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Freddie Hidalgo lay face down at a church altar in Tucson, crying so hard it turned into yelling. When people laid hands on him to pray, he got angry and punched the floor.
At one point a man put an arm around him. Freddie decided that if the arm was not gone by the count of three, he would choke him. On three, just as he was about to turn, he says God spoke to him for the first time in his life.
Less than two weeks earlier, on Christmas Eve, Freddie had been a 20-year-old atheist on meth and cocaine with a plan to end his life.
In this interview, Freddie tells Justin Gilpin how Jesus met him that winter and how God later carried his family through their son’s brain surgery. What follows is his account.
A broken home
Freddie grew up in Arizona in a mostly Catholic family, but he says there wasn’t a Christian in it. His parents divorced, and his dad was always drunk. His grandmother read tarot cards at the table for people who came to the house, and Freddie says he saw a lot of spirit activity there as a child.
At 15 he started using drugs. The first thing he ever did was a whole gram of crystal meth and cocaine, and he says he was addicted right away. For five years his life was drugs and parties. He called himself an atheist, and the dark music he listened to led him toward not wanting to live.
Christmas Eve
By December 2002, after a DUI and another arrest for driving high, Freddie had a gun and a plan to climb the mountain outside his town on Christmas Eve and end his life. That day a friend called wanting to smoke, and Freddie decided to see him one last time. He spent the day crying, then raging, then crying again, thinking about his mom.
His friend never showed up at the church. Freddie walked in looking for him, and an older lady with white hair sat him in the front row with the children for the Christmas play. The kids kept asking his name and whether he would start coming to their church. Freddie says they were breaking down his pride.
The play was about a broken family: a drunk dad, a sick mom, a son arrested for marijuana, and a five-year-old girl who had never spoken, pretending to play with her toys while everyone fought. Freddie had been that kid, playing with his He-Man toys while his parents fought. At the end the little girl came up with her Bible, said the name of Jesus, and told her family Jesus is the answer. That was when the tears started streaming down Freddie’s face.
He was invited to pray at the altar that night, but he was too scared to go. Still, he says that night kept him from killing himself.
Set free at the altar
Then the pastor called. Freddie had signed a visitor’s card he didn’t remember signing, and the pastor invited him to a youth convention in Tucson. Freddie was tired of the party life, so he went.
It was January 3, 2003, and over a thousand young people were there. At the altar call, the preacher spoke about a young man who had been sleeping around and doing drugs, looking for happiness that wasn’t coming. Freddie went forward. Later the preacher put his hand on Freddie’s head and said he was going to speak to the demons inside him. Freddie looked up at him. “I saw his face of compassion. He truly cared.”
What stopped him on the count of three was not an audible voice, Freddie says. He calls it head knowledge. God asked him who he thought he was and told him he had better let these people pray for him.
Later someone told him to lift his hands to Jesus, and he couldn’t. So he said, “Jesus, I need you.” He says everything left him at once. He collapsed and started laughing like a tickled baby. “I went from extreme darkness to extreme freedom, extreme bondage to extreme joy that I’ve never felt before.”
That night he gave his life to Jesus and was baptized in the name of Jesus.
A new life
The next morning he filled seven trash bags with everything from his old life, including his music and old letters, and burned them in a bonfire in the backyard. About six days later, at the next Bible study, he kept telling Jesus he loved Him. When his pastor laid hands on him, Freddie says, he was filled with the Holy Ghost and began speaking in tongues. That night he prayed in tongues on his knees until three in the morning. He calls it the foundation of everything in his life today.
For his first year or so in church, Friday nights were hard. Old friends banged on his door and asked how long his church phase would last. One night he went into his closet and cried. Freddie says the temptations didn’t vanish, and he still has to crucify himself every day.
Jeremiah’s healing
In 2011, Freddie and his wife, Priscilla, were pastoring a church they had planted in their living room. Their four-year-old son, Jeremiah, started waking them at night, asking them to pray because his head hurt. Then he threw up. At Phoenix Children’s Hospital, doctors showed them an 8 cm tumor at the back of his brain, with roots that went into the brain. Getting it all out could cost him his walking and talking. He might not even remember his parents.
The whole church came and prayed. Freddie took Priscilla’s hands and reminded her that they had given Jeremiah to Jesus when he was born, and that they were only his stewards.
The surgery was supposed to take 12 hours. Four hours in, the neurosurgeon, a Christian, called them in and told them he had seen a miracle. Sitting in that office, Freddie says, all he could think was that he needed his son: “God gave my son to me to heal me.” He said that when he pulled on the tumor to test the roots, it slid down Jeremiah’s brain and fell onto the table. It appeared to be dead, and the roots they had seen on the MRI were gone. Jeremiah woke up, knew his dad, and was strong enough to pull two nurses’ hair.
Today Jeremiah is 19. He is a young preacher, videographer and photographer, and youth conferences across the country fly him in to make media reels for their campaigns and events.
His work today
Freddie has planted two churches from scratch and is on his third. On the Native American reservation where he pastors, he sees people get demons cast out almost all the time. When people tell him he does so much for God, Freddie says he stays busy because an idle mind is the devil’s playground.
“I’ve baptized over 300 people. And it’s not because I’m great. It’s because I’m trying to stay saved myself.”
Freddie’s word to you
Justin asked Freddie what he would say to someone who feels the way he did that Christmas Eve.
Many people carry that same hopelessness, Freddie says. They look to a relationship, a job or a reputation to fill it, and it doesn’t. He calls the empty place inside every person the God spot. “You can put all types of things and you’ll still be empty.”
The first thing to pray for, he says, is a heart full of sorrow over your sin. Then delete the messages that lead to casual sex, block those people, and step away from the need for likes and comments until a need for God comes out of you. “When God sees that need, He’s a God that meets needs.”
Freddie believes prayer is what finally reached him. He found out later that teams of people at a military base had been praying and fasting for him.
At the start of the interview, he told viewers what his story would show them. “You’re going to realize God has a call upon your life as well.”
Watch the full interview
Hear it in Freddie’s own words. Press play at the top of this page to watch the whole conversation.