My name is Frank Fazzalaro. I was born in 1947, in Silver Creek, NY. While growing up as a young kid, my life was centered around sports, particularly basketball. My father was a Catholic, and my grandfather came over from Italy. My mother was Irish, and though being not a Catholic, she had to sign papers with the Catholic Church if she had any kids to bring us up Catholic. Thus she married my father in the church.
My father’s sister was very religious, attending mass regularly, saying the rosary, going to the stations of the cross, lighting candles, praying to Mary. I myself at times attended mass, and in my heart had a longing for God. I had questions within myself about Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, life, death, etc. I attended religious instructions sometimes just to be able to play basketball at the CYO. Basketball was my life, and before a game, I would pray to God that I would have a good game. I had a cross around my neck which was blessed by the priest. Little did I know that God was not hearing my prayers. I had sin on my soul and God was not really concerned about the amount of points I scored, or if I passed the ball behind my back. I know now that God loves one soul more than the whole universe, and that in His Word is the blue print of how to live my life on this side of eternity.
I had aspirations of playing in college, but by the end of my senior year in high school, I was ready to forget about sports and find out what life was all about. My life changed and I started getting in trouble with the law. And when in trouble, I would turn to God for deliverance. If I ended up in jail for stealing, or if I was on a bad acid trip, God would be the one I would turn to.
I know God followed me through those dark years as Satan was leading me down a road of destruction. I was alienated from God because of my sins, born in sin, shaped in iniquity. In 1970 I was witnessed to by brothers from the Tony Alamo Ministries on Hollywood Blvd., and for the first time in my life I was asked if I was born again. This question was so foreign to me that at first I joked about it, not knowing what it meant.
I left California and went back to New York. In 1972 I was back in California, and I remember I used to sit across from Grauman’s Chinese Theater waiting for the witnesses from the Tony Alamo Ministries to come by, knowing that if I were in their path, or in their sight, they would hand me a Gospel tract, and then I could question them about the Bible.
Eventually I caught their bus and went to one of their services. Now, God had been dealing with me for quite some time. God knew I wanted to really know Him, and to serve Him, and to spend eternity in His kingdom. In the masses I used to attend in the Roman Catholic institution, I spent my time kneeling, sitting, or standing throughout the mass, trying to learn the appropriate position. I never learned anything in the mass, but whenever the mass was over, as I reached the outside of the church there was a sigh of relief; it’s over, now tomorrow I can do my own thing. I’ve put my token in.
In July of 1972, I did catch that bus, and at the altar call I went down to the altar, knelt down on my knees, said a prayer of repentance to God, and when I stood up I had felt my sins had lifted off me. There was a circumcision, not of the flesh, but of my heart, and my sins were gone.
Satan is a deceiver and I see now how deceived Catholics are. As I travel the pages of God’s holy Word, there is no Purgatory, there is no prayer or money to get you out, there is no Limbo, only Heaven or Hell, and once there, there is no getting out. “And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence (Luke 16:26).” Praise the Lord.
Frank Fazzalaro