My Testimony

From Brokenness to Redemption

My name is Jayson Fischer, and I was born in 1971 to William Peter Fischer and Patricia Saunders Fischer. I have an older brother, Billy, who was four years older than me.

My story begins with a family that was supposed to be perfect. But when I was just two years old, my brother was diagnosed with a terminal disease. Everything changed. My father walked away from my mother, my brother, and me, and my mother moved us to Florida.

At a very young age, I experienced things that no child should have to experience. My mother's boyfriend was physically and emotionally abusive. When I was six or seven years old, my brother and I were eventually put out on the streets in Fort Lauderdale. We lived in a tent. My mother's appendix ruptured, and she ended up in the hospital. My brother and I ended up in foster care.

That was the beginning of a kind of pain that I never imagined a child could carry.

In my first foster home, I experienced physical abuse. I didn't know how to process what was happening to me, so I ran. I became a runaway. Eventually, I was placed in a locked psychiatric facility, where I was subjected to psychiatric drug treatments as a child.

I wasn't trying to be a problem.

I was a broken little boy trying to get back to his mother.

Then, when I was eleven, my brother somehow found our father. Back then, you couldn't simply look someone up online. My brother was persistent and eventually got our father's number through the telephone operator.

My father came to New York, and suddenly a man I barely knew became part of my life.

I moved into a house in Flushing, Queens. My brother only lasted about a week. I endured months of abuse before someone who worked with my father saw what was happening and helped get me away. Shelly and Larry took me in and eventually had custody of me for four years.

Then came one of the greatest tragedies of my life.

My father murdered my brother Billy and Billy's girlfriend, Nancy, in his house in the Hamptons.

I was still just a young man trying to understand a life that had already given me more pain than I knew how to carry.

I eventually left Long Island and went upstate to live with my mother, a woman I never really had the opportunity to know because of everything that had happened.

In high school, I discovered that I could numb the pain. Drugs and alcohol became part of my life. I was looking for something—anything—that would keep me from having to feel what was inside of me.

At nineteen, I was living in Pompano Beach, Florida. I was dating a woman who lived next door, and one night after doing drugs, I woke up the next morning to her telling me, "We're going to church."

We walked into Calvary Chapel in Pompano Beach.

Pastor Bob Coy shared his testimony about giving his life to Jesus.

And something happened inside of me.

I realized that I needed Jesus.

For the first time in my life, I experienced something I had been searching for everywhere else: peace, joy, love, and a presence that this world could never give me.

But accepting Christ didn't mean all my wounds instantly disappeared.

The trauma of my childhood followed me into adulthood. It followed me into two marriages. It followed me through mistakes, through the loss of a child 24 years ago through an abortion, and through many decisions I made as a broken man who didn't know how to truly walk as a follower of Christ.

For a long time, I allowed my past to define me.

Today, I refuse to do that.

I choose forgiveness.

I choose not to live condemned by what was done to me or by the things I have done myself.

Because if I say that I believe Jesus died on the cross for my sins, then I have to believe that His grace is greater than my past.

I cannot accept what Christ did for humanity and then tell myself that His sacrifice isn't enough for me.

So today, I am choosing to live intentionally.

I'm choosing to be vulnerable.

I'm choosing to stop living through superficial relationships and start allowing people to truly know me.

And I'm choosing to become the man that God has called me to be.

My story isn't a story about a perfect man.

It's a story about a broken man who discovered that Jesus was willing to meet him in the middle of his brokenness.

I've been hurt.

I've made mistakes.

I've carried things I didn't know how to carry.

But I'm still here.

And I believe I'm still here for a reason.

Today, I don't want my past to be the thing that defines my life.

I want Jesus to define it.

I want to be intentional with my life, intentional with my relationships, intentional with my faith, and willing to walk wherever God calls me.

I don't know everything that God has planned for the rest of my story.

But I know this:

What the enemy meant to destroy me with, God can use for His glory.

And my greatest desire now is not simply to survive what happened to me.

It's to allow God to use my life to help somebody else believe that they can be redeemed too.