In an interview between Alan DiDio and Katie Souza, Katie Souza talked about her testimony and how God took her from prison life to sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ to the world.
It was an unexpected job route in media that Katie Souza first thought would fill her the best.
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“When I was in my late teens, like 17,18, I was the youngest disc jockey in Hawaii. So I started my TV career in radio and I worked at 98 Rock in Honolulu, Hawaii, and KKUA, and these different radio stations,” Souza says. She soon found herself moving to California and working in radio, and eventually, TV, working for CBS working the teleprompter. Desiring to be taught and mentored on how to run an array of equipment, Souza found herself working camera, audio, tape and switch, evening winning awards. However, her big dreams of television stardom faded.
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“I was already smoking pot, doing mushrooms, doing coke and all that, and it just got worse and worse and worse. Pretty soon, I had to leave CBS because I was a mess,” Souza said.
From here, she found herself going down a deeper spiral, selling drugs in Hollywood and even appearing on her TV show job hyped up on substances. She ended up fleeing from California to New Mexico, fearful of the police. From here, she found herself with her own Meth lab and doing collections for mobsters.
“That racked me up a lot of charges. [I] ended up being arrested 12 times by the local [police], and then finally got busted in a lab by the Feds,” she continued.
So, how did God take one woman running in the opposite direction of Him and use her for His glory?
During the intense pressure of finding out if she would be going to prison for 20 years or more, Souza says she experienced an outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
“I was so pressurized inside myself that all of a sudden, bam! I started praying in tongues and didn’t even know what it was. I just laid there and started praying in tongues,” says Souza. “I got baptized by the Holy Spirit in the middle of me thinking I was going to lose my mind.”
Souza says she spent her time in prison reading Scripture after she found a Bible in the bottom of a dirty clothes barrel. The Word of God pierced her heart and soon she was telling everyone around her about Jesus. After this, people started getting baptized and miracles were abounding all around her.
Spending lots of time in lockdown, Souza learned about the power of prayer as she saw God do miracles around her and for her. The Lord even gave her the specific date she would be released from prison when no one else thought it would be possible for her to get out that early. However, through the winning of her motion, Souza’s release date was recalculated, and she got out on Nov. 21, five years into her sentence.
“He knows how to set a captive free,” DiDio says. “He specializes in getting captives out of prison.”
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Abby Trivett is content development editor for Charisma Media.
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Rabbi Kirt Schneider