by David Dodd

Listening to Shawn McDonald talk of how God lifted him from the muck and mire is a humbling experience filled with God’s grace, mercy, and glory.

From his earliest childhood memories, Shawn was terrified of demons.  He would lie in bed at night thinking they would be lurking in the hallways, about to pounce.  They were his biggest fear in the innocence of childhood.

The demons then became real, leading Shawn to a life of drug using and selling, spending a lot of his time on the streets, making deals and money.

  Long before he even thought about playing music for the Lord, God’s Loving Hand stepped in momentarily, in the form of an unexpected offering. 

 “This guy wanted to buy a bag of weed and he didn’t have any money,” Shawn recalls during our conversation, “but he had this beat-up guitar.  He was like, ‘Hey, what would you give me for this guitar?’

 I’m like, ‘I don’t know, I don’t play guitar.  I don’t need a guitar.’

 ‘Well, just give me something.’

 “So I ended up with this guitar; I didn’t even know why I had it, it just sat and collected dust for a couple years.”

Through a series of arrests and probation time, and realizing he needed to change his life, Shawn was sentenced to house arrest.  The only time he could ever leave his house was to go to church.  That’s in itself was an absolute miracle. 

“There was a kid named Chris who was always inviting me to church and his college group.  He lived right around the corner in the apartment right next to me.  For a really

long time he kept asking me to go to church with him, he didn’t bug me but he was continually persistent.  He knew what I did, but he also knew what God could do.  He just kept asking me over and over again to the point where I bet he was getting tired of asking.  It was kind of a crazy thing; he told me that about a week before I told him I wanted to go to church that he kind of duked it out with God.  He got really mad and angry, screaming at God saying, ‘I just don’t understand, I poured so much into this kid and there’s just no fruit, I don’t understand what you’re doing, God.

All this happened the next week which is just ironic how it all fits and how it all works together.”

Even prior to that, Shawn had another encounter.  This time it was directly with the Word of God.

“I was really frustrated and I picked up a Bible and I said, ‘Okay, God, if You really exist, where are You?”

Shawn randomly opened the Bible and started reading.  He was in the gospels, and he began reading about a very familiar subject.

“The first thing I read was Jesus saying to clean the demons out of your house and how they come back sevenfold.  I spent the next couple of days just kind of cleaning everything out.  I got really scared.  I got rid of all the drugs I had to sell.  It’s weird because most stuff doesn’t spook me, but I’ve always had this unsaid fear of demons, even when I was doing drugs.

I had a couple bad trips on LSD and mushrooms and even in those bad trips, the bad trip was the fact where I went somewhere evil to the point where it scared me.  I freaked out and went a little crazy in those trips.  One of them I thought I had gone to hell which was weird because I wasn’t a religious person at all, but yet I had some concept of heaven and hell, you know, I kind of believed in it whether or not I thought about it at all because I didn’t.  So when I picked up the Bible and read that, it just scared me so much that I got rid of everything.”

Two days later, a ton of police arrived with a search warrant and ransacked his apartment.  They found nothing. 

For the first time in several years, Shawn’s apartment was released of the demons.

“They still took me away for a couple of days because they had an arrest warrant, but they didn’t find anything to put me away for a long time.  I spent three or four days in jail and was released on house arrest and probation.” 

He went to church and experienced worship for the first time.  He asked the worship pastor if he could have a copy of some chord charts.  He went out and bought a chord book of worship songs.  

Shawn went home, dusted off that beat-up guitar, and starting playing for the Lord.

 “I found so much joy and peace in just worshipping our Father in church and college groups, stuff like that.  I’d go home and beat around on the guitar just to learn the chords and just worship in my room.”