City leaders join together for special time, and testimony
By KEVIN CHIRI
Slidell news bureau
SLIDELL – If anyone doubted the power of God to change lives, they needed to hear the testimony of Ryan Pellegrine, the guest speaker at the 11th annual Mayor’s Community Prayer Breakfast that was held at the Slidell Municipal Auditorium last Friday morning.
Mayor Greg Cromer took over the leadership in the prayer breakfast the past five years after former Slidell Mayor Freddy Drennan started the tradition. This year, Cromer added Pellegrine as the guest speaker to the annual program that has parish mayors reading excerpts from speeches made by presidents in the early years of our country.
The words of those president’s is motivating and uplifting on its own, but then Pellegrine added a special touch to the gathering of over 300 people, which included business leaders, pastors, spiritual leaders, and individuals of all ages.
Pellegrine told his testimony that took him from a troubled teenager who became a drug dealer and alcoholic to a man who lost everything before surrendering his life to God.
Now, Pellegrine is using his story, as well as his outstanding talent as a musician and singer, to spread the message of salvation, and hope through Jesus.
“Everything that happens in life is by the grace of God, and when I came to a point that I began to surrender, God’s grace grew and grew,” he told the crowd.
Originally from New Orleans, he grew up for many years in St. Louis where he lived with his mother, while his father was still in New Orleans as a policeman. While he said that he has a great relationship with his father now, that was not the case as a teenager.
“I felt rejected by my father because he was not near us when I grew up, and I also felt rejected by kids at school. I went to a church where people appeared to be moved by God all the time, but I never felt it or had that experience,” he said. “My mother was the most Godly woman I have ever known, but without my father in the picture I did my own thing.”
Pellegrine said he found acceptance from other teens in the drug and alcohol scene after he was initially kicked out of private school as a freshman.
“I worked my way up the illicit corporate ladder of drug dealing,” he said. “I had big money, women, played music in bands and thought I had it all. But I didn’t realize I had become an alcoholic, and then got hooked on opioids.”
In time, Pellegrine said, “my empire came tumbling down and I lost everything, I totaled my new car and tried suicide several times.”
It was one of those times waking up, and surviving, from a suicide attempt that things began to change.
“I woke up and realized I had lived,” he said. “For the first time in a long time I thought about God, and I told Him, ‘You’ve been after me my entire life. I’m committing everything to You.’”
Pellegrine said the first thing he felt impressed to do was to marry the woman he had been living with. Within two weeks he and Autumn were standing at the altar and were married, now with two young children and still happily together.
He was still drinking as a way to help him go through opioid withdrawals, but one day that changed too.
“I was about to get a drink, but then I suddenly put the lid back on the bottle. I told God that I would rather die than go back to that,” he said. “That night I got eight hours sleep and everything has changed for the better ever since.”
Pellegrine said that God changed him to become “a man of integrity, a father, a husband and a son. Before that I was none of those things, but I have learned there is true freedom in Jesus.
“I acknowledged that I really am a new creature in Christ and my life is now devoted to helping others learn that” he said.
Pellegrine then played a song he wrote as he displayed great skill fingerpicking and playing his acoustic guitar. The room of hundreds was silent before some raised their hands in praise to join him, then gave him a standing ovation when he finished.