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John
People's Stories
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SEVEN DAYS TO CHANGE A LIFE
John's search for peace with God was to lead him far from his dreams of fame in Sao Paulo, Brazil
"BROKEN-HEARTED. That's how I left her night after night, as she knelt before me, pleading with me not to go out." Thus Brazilian, John Baruck, describes his mother's desperation when faced with the realities of his double life.
"At school they said I was 'different', always asking questions and wanting to know everything," he recalls.
Drawn by a longing for friendship, at eight John began to hang about with his cousins, joining them in swimming in the nearby brook. "There I was sexually abused by a close family member:
This continued for the next two years.
It was a huge relief for John when they moved to the city in. 1988. There he started working and attending school in the evenings. "I became more myself, more self-aware." Then someone at work introduced him to an underworld of gay clubs, drag queens and transvestites. John recalls the conflict he knew within: "On the one hand, there was my good, religious, moral upbringing but, on the other, this attraction for men. I tried hormones and drugs to try to change myself but in the end I justified it by saying "God made me this way."
John lived quite openly as a gay, bringing boyfriends home and even on family gatherings. "I was desperately searching for some intelligent, attractive, person who would be faithful to me. Yet I wanted peace too. I wanted glamour and long-term relationships but still have God's blessing."
"It became hell for my mum. I thought I had the right to go out clubbing and have fun, but she would kneel before me pleading with God to save me. There I would find her hours later, still awake and praying, when I got home in the early hours. I was having the time of my life in this twilight world where nothing was as it seemed.".
And still his mother prayed."
At 18 he got in with a crowd of actors and TV models, who encouraged him to be a model and gave him the name of an agent. This man was to prove the turning-point in his life. Not only was he an agent, but a Christian too, and he began to take John along to a cell-group.
"I went because I thought I had nothing to lose. I was tired of having so many relationships, but never finding the one I was looking for. One day they said: 'Here's a Bible. If in seven days God doesn't change your life, you can burn it."
On the second day, a woman in the group knelt on the floor, and read from the Bible, Matthew 11:28: 'Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest'. "That spoke to me, because that was how I was inside."
"God told me He loved me, He had a future for me and that He had been testing me." Soon John got baptised with the Holy Spirit."
John then got deeply involved in the church and they prophesied that he would be a missionary. In 1999 he left Brazil to come to Europe, not knowing where to settle. He'd been in London about a month when, one day, strolling down the embankment, he spotted a group of guys wearing bright red crosses. They were from the Jesus Army, and invited him to come along.
"I found myself drawn to this church and its easy-flowing mixture of informality, creativity and maturity. Even though you may not understand the English language, you can understand the language of the soul - that love and warmth that flows between two people. Some people speak fluently yet never really experience the language of the soul that I have found in the Jesus Army. And if I can find my place in this world and make it, then you can too."
John 
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John
