On New Year's Day 2019, Michael Cabezas sat in a bathroom cubicle weeping. These were not tears of sorrow, however, but rather tears of joy, tears of relief, tears of revelation as he was finally, once and for all, experiencing the overwhelming and abundant love of God.

The youngest in a large Ecuadorian family in the city of Newark, New Jersey, Michael was a second-generation immigrant child of '80s and '90s America, a life filled with hip-hop, MTV, video gaming, and baseball. Sadly, what his life lacked was the attention and affirmation of his father, Victor. Broken by the attrition of chasing the American dream, Michael's father had become a ghost in the home.

When Victor passed suddenly in 1998, Michael turned to other sources of affirmation to fill the void left behind. His life became filled with the endless pursuit of glamor and hedonistic dreams