The 700 Club with Pat Robertson

LIFESTYLES

How HIV Turned James Hartline to Christ

By Amy Reid and Tim Branson
The 700 Club

CBN.com – He spent more than 30 years living a gay lifestyle, but James says he wasn’t born that way.

“My dad had a lot of pornography in the house,” James says. “As a six year old child, I found that stash and began to read those things. It really corrupted and polluted my mind.”

Then there was the abuse.

“My mother abused me for 14 years. It was a very painful situation of constant abuse, constant anger. I have scars to this day that were inflicted on my physical body as a little boy, and there was nothing really instilled in me that helped me function.”

James found refuge at his grandparents’ house. One summer, he went to vacation bible school.

“I can remember the first time they said, ‘Any of you kids want to accept the Lord?’ I was right there, and that was when I was 9 years old.”

But back at home, the abuse continued.

“The beatings were very bad. So I grew up with the concept that something was wrong with me in the eyes of God because of all the beating every day. How could a loving God let me get beat every day?”

Because of his home life, James was a misfit at school.

“I acted out in school and had a lot of peer problems,” he says. “By the time I entered puberty I was very disturbed. [I] began to run away at 13 to get away from the abuse.”

His mother kicked him out of the house when he was 14, and James was sent to an orphanage. The pain of abuse still haunted his memories. He found an escape.

“I became habitually addicted to looking for relief from all of my suffering through homosexuality. I always knew that it was wrong. I was powerless, and I felt a sense of doom all the time.”

But sex alone wasn’t enough, and James became a drug addict. He became a thief to support his lifestyle, but that didn’t pay off.

James spent most of his adult life in and out of prison. The drugs and years of emotional pain took its toll, and James spent much of his prison time in the prison psychiatric ward.

“I cried out to God every time,” he recalls.

After one stint in prison, James went on a four-day binge of sex and drugs and contracted HIV.

“This is it. This is what I had been expecting -- my doom. In reality, though, it brought me to the place of realization that I am going to die. I am going to come before the Lord, and that began that final push to say, ‘I’ve had enough of this.’”

But James wasn’t ready to give up his lifestyle, and he went back to prison. His cellmate had AIDS. He was dying.

“I knew he was going to die in the prison because he was already sick, and the Lord told me [that] you are looking at yourself. If you don’t change now, if you don’t make that transition to what God wants you to do, then you are looking at yourself. The Lord put me with that guy so I would be forced to make that ultimate decision. I was either going to die. I was going to end up like that guy, or I was finally going to do what God required of me.

“I changed, because I just came to that decision that I didn’t want to go out of this life in disobedience to God like that fellow did.”

You might be surprised to learn that James did not leave his San Diego neighborhood. He stayed so he could help bring hope to his community. Every day while he walks the streets and prays, James confronts his own past.

“Well, this is the place that I was actually infected with HIV in. As you can see the doors are open. It never shuts. It’s open 24 hours a day, where many men come in for anonymous sex, watch pornography. Many of them are doing drugs as I was. I was a witness to what goes on in there. But God’s changed me, and I no longer go into those places. Unfortunately -- and it’s very painful to me -- the doors are still open and many more lives are being destroyed.”

As he prays over his neighborhood, James says he wants to be a walking testimony to people caught in the gay lifestyle.

“Ultimate transformation in Jesus Christ does take place. I am a living example that even though I went down the darkest road possible and suffered all the consequences that walking that road entails, ultimately transformation came because the word of God is more powerful than all the sin that can be paraded in a man or woman’s life.”


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