I Am Bulletproof

By Bryan Miranda

Apostle Bryan Miranda is a Marine, a former drug addict, and a former mafia member with a violent, detailed history of prison life. He was wrapped up in darkness of the worst kind. After being locked up for the majority of the 90s, he found himself facing two life sentences in 2002 after an aggravated robbery charge. Bryan found himself fac

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trilogy Christian Publishing
• Release date: Apr 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781640887657

Book preview

Foreword

It took a miracle for me to get to know Bryan Miranda.

Now it wasn’t just your run of the mill, Jesus’s shadow appeared in my English muffin this morning kind of miracle. I’m talking about, The Heavens opened, the voice of God thundered, as an angel with doves’ wings descended upon me kind of miracle.

He came into my life during a tremendous season of miracles that I was experiencing, which for me coincided with a tremendous season of trial and challenges.

At the time, it was difficult to find someone who understood the unique construction of the season of transition God was passing me through. I honestly believe that God orchestrated it in order to allow me to meet this man of God and let him be used for the will of God in my life.

When I was asked and given the honor to do this foreword, I began to meditate on what would be most appropriate. I could go on and on about the heart and his zeal of this tremendous man, his passion and love for God, and his willingness to lay his life down for the will of God. I believe, though, that actions and experiences can speak louder than mere accolades. I decided I would let an experience we shared hopefully set the tone for what you as the reader will walk through with Bryan together. I don’t believe any of this was an accident, but more so, I believe even this testimony was God foreordaining His work for you.

And I believe it speaks to the heart what this book is about.

Apostle Bryan, the name I have come to know him by, and I were discussing the book, sharing the word of God together at a coffee shop with the name very similar to Star-Ducks, one evening in Orange County. We could feel a weightiness on our conversation, almost as if God was sitting at the table as we shared with one another.

Next to us was its man look like he has been through his share of trials in life. He may or may not have been homeless, since he had about four bags with him strewn about his chair and under his table. He was wearing a leather jacket with a T-shirt underneath, had a long beard that was streaked with white, and a fair number of tattoos hiding underneath leather coat. The wrinkles on his face and weather-beaten skin matched the hardness of his furrowed brow, and it appeared as if he was ever so slightly listening in on our conversation, even though he was doing it on the down low, so to speak.

As we finished our conversation and began to gather our things, we heard a voice with a heavy Latino accent come from the table next to us, from the man in the leather jacket.

Hey, can I ask you both a question? You guys know about God, right?

Apostle and I exchanged glances, turned our attention to the man, and welcomed his response as his brow knit even further.

I’ve been struggling with this, and I want to know an answer. I don’t understand why, maybe you guys can help me out. He paused as if searching for the right words, taking a moment to stare at the table in front of him.

"If I’m the worst in my family, why am I still alive…and why is the rest of my family dead?"

I could feel the pain in his voice, the almost grinding of his teeth as he asked this question that had been on his heart that had been plaguing him for God only knows how long.

He proceeded to tell us that he had spent his life in and out of prison. He told us that he had done his fair share of drugs and alcohol. And he added, he was guilty of…the way he put it, "a whole lot of bad things."

He said his brother and his sister were always good, they didn’t get into any trouble like he did. They both ended up dying in a car accident.

He then proceeded to say his mother had died of cancer not long after that.

He himself had just finished another prison sentence and had no one to come home to when he came out. He admitted that he wanted to change his ways. He said he didn’t want to live that life anymore, but he didn’t understand why he was the one still alive when he knew he was the one who deserved to be dead.

I don’t know if my shock and surprise we’re obvious, having already known the majority of the details of this book. I couldn’t help myself. I told the gentleman, Well, I know us meeting you here is no accident! I asked Apostle, I said, I think it would be very fitting if you spoke to this man, I believe you have exactly what he needs! So I turned Apostle loose and watched him for the next twenty minutes witness passionately to this man.

He shared with him about his upbringing, his involvement in Mafia Familia, his life and time in prison. It almost seemed for a moment, as I looked at this man who was nodding his head fervently with every word that he said an agreement, that their lives were almost a mirror of each other. Then Apostle shared with him his personal encounter with Jesus Christ, how God had kept him from dying more times than he could count. To make a long story short, we ended up praying with him outside of that Star Ducks, and he received Jesus Christ into his life.

And before we left, he was filled with the Spirit of God. I can still see the look on man’s face, his eyes as wide as saucers as God cleaned out his soul, him asking us what we did to him.

Apostle simply told him, It’s not us. It’s Jesus.

I promise you, this really happened. Some of you may have never experienced anything like this. The more we talked after, the more I came to find out that this was just one more miracle in the miraculous life of Bryan Miranda. They seemed to follow him, and I was a beneficiary of simply being close enough to see it for myself.

In fact, I believe that as your read and take this journey together with him, you might even find yourself surrounded by a few miracles of your own.

I believe that God has always had a purpose and a plan for Bryan. And I believe that that divinely orchestrated conversation at that little coffee shop was God bearing witness to the purpose and plan to heal the brokenhearted and restore and reveal the grace of God to whosoever will, within the pages of this man’s life.

I also believe that you reading this book is no accident, which it is divinely orchestrated, and that God has something very special for you from this point forward.

I pray you will find yourself in these pages, that you too will come to know that no matter how far you’ve gone, how lost you are, there is hope and there is grace waiting for you far beyond anything you could ever imagine.

Good luck on your journey, I look forward to seeing you on the other side of I AM bulletproof!

Pastor Michael Leon

Preamble

As I cut the corner down the side street through the alley, I could feel my breath escaping into the darkness. I kept running, feeling that Charlene would swallow me up whole at any moment. I kept running, into the cold, crisp night, the sounds of gunshots echoing through the stillness. I kept running, with every ounce of strength I had left. I kept running, even though with every breath of air it felt like I had been hit in chest with a sledgehammer, which, at the time, wasn’t too far from the truth.

I heard the screeching of tires as I heard my lookout, Chuco, catch the corner in my ’93 Chevy Lumina. It was as if he was bringing with him what sounded like a wave of shotguns and machine gun fire behind him, which in my case was a very familiar sound.

We were in trouble.

This might be it, I thought to myself. This might be the last time I run down this street, or any street for that matter.

Chuco came flying by then suddenly slammed on the brakes. I jumped into the car. As we sped down the highway, I remember a warm sensation running down my body underneath my jacket.

I had been shot.

Man, this is crazy, I thought. I had made it through Iraq’s Desert Storm/Shield; I had even made it through the concrete jungles of the Texas penal system. I had come out of both without even a scratch on me. Came out without even one stab wound. I had always figured I just had it like that. But tonight was a different night. That night, I found out that maybe I wasn’t as bulletproof as I had thought.

This is my story.

Acknowledgments

I would like to take this time to acknowledge a few people over the course of the last seventeen years who have helped me get this from my mind, heart, and spirit and onto paper it was a long and winding road, but we made it.

To my lovely wife, my Mitas, my Melody, my Prophet who has always stood by me and modeled the truth unashamedly. Thank you for those early morning vision talks. For the love you have shown me with your unwavering posture and wisdom I couldn’t have gotten here without you, nor would I have been able to become the man I am today. I truly have been blessed with the best, my Mexican Lucille Ball. My Champ.

To my friend Pastor Michael for his prophetic mantle that gave me the strength and reason to trek back down the corridors and hallways of my childhood. Thanks for your truth and balance. The love you showed to me and my wife through this process was top-notch.

Introduction

Life is full of pain, struggles, and mistakes. Learning how to deal with them sometimes can be the difference between life and death. Have ever wondered why me? Why this? Why now? Will it ever stop? Or maybe I was just born to be cursed. Well, I have three words for you: It’s not over!

I wrote this book for the purposes previously mentioned above. IAMbulletproof is an autobiography in its purest form, made for the reader with all the ups and downs, highs and lows, valleys and peaks that the monotony of life can throw at us. You may be thinking, what’s so different about my life than yours? That’s just it, probably not much. But my hope and prayer is that the ink on this paper will find you reading it over the next couple of hours, or days stepping off the precipice of your own life, and into this book with me as I tread heavily into places of a marred adolescent childhood filled with anger, confusion, and abandonment. With an identity lost as a little boy, you will discover a life torn apart by perversion coupled with hidden secrets never to be spoken of. This book reveals the depths and tolls of a young man fighting in the perils of war while serving in the Marine Corps. He finds himself fighting an internal war the same, desperately trying to figure out which way to go as he fights anyone who gets in the way of his pursuit. You will witness firsthand how he falls from grace into the anvils of hell in the Texas penal system, the Mafia lifestyle, and all the while seeking to fill the never-ending abysmal void in his heart. This leads him down a dangerous path of violence. Eventually, he seeks a way out as his life spins out of control; he comes to an ultimate showdown and crossroads in his life. Finally, He finds a road of redemption and reformation that brings about a finality with a man named Jesus Christ.

My expectation for you is this: since you’ve stayed this long with me maybe you would be willing to continue on. Just maybe by reading this book you may find reason, mixed with hopeful answers that can help you, the reader, finally obtain and come to a place of peace and rest for your soul. Maybe, just maybe, you will find the miracle I found but without having to go down some of those dark places I had to. Maybe, you too can finally find freedom in a way that only you can describe in your own words telling your own story, of someday how you had fallen down a broken mess beyond repair, full of angst and reproach, and then in a flash thrust forward like a star shooting through that dark sky into a dimension of heavenly joy and bliss. Then you too can say, IAMbulletproof!

Chapter 1

Who Am I?

If I’m going to begin, I might as well begin at the very beginning.

From a very young age, I’ve always had this instinct on the inside of me. It seemed to be built through a great deal of peril and trepidation that was part of my everyday life. My very first memory is at four years old, driving down an abandoned highway with my mom and her then-boyfriend. He was a track star from (SMU) in Dallas, Texas. As we were driving one day, he pulled over abruptly at an old bridge that crossed a nearby lake.

Today, you’re going to learn to swim, boy, he said. As he jumped out of the car, Mom was screaming, pulling him, begging him not do it. He grabbed me and flung my little body over the side of the railing like a small sack of potatoes. I almost drowned at the bottom of that lake that day. I most likely would have if Mom hadn’t dove in after me. She pulled me up before everything faded to black.

The next memory isn’t any prettier. It’s of the same guy, beating Mom’s face into a bloody pulp during Halloween one day in their bedroom. I remember the feeling overwhelming me as it happened—a sense of panic. I climbed up some nearby cabinets in the apartment where we were staying and grabbed some glasses off the shelf. I ran back to the room and threw them at his head as hard as my little kindergarten-sized arm could throw them. That ended up as you might expect, which was me getting slapped around! Mom, though, she was always a tough one. She got up after all that mess, put makeup on herself, and then dressed up as a witch to hide the damage he did to her face. She dressed and fixed me up too and made me look like a mini vampire. She did it for me, made it so that we could go out and have a fun night despite it all. She made it so that no one would know what had just happened to us.

I look back on those days now and realize that she was doing the best she could with what she had.

As far back as I can recall, back to four years old, my life has felt like an anomaly. A conundrum may be a better word. As I sat down and began to attempt to unravel these early years of my life, I started a painful process of discovery. I realized that a trove of memories had been buried deep within, locked away in the vaults of my mind. Some of them I had not been able to search out until this very day. Yet the journey of mining out these memories has helped me begin to answer one question that has haunted me since the day I was born. Who am I?

I was born on July 5, 1971, at St. Paul’s Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. I guess you could say I was destined for a road to Damascus experience from the very beginning of it all, which makes St. Paul’s a fitting place to be born. Two of my birth certificates attest to this fact.

Yes, I was born with two birth certificates, one with the last name Evans, and the other with the last name Ables. Shortly thereafter, both of those certificates were put aside for my legal birth certificate, which has my adopted name.

That’s right, I’m also adopted. It’s a crazy way to begin life. I was not raised knowing this, by the way. Later on, as I began to struggle to find out who I was, all of this became a great source of angst, frustration, and pain.

As a young child, my mother, who I always refer to as Mom, kept many secrets from me. In East Texas, back in the seventies, things were a little different than they are nowadays. You could get in trouble being Hispanic in a Whites-only town. I’ve always had a light complexion, so I guess Mom figured if she never addressed it, it would never be an issue. After all, as far as she told me, she was my Mom, from start to finish.

She thought that being more open with those kinds of things would cause more trouble than good. It was a philosophy that would have a huge impact on my young life later on.

As it is with lots of kids, I never thought my childhood was any different than any other children I knew. I guess I didn’t know any better. I thought everyone had been smuggled by their family friend and Grandma onto a plane to Mexico City, while their mother was getting married to the man, she had told was their real dad. As strange as that sentence sounds, try and use that as a baseline as I describe the duality of my family. Again, I thought this was all normal.

As a small child, I didn’t grow up knowing my biological father. I had a family friend who always seemed like a father to me and was consistent throughout the young years of my