By Janet Seever
Enthusiastic. Energetic. Passionately in love with Jesus. These words describe Louis Preston, who is now 32. He has a beautiful wife named Mia who came to Canada from Japan to improve her English, and a family of three wonderful children. One thing he enjoys most is sharing his Christian faith with others out on the street, which he now does weekly.
That’s how Louis and Mia met. Louis was doing street ministry in 2010 and Mia kept showing up at his meetings. He didn’t want her to walk home in the dark, so he started giving her rides. She accepted the Lord and the two of them were married six months later—not once, but three times—first in a small civil ceremony, then in a Calgary church and finally in Japan.
Growing up rebellious
Louis remembers being given a Gideon Bible as a fifth grader, which he started reading a little bit each night. The Word of God was instrumental in Louis coming to Christ.
He was raised nominally Catholic, but after his parents divorced when he was 11, church attendance stopped. He lived in Calgary with his mom, an American citizen, until he turned 15. Seeing his dad every two weeks didn’t provide the discipline he needed.
Louis began drinking and using drugs quite heavily at 13 and running around the streets at night with the wrong crowd. At this point his American mother decided to move back to the U.S., so she sent him to live with his dad at 15.
“All of a sudden I’m with my dad and he’s going to tell me what to do, I just wasn’t having it,” says Louis with a laugh as he remembers. “He would change the locks; He’d kick me out, but since I got saved, I now work with my dad. I’ve worked with him for 10 years in a small business and we haven’t fought once, we haven’t argued once. This is just the grace of God.”
He was reconciled with his mom as well. “We have a great relationship now,” Louis says. “But we didn’t fight as bad as I did with my dad. Reconciliation with my dad was one of the biggest things God did when I got saved.”
A radical encounter with God
Louis points to three ways the Holy Spirit was drawing him to the Lord. The first was an encounter with a homeless man he met while working at Earls downtown. He used to talk to this man who wore a big cross and noticed he had character. “I started to get convicted,” Louis recalls.
The second way was through Pastor Lawrence Irwin’s street ministry. Some Sunday afternoons as Louis was driving home to Bridgeland from his work at Earls, he would drive across the bridge and see Lawrence and another man down there, speaking near a cross.
One Sunday he stopped and parked across the street. He had just smoked a joint and was stoned as he crossed the street to where the outreach was going on. Lawrence walked over, gave him a DVD with some preaching and testimonies on it and introduced himself. Louis went home and watched the DVD a couple times.
“I don’t think I ever met anyone who said that God had done anything in their lives,” Louis says. “I wasn’t aware that God did anything in people’s lives. I was totally blown away because it was all testimonies and preaching.”
After watching the DVD, he was totally convicted.
“I had kind of decided that I was going to follow Jesus. . . . Whenever anyone came to Jesus, they needed to give up everything and follow Him. That’s the only way I understood it.”
At the time he had been bartending at Earls downtown, and had a pop under the counter as he was working. He would continually slip alcohol into it as the evening progressed.
He knew that he needed to get a different job, so he quit his bartending job. Since he was without a work, he called his oldest sister who was working for the Catholic Church, leading youth retreats in schools in southern Alberta. She got him a job as her helper.
One weekend they were in Medicine Hat for a school retreat. On a day off, they went to a Catholic church downtown. As Louis walked around inside the church, he saw the stations of the cross depicting the last day of Christ’s life.
“It was such an intense moment,” Louis recalls. “Now I would say it was the conviction of the Holy Spirit.” He didn’t know what to do, so he took all of the money out of his pocket, put it into the collection plate and left the church.
“All of a sudden I felt the presence of the spiritual reality. It was too much for me. . . . I couldn’t handle it.” He went outside and sat on a carved bench, with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane on one side. “That’s how I felt.” On the other side was the Last Supper. “I can understand that. He was telling His disciples He was going to die.”
All of a sudden Louis began to weep. “I understood the cross. I understood that Jesus did it for me! Every time I would think of a really bad sin, it was overwhelming. I would weep harder and harder.” His sister and her friends thought Louis was having a breakdown.
“I got off that park bench and there was absolutely zero addiction to drugs. It was gone. I mean gone, gone.”
He no longer had the slightest bit of temptation or withdrawal. He had already gotten off of the harder stuff, but at that point it was just weed and he couldn’t get off of it.
“I was smoking it every day, and I’d spend hundreds of dollars on it. From the moment I woke up until the moment I went to bed. That was gone too.”
The other thing he realized was God’s nearness. “I can’t explain it, but He’s HERE. I began to actually feel love for people. It was incredible. Before I was extremely selfish. I was always feeling sorry for myself.”
That was in 2006 and the change has been permanent. The joy of the Lord shines through Louis’s life.