The Johnny Chang Interview (EP 87)
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Who is Johnny Chang and what is his background?
what's going on guys welcome back to another episode of the bryce carver podcast i'm bryce and today i have an awesome guest on recently became friends johnny ching johnny how are you doing bro appreciate you my pleasure do you think do you go by like i know some people call you pastor because you like do like an online church do you like do you call yourself pastor or i go by minister cool minister more than anything or just johnny okay yeah i'm not too big on the labels Yeah, okay, cool. Yeah, that was actually something I wanted to talk to you about later. Yeah, I'm super excited about this. My favorite thing that I admire about you is your knowledge on the Word. It's just so crazy. I feel like that's such a beautiful compliment and such a beautiful thing to have.
The way that you quote Scripture and the way that you remember it on your heart, it's like every time you get asked a question, it's the first thing to come off your tongue. So I highly respect that. Thank you. And I also highly respect the work that God has done in your life. I mean, it's so crazy how you can hear something about someone. And like whenever I hear your story, right, when I see videos and things like that, the Johnny that I know is not that old Johnny. So it's hard for me to imagine what your life was like before. And so I just really admire your heart, your character, and your dedication to Scripture. So I appreciate you. Thank you, bro. Yeah, man. Um, I bet a lot of times when you do interviews, do you get asked to like share your story a lot? Yeah.
No. Yeah. It's usually what it is.
Yeah.
You can't have a testimony without the test. Right. So yeah, definitely.
Yeah. I'll let you kind of summarize that quickly because I want this to be different. I want us to just like ask questions about the Bible and stuff like that. Cause I think there's, there's a lot of value to that, but I don't want to undermine what God's done in your life. So if you had to briefly summarize how God encountered you, what your life looked like before and afterwards, what would you do?
Yeah, so I grew up in Section A project housing on the east side of L.A. And my father was like an atheist. My mother was a Buddhist, like a hardcore Taoist Buddhist. And my dad was an alcoholic and didn't believe in any, you know, he didn't really have like good morals. He was beat as a kid. So he kind of passed that generational trauma on to me and my brother. So he beat me. He beat my mother. He beat my brother. And so I kind of took to the streets because I like I'd rather stay out and chill than come home and get beat. Yeah. So at the age of 12, I joined a gang out here in San Gabriel Valley. And like three months into that, I ended up going to prison. It's called California Youth Authority. So I was 12 years old. I went from 12 to 25.
Essentially, I was locked up and I was incarcerated. And yeah. You know, it was, it was, uh, during that time that I became actually a Muslim in, in, in prison. No way. Yeah. So I was a Sunni. I was studying under, uh, like an Imam. Um, he was one of my, his whole family essentially was, um, Sunni, Sunni Muslim. And so, you know, I read the Quran front to back three times. I read the Bible again. At that time, front to back, two times. And he was telling me that we have to pull from the book that came before us, which is the Bible. So there's Abraham, there's Cain, Kabriel, and all these different people also in the Quran. So yeah, I got my GED. I was trying to work on myself mentally, emotionally, physically. But the one thing that I kept feeling was like emptiness inside of my heart.
No matter what I did, I was just happy, sad all the time. This crazy roller coaster. So I got super blasted. You know, most people who are tatted down, it's because, at least in my experience, is because we feel nothing except for pain. So like I would rather feel something than nothing, even if it was pain.
Right.
So I went from that to then coming out, being released, tried to fly straight and recognize that I couldn't. I was a two strike felon in California for a violent crime. I was in there for a shooting, essentially two counts of assault with deadly weapons. I was like, all right, I genuinely like I'm trying. I'm applying to all these places. There's no love being shown. I was like, man, F it.
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