the world, I came into the world to a seventeen-year-old mom who was desperately trying to figure out how to survive. I was the third child to the seventeen-year-old mom, and I can’t even imagine what her story is or has been. I never lived with my mom, beyond eight months old. And in the short eight months that I lived with her, it was a very difficult time for her, I’m told. She made some choices that I believe today may still cause her shame and grief. My mother’s, and my journey, without giving details on her journey, has been forgiven. That’s as far as I can go on my end because she’s not currently in my life.
Beyond that, at eight months old, I went to live in a home and I lived there until I was nine years old. During that time, I would go to church and I would hear messages about God’s love. We heard the undiluted truth of the word of God. However, those people that presented the Word of God—like all humanity—had their places of sin. Unfortunately for me, some of those places of sin led to my abuse. So I would get beaten, locked in closets, and starved. That carried on for a long time. That was one of the homes where I received many scars. During that time, I would go to church and God kept His church as a place that was an anchor to my soul. The reason why was because it was the one place where either people were seeking the Lord and they were super nice, or people were pretending to love the Lord.
God kept His house a place of refuge and safety for me. Still I would be put in those locked closets, they were often dark, and I couldn’t see anything. I knew when the door would open, there would probably be abuse that came on the other side. So I got used to being in those dark closets, used to being alone and in those lonely places. The Lord was my entertainment, to be honest with you. I would have visions of preaching to people. I’d pretend to take the sermons I had heard on Sunday, and I would close my eyes and imagine preaching those messages to thousands of people. And so the Lord got to my heart very early, even in the midst of pain, and because of the pain, it taught me to pray unceasingly.
I was praying for survival. I was praying through hunger, I was praying through beatings. And sometimes, even at five years old, I would pray for Him to bring me home. Most people would not imagine having a childhood where at five years old, one would ask God to bring you home, but that was what I felt. So, the connection between me and God started very early on. I was desperate for Him, literally and physically desperate. And during those years, in that desperation, I went through waves of grief and anger. I would think, I go to church, hear these promises, I hear about Your protection, I hear about Your provision. I hear about you feeding the 5,000, and “Lord, I’m in the closet, and the dark, starving, and I can’t understand.”
And I just remember there were heart-wrenching conversations with God in the closet. And so I took to the books of the Prophets because it was so powerful for me that they would testify to the truth. They were innocently truthful, and yet they would get thrown in cisterns. And one of the things childhood taught me, was that one of the most beautiful places to be with God in intimacy is actually in the cistern of your soul. And the reason why is there’s no other voice there except for you and God. He will teach you some of the most beautiful lessons in the midst of your suffering. So, I’ve learned to love the cisterns of my soul with God. Rising up from that place, at nine, I was finally taken out of that house by the mom and left abandoned after she had gone too far and beat me across the face with a belt buckle.
The scarring still shows around and under my eyes. Then the school got involved and she became afraid. So she took me to the Division of Youth and Family Services and I sat there with a garbage bag of clothes. The first time I learned I was lovable was when I was left behind. And I sat on the stairs for two hours with the garbage bag of clothes until a social worker came out and said, “I think you’ve been abandoned.” And I found out the family that I thought was my family was not my family, and at nine years of age, I went into foster care for the first time. Foster care was the highlight of my life. Thankfully in foster care, we went to church consistently. I went to vacation Bible school for the first time.
I was very mature for my age amongst my peers because of what I had been through as well as what I grew up learning. So they called me from an early age, a teacher of the teachers. And that title, no matter where I went kept coming back. I was a teacher of the teachers. Even here at Jessup when I was getting my college degree, that was one of the titles that one of my professors, Dennis Nichols, called me. God had brought me, once again, to a place I related to Jesus when he was twelve years old, speaking in the synagogues to the leaders. And it was like there’s something rich in suffering that teaches you things beyond your age.
Suffering just teaches you the depth of walking with Christ, even when it costs you everything. For a child losing innocence, and all types of things that were lost in that time, it was kind of like I was Job at the age of five. And it teaches you to count the cost, and still say “Blessed be the name of the Lord.” And Christ was my living hope because He was the only one that could enter those closets when no human being would. Fast forward at around eleven, my biological dad came into the picture, and he took me to live with him. I was with him from age eleven to seventeen, and those years were pretty hard, too. Once again, he was another person in ministry and was living a double life. He was a boxer. And I went through many, many blows. So, I have a chunk missing out of my lip. The nick in my eyebrow came from hitting my face on the entertainment center. Those days were extra hard because one of the hardest things to deal with is when you look like the person abusing you. It’s one thing when you have an abuser that’s outside of your family, but it’s entirely different when you look like the person who hurt you. Every day you look in the mirror and see that person. But even with that, God taught me the love and grace that comes through suffering.
There’s a love He taught me early on. There’s love that comes through suffering. And that love is the same love that Jesus had when He looked down on a people while His body was torn apart and said, “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.” The more I learned of my father’s story and the more I learned of his loneliness and his upbringing, I realized he’s a forgivable person too. It doesn’t mean that I have to be in his presence, but it does mean he’s a forgivable person that God can turn around, too. Finally, at seventeen, the State took me away from my biological dad’s home. And then I ended up in California with an aunt and uncle, which was the highlight of my life. During that short period of time, it was about a year before I turned eighteen, and we had gone through some hard losses.
I was having experiences that were way beyond my age and it had taken me deeper and deeper into a kind of dismal place; dismal, foreboding, like in Ecclesiastes—I began questioning everything about life. And as I question and I’m getting older, and I’m understanding more, I’m looking around and I’m seeing everyone’s world isn’t like this. I began to wonder if God even loved me; how could You say, “You knitted me together in my mother’s womb and that I’m fearfully and wonderfully made and that there’s a plan for my life?”
Before being a biblical scholar, I go in and I’m looking at stories like Jeremiah, differently. I’m listening to people say, Jeremiah 29:11, and realizing they were in a long time of exile. Their king wouldn’t even listen to give them a proper warning. And the promise that He was revealing in Jeremiah 29:11 was revealing they would be in suffering for a while. But they were to make the best of that suffering still, and one day, there would be a promise that they would come out. So then I became angry with God about that because people throw around promises that don’t stand. I’ve been listening to people talk about protection for years, but where’s the protection that was over me when I was crying out to You? They say, “Call on the Lord and He will come quickly to your aid;” I was calling on You for years, God—what can be more innocent than a child needing You?
My name is Jackie and Jackie’s derived from Jacob. And I love the story of Jacob wrestling with God because that was my wrestling season. I was starting to come into adult age and I had questions for God. In my childhood, there was a lot of innocence. So it was just like you kept waiting for the hope to come through. You kept looking for it because that was the only way you could survive. Yeah. But in adulthood, it was like, “No, I have some questions and I really want to ask them. You say I can talk to you about anything—here are my questions. Do You even love me? Because if You do, how did this happen? Huh? Do you even care? Why is it You protect other people? I hear other people’s testimonies, but mine? You left me in a hard place.”
The story of Hagar and Ishmael got to me once. There he is in the middle of two adults, craziness. And now he’s in this situation where he’s thrown aside because the adults are fighting. I’m asking God, “Why does it seem like Your truth doesn’t prevail? Why does it seem like You don’t protect innocence? And why does it seem like we’re still here?” So there was one of the backdrops of my story at sixteen. God gave me a dynamic call. I was running away from my father’s home, and while I was running away, this guy at the bus station gives me this movie ticket, it was for the movie, The Passion of the Christ. And while I was watching I only got thirty minutes into it and they started beating Him, and the guards start mocking Him as they whip Him. I remember leaving the theater racing out and I just dropped outside the door and I was crying and crying. I was so angry with God, in a real way, for the first time in my life, and it was because I couldn’t understand and I thought, “All this time I’ve been waiting for You in my heart, I guess to come down from the cross to reveal to me how You make the suffering stop. But right now I’m looking at how You didn’t come down from the cross and You didn’t make Your suffering stop. So how can I trust that you’ll make mine stop and not let me go through suffering?” I heard him speak in every cell of my body, “Jackie, I want to teach you about the love that comes through suffering.”
As I aged and I became more of an adult, I realized Jesus is the love that comes through suffering. He came into this world, and He was defiled and rejected, and all types of terrible things took place with Him. He came in the most innocent way. He came looking like a bastard child. He came looking illegitimate. He didn’t have two nickels to rub together or a place to even lay His head. And yet He walked among the least of these and sat with sinners. He did exactly what He needed to do to save us all. Even in the garden of Gethsemane when He said, “Not my will, let your will be done.” And He is the love that comes through suffering. So eventually, as I got older, I finally went to a place up in Grass Valley to heal, after all I had seen. And during that time of healing, I began to dive deep. I had to dive deep because I needed answers, but I didn’t have all the answers.
While there, I began going through the word of God again, but this time with adult eyes. And a lot changed doing that. With adult eyes, I saw in God’s Word that He is the standard. He is the One that comes through suffering with ultimate love. He is the One, even in His most brutalized time, He still forgives a thief while on the cross. And He offers him paradise, which told me I can’t be too far off from God’s love. Then I saw Him show up and bring me to a place where I was loved.
There was this woman there named Marion and she would give me bear hugs no matter how angry I looked because I still considered myself, “Daughter of Thunder.” I remember she didn’t care what I looked like, she would come up and give me these bear hugs. Then I realized I was starting to like it and expect the bear hugs every single day. I thought, “You can even either sit here and remember all the tragedy of your past, or you can try something different.” My fear was, I didn’t want to let down my guard and then have another failing or another disappointment. And I remember thinking one day, “What have I got to lose? Hoping again?” So I guess the first thing that God revived in me—I had to have a revival in my soul—before I could be used for anything.
A Revival of Hope
One thing that was dead in me was hope. But the thing that God revived in me was hope. So once that revival of hope broke through during my “Daughter of Thunder” years, I got in trouble because I was hanging out with some gang members. And while I was hanging out with gang members, it was really difficult and hard. And we had no one at home. The people that you’ve left outside to play with are usually the ones not doing any good. During one of those times, there was a kid that was like, “Let’s run on this kid.” And sure enough, I had enlisted in the military to be in the army of the world. But God enlisted me that day to be in the army of the Lord. On May 30th, I went into a detention center for getting into a gang fight. Only a few years later, when I was at this program on May 30th, I ended up getting baptized. So once again, another redemption for me, where God was taking me from death and destruction to life. And He said, “I’m not calling you to an army of this world. I’m calling you to be a mouthpiece for the army of the Lord.” So then it was time for college. My hope was resurrected.
The sky was the limit. Everybody had been talking to me, and they had already been prepping me. Some of the leaders had been taking me out to start preaching in different places during our wilderness trip. They had asked me to lead Sunday service—they could see the calling in me before I could see the calling in myself. Well, on this very campus (Jessup University Chapel) was when the turnaround began. I was working five jobs and I was putting myself through community college, from dog walking to youth mentoring at Salvation Army to mentoring and tutoring kids that were in at-risk behavior, even meeting with gang bangers and helping them. I was doing martial arts with kids—whatever God needed me to do. I was at community college and Pastor Mike Petro, who had baptized me earlier said, “Jackie, I need you to go to this place with me and I need you to talk to the students, share your testimony and preach a message.”
So I came to William Jessup in 2012 and they were doing a tour in the rain after I had finished speaking in class. And the Lord just said, “Wait with me child.” So they carried on in the tour, it was right outside this hall, down the pathway. And I knelt down in my stockings, in my dress, in the rain, and I said “Abba” for the first time. I said, “Papa, I’ve never asked you for anything. You know I’ve seen a lot, but I want this.” I didn’t even know there was such a thing as Bible college. So one day later, I spent that whole night in prayer and scared to death. I said to myself, “You’ll never have anything if you don’t start asking.”
I came into that office with nothing but a transcript, barely two cents to rub together. And I said, “I don’t have anything, but I need to know if there’s even a chance to come here. Here’s my transcript.” At that time, I had a 4.0 and Dr. John Jackson (President of Jessup) was just starting and they were bumping up their graduation retention rate. Because I had a 4.0, they took me on a full ride. And I used the opportunity in every way I could. I graduated top of my class in pastoral ministry and received the highest honor award here at William Jessup, called “The Founder’s Award.”
During that time here (at Jessup), my life went viral. There was a movie produced on my life story called “My One Christmas Wish.” It was in my sophomore year, I was writing for two companies, adoption.com, and adoption.org, to millions of people all over the world; interviewing people, and just getting that message out. And during one of the blogs, I started my online diary called “Diary of a Former Foster Kid.” The week before I had written two pieces “Inside the World of an Abandoned Child” and “Inside the World of an Adopted Child.” They went far in the world. But then at the holidays, I ended up writing one piece that took off like wildfire, and it was about what it feels like at the holidays when your family’s not around. And that went viral. I posted it probably like at 8:00 pm and then left to hang out with friends. I went to bed, and by the next day, I had reporters outside my door asking me to do all types of things. I ended up on Huffington Post, 60 Minutes—every TV and radio station you could think of.
Then for the next two and a half years, it was media all over my life—it never stopped. So midway through all of that, when it began, it was a lot of secular media companies. And I remember getting wiser. And what I learned early on is that media companies, they will write the story they want to write. So I became very prayerful and discerning of what media I went through. Then it became features like 700 Club and different people that would tell my story for what it was with God and not leave Him out. So that was a powerful season and a powerful time. And then I just never stopped running for God. I began to go out to the people that I remembered.
I went out to the street corners because I wanted to reach the people that felt unreachable. And one of the biggest things about being in the cistern of your soul, first with God, is He’ll send you to other people’s cisterns to say, “This time, someone’s showing up.” God sends me to the gang bangers, the drug addicts, the pimps, and the prostitutes and I tell them about Jesus. I’ve taken down drug kings. One of them is sitting in Elk Grove right now, leading other people to Christ in jail because he called me up one day and said, “Pastor Jackie, I can’t change and be the preacher you’re saying I can be until I clean up my life.” So he called me up, and he turned everything in and went into jail and started preaching there like Paul. He said, “I’m gonna be like Paul.”
Other people have stomped their crack pipes. One day I was out there and one of my professors from here came out and said, “I keep hearing about the miracles that are happening out there. I keep hearing about what God is doing.” I said to her, “Then come out and see for yourself.” On the night she came out, one of the drug dealers ran up to me, and said, “Pastor Jackie, there’s somebody dead in the bathroom.” I go over there and sure enough, we look into the city bathroom; there’s a guy, pupils dilated, no life. He has dots all over him from no oxygen passing through. They’re trying to see if they can get a pulse for six minutes. Nothing. And I told God, “This was not what You promised me when You told me to come out here and to preach. You said this was gonna be a church and You declared this would be a place of life and no more death. Lord Jesus. Do what You promised.” And the man started shrieking. He jumped up, and he started speaking right away as if he had never gone out. And everyone was dumbfounded at what happened—when you call on the name of Jesus, life enters the body.
Also, that same night we had a live feeding—the 5,000 moment—we ran out of food, and the professor was like, “Jackie, go to your car and see if there’s anything left.” We had probably fed about 250 people, and they were still coming through. Out of nowhere, this group comes through of about ten people with bags in both hands, about twenty bags. “Jackie the Street Preacher, is that you? The Lord told us to bring you food.” And we had food to feed everybody in the park. It’s not even just like in the scripture, Jesus says, if I can’t show you things in the physical, how can I show you anything in the spiritual? God showed me the spiritual first in those cisterns—how everything in the physical manifests through Him.
What would He call me today? Well, I took the humblest term I could find and the reason why—I want to stay in a place of prostration before the Lord. I’m a chaplain. I have my Bachelor’s and I’ll complete my Masters soon. Then, I’ll go after my Doctorate. I also have my certification in web design and I’m one of the top marketers in our region. But those aren’t the titles you hear about. The one I chose is “Street Preacher”—not many people want to claim that title. Why? Because it means you go to the people that everybody else wouldn’t even dare touch. I call myself “Jackie the Street Preacher” because I always want to make sure that no matter how high God lifts my head—I always come back to that place of humility.
The Lockbox & Forgiveness
Here’s the healing part—there’s just so much unforgiveness everywhere. When I began forgiving it was all about forgiving the people who had hurt me, because up to that point, I was a lockbox of everyone who had hurt me. I was a lockbox of their secrets. Because when people hurt you and your innocence, especially as a child, you listen to your abusers and do what they say. And when you’re holding all these people’s secrets and they’re telling you you’d better not be telling anybody, or I’ll get you—those things that they say to you, you learn to hold all those secrets inside. I think that’s important for people to hear and know because the truth of the matter is people often ask, “Why don’t people tell?” The answer is simple, “When you don’t know that you’re not going to be hurt if you tell—you don’t tell.”
So you walk around like a lockbox of everyone’s secrets. For me, when I began forgiving, it was like, I can no longer hold all these secrets inside. It was as if when people would look at me I felt like—they were looking at their own sin. When I got older, and I began forgiving, the first thing I had to do was forgive myself. Forgive me for not knowing what to do. Forgive me for being a lockbox of people’s evil, and secrets and release that from myself. I’m not their sin. I was a beautiful child that God created that was meant for love, and those things that happened were not mine to carry.
Their sins were theirs to carry and theirs to ask repentance for. So when that happened in the beginning, in regard to unforgiveness, I didn’t know how to communicate. The only thing I knew was God was telling me, “You’re not a lockbox of everybody’s secrets.” So I ran with that and it was like I was blabbing out—“I can’t hold any more of your crap.” The point finally came where I experienced complete forgiveness. I went back—I had these inner vows and I said I would never go back to New Jersey. And I found myself going back to places. With the first family that had me, I went back to New Jersey and I forgave them in person.
I remember it wasn’t a Hallmark moment, not a long-winded conversation. It was so simple. I got ambushed into that situation because I was going back to visit the daughter who had invited the woman that would beat me and lock me in closets. When I saw her, it was different because I wasn’t that child anymore. I think the enemy wants to keep us in a place of fear because when we haven’t seen our abusers, he wants to keep us in fear of those people. But in reality, when you see them often as an adult, everyone is older. They’re smaller; they’re not those big people they used to be. I saw this woman and I thought, “I’m not sitting down at the table.”
I want to talk about what happened so that we can bring some healing. We went outside and it wasn’t a two-hour conversation, it was barely thirty seconds. She just looked at me and she said, “I couldn’t stop what I was doing, so I had to give you up and it was the most loving thing I could give to you.” And that was all she said. And I said, “Okay, let’s go eat.” Because to me it wasn’t about attacking her, or revenge, or any of that. I wanted the validation that this happened and I’ve carried these memories for all these years, and I said to her, “I need to hear that you know it.” I simply needed the validation, and then I was able to move on. But, there are many people in need of healing that don’t get the validation. There are some areas where I’ve never gotten validation. And I know that if that day comes, great—if it doesn’t, I’m okay because I’ve forgiven them. I’ve seen two young people (my parents) that were doing their best to try and figure out their lives with what they had, and I could say the same thing about myself.
When I look at forgiveness, and I look at what I tried to do in the places of my desperation, somebody else is out there somewhere saying, “Jackie hurt my feelings in this way.” When I look at the people that hurt me, they were doing it in their suffering, and their ignorance. When it comes down to it, I now recognize that we all fall short of the glory of God. What that also means, because we all are born into a world that is filled with sin, is we all have the opportunity to suffer. But one thing I’ve learned about forgiveness—there’s a love that comes through suffering. And that’s Jesus. If I believe—and I do—that this world is not all there is, no suffering at all in this world can compare to an eternity that lasts forever. And if eternity lasts forever, and the greatest experience we could ever have is with God forever and ever—I don’t even want my enemies to face a life without it. Because this temporary suffering, even if I had an enemy that calls me to suffer every single day of my physical existence, it would not compare to an eternity separated from God. For me—that’s what it is to love my enemies: God has placed a banquet, a spiritual banqueting plate in my hands. And He is saying, when you forgive your enemies, you are coming to the banqueting table in the spirit and putting that plate on the table for them. At least that’s what He showed me in my walk of forgiveness.
For a long time, people treated repentance as if it was something almost like modern-day leprosy. But the truth of the matter is repentance is the love song of a Father calling us back home. When you think about what He’s saying, many people treat Him as if He somehow wants to push them away. But actually, He’s saying, “Turn back to Me”—it’s an invitation to come back into the Father’s arms. That’s why the Bible says, “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is near.” He’s saying, “I’m right here. And I’m trying to turn you around to the One (Me) who has given you life and will give you life instead of leading you into destruction.” Repentance is the love song of a Father calling His kids to come back home to His love.
Kingdom Roar
Over the years we’ve been going out to those places and doing ministry on the streets, meeting with the gang bangers and everybody that I can. I travel and I preach and I do all things. I do all types of things in ministry, from seminars to church at the Capitol. But the biggest thing for me is that we just launched Kingdom Roar because God has given me visions and dreams that He, in this hour, is going to be roaring at each corner of the earth—bringing and drawing His people back in. The name Kingdom Roar—it’s a revivalistic movement. It’s the movement of God fulfilling His promise. The people on the team of Kingdom Roar, and through this movement, will be roaring. Whatever God tells us to do, we will do it for the sake of expanding His Kingdom in this hour. So, it’s a newborn baby, just birthed. And this is what God’s called me to this hour. To go from a girl locked in closets, beaten and starved, to now running a nonprofit called Kingdom Roar to expand the kingdom of God.
Jackie’s story—in her own words, boldly testifies to the truth that no matter where you’ve been and what you’ve been through there’s hope in Jesus Christ. He takes our mess and makes it His message, as we learn to seek Him with our whole heart. God rescues us out of darkness and brings us into His marvelous light to know that we’re His, we’re loved, and it’s a story the world needs to hear. He turns our soul cry into a war cry.