This testimony mentions childhood neglect and abuse.
Ryan was six years old the first time he saw God. He was seventeen when he woke to find Satan leaning over his bed, and he went back to sleep. Decades later, with no food left in the house and his family hungry, God asked him a question that led him somewhere no preacher would have predicted.
This is the first part of Ryan’s testimony on the God’s Truth Podcast. You can read the second part in I Spent 30 Minutes in Heaven and Received a Reward From Jesus. Ryan says he has receipts, dates and witnesses for much of what he shares. What follows is his account.
A four-year-old’s choice
At about four, digging in the yard, Ryan had a sudden thought: you know who’s down there? The devil. In that moment, he says, he decided he wanted to be with God. He did not even know who Jesus was yet. When he found out, his response was simple: “Oh, that’s the Son of God. I like this guy too.” He says he has walked with the Lord ever since and never turned back.
His childhood made that remarkable. His mother, he says, was involved in occult practices that ran in her family, and his father was a drug dealer. The family moved constantly. At around six, Ryan and his sister slept on the floor of a car and washed at petrol stations. Once he asked for a hot dog, and his mother counted her coins and said she couldn’t afford it. He thought being hungry was normal. Even so, he speaks of his parents with forgiveness, and his mother later became a Christian.
The courts eventually placed the children with their grandparents in Michigan, near Lake Michigan. Ryan calls them “the best people I’ve ever met in my life.” There, he went to church and a children’s Bible club for the first time.
“I have always been with you”
That first summer, during an afternoon nap, Ryan found himself standing at the end of his grandparents’ road. A soft, motherly voice called his name. He followed it down the dirt road, past apple trees, to a field where a man stood in a glowing bubble of light. The man looked about 55, rugged and kind, and was dressed in Ryan’s grandfather’s favourite clothes, even with his hair parted the same way.
The voice spoke again: “Ryan, do not be afraid and go to him. But know and understand he is not alive in the way in which you know and understand yourself to be. But he is alive. Go to him.” The man knelt, sat Ryan on his knee, put an arm around him and said with tears in his eyes: “Ryan, I am with you. I have always been with you, and I’m always going to be with you.” Six-year-old Ryan replied, “That’s nice, mister.” Then he woke up.
It took him years to understand that he had met God the Father, dressed as the person who would comfort a little boy most. Later, he says, he saw the same Man seated on a throne in heaven. To those who say no one can see God, he points to Genesis 18, where the Lord appeared to Abraham and ate with him.
“Oh, it’s just you”
At sixteen, after deciding to read the whole Bible, Ryan heard the Father’s voice again on his way home from basketball: “I’m going to cause a nation to rise from your seed, like I did with Isaac.” He did not yet know the story of Abraham and Isaac. Weeks later, he read it and was stunned.
About six months after that, he woke at night with his eyes still closed and heard the same gentle voice: “Ryan, do not be afraid and do not open your eyes. Prepare yourself, because someone is in your room. Take as much time as you need, but do not show fear.” He thought it through. A burglar with free will worried him more than Satan, who “can only do what God allows him.”
He opened his eyes. Leaning over the end of his bed, about three and a half feet from his face, was a featureless figure blacker than anything he had ever seen, like a flat cut-out of a man with no light in it. Without words, it projected consuming hatred: I hate you. I want to kill you. Ryan looked at it and said, “Oh, it’s just you.” Then he fixed his pillow, turned his back and went to sleep. “Do you know who my Dad is?” he says now. Satan is “a bully that doesn’t even have a right to be a bully to a child of God.”
Walking away from fame
At 22, Ryan signed a major record deal in Orlando. God showed him that the path would make him successful but would “fundamentally change” him, and that it was not His plan. Ryan walked away. (He tells that story in full in part two.)
Years later, working in the Philippines, he gave every coin in his pocket to a crowd of hungry street children outside a mall, then grieved that he could not help them all. As he walked away, he says, he heard an angel speaking to another: “Do you see that man? The hand of God is upon him, and he’s going to change this country.” The presence of God was so strong that his business partner, who touched his shoulder, and the partner’s sister both broke out in goosebumps before Ryan had said a word.
“Do you trust Me?”
Ryan married a Filipino woman and they had a son. Then a business venture collapsed. A partner who had promised to cover his family’s living expenses stopped answering his calls, and they went two or three days with the last grains of rice gone. Ryan and his wife borrowed 500 pesos, about ten US dollars, from a neighbour. After bus fare, that left 300 pesos for dinner. He went to the hotel where the partner was due to appear at an event, hoping to be paid. The partner never came.
Head down, Ryan walked the escalators praying: “Lord, You’re my only hope.” Silence. Then he wandered into a gaming room, and a hostess asked if he had come to play. As he started to say no, God said, “Don’t say it,” and then: “Do you trust Me?” “Lord, I trust You,” he said. “What’s going on?” “Walk forward.” Step by step, God directed him through rows of machines: left, then left again, past six machines, “Stop.” “Do you trust Me?” Ryan answered honestly: “Lord, I do, but I don’t.”
Then: “I know you don’t have enough faith to give Me 300 pesos. But can you give Me one of those 100-peso bills?” That was about two dollars, part of his family’s dinner money. “Lord, I have to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s You,” Ryan said. “It is,” came the answer. He fed in the note and thought, this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. Then he started winning, spin after spin, losing only a handful of times, until the balance reached 4,400 pesos. He bought bananas for his son and doughnuts for his wife, and showed her the receipt. “God gave this to us,” he told her.
His wife then said God had told her they had left too soon. The next morning they returned. After their first notes were swallowed, Ryan prayed and went to a machine God showed him. Down to his last few hundred pesos, with his wife pleading with him to stop, he pressed the button once more and hit the machine’s biggest jackpot: 22,000 pesos. Ryan says he has the receipt and dated photos.
He is clear that this was not a strategy but a specific instruction in a specific moment, and his point is not about machines. It is about the God who provides. “If He will climb up on a cross,” he says, “don’t you think He can make a machine deliver cash to the ones He wants to take care of?” We limit God, he warns, when we put Him in a box.
“I don’t have faith. I know.”
Ryan has a striking way of describing his trust in God: “I don’t even have faith. I know.” He compares it to an air conditioner that has never once failed. You do not hope it will turn on; you know. “If He tells me to do something and it’s scary, I know He said it, so I’m doing it. That’s my adventure.” And he is disarmingly honest about himself: “I suck. He knows that. I gave You all my coins, all of me. We can work on me together.”
He closes with a lesson he learned from Derek Prince: the way up is down. Humility, Ryan says, is not just a virtue. It is a necessity. The only person he wants to impress is God, and the God who once sat a frightened six-year-old on His knee is still saying the same thing: I am with you. I have always been with you.
Continue Ryan’s story
Scriptures in this episode
- Genesis 18:1–8, the Lord appeared to Abraham
- Genesis 26:3–4, I will make thy seed to multiply
- Psalm 27:10, the Lord will take me up
- James 4:7, resist the devil, and he will flee
- Hebrews 13:5, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee
- Philippians 4:19, my God shall supply all your need
- Psalm 37:4, the desires of thine heart
- Deuteronomy 28:13, the head, and not the tail
- Matthew 23:11–12, he that humbleth himself shall be exalted
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