Joshua's Story of Restoration

Joshua’s story of restoration

Jesus is healing and restoring lives at His Mansion by revealing His heart for helpless sinners. As He does, people like Joshua Taylor learn how to follow Christ at His Mansion and beyond.

Joshua grew up as a nominal Christian in south Louisiana. He started smoking weed and drinking around the age of thirteen after his parents divorced. He later left home and progressed into harder drugs, especially painkillers, leaving him in and out of jail in his early twenties. After he was kicked out of his apartment, his grandmother, a strong Christian, took him in and gave him one week to find a place to live. She also recommended His Mansion.

Unwilling to attend a Christ-centered program, Joshua fought sleeplessness until finally crying out to the Lord: “If you’re there, if you’re real, you have to do something. You have to change me because I can’t do it and I’m terrified and lost.” The next morning he knew he was going to His Mansion and that he was going to give his life to the Lord. “He responded in mercy and kindness and changed my heart to do what I was unable to do,” Joshua reflects.

In 2013, when he was twenty-three, God brought him to His Mansion. The Lord started tackling the lies and false beliefs he held. “Most of our sin, our trouble, anxiety, worry stems from a wrong belief about who God is,” Joshua explains. As a Resident he asked deeply honest questions about faith as others challenged his preconceptions about God, while working through the pain of his past that he had previously quieted with drugs. God also used the book of Romans and rich hymns like “Hallelujah, What a Savior” to win his heart. “The Lord’s sovereignty led me to this place, no matter what I tried to do to escape that,” Joshua testifies, “that is the heart and soul of who God is: to seek and save the lost and to protect and preserve.”

As he came alive to the sovereign love of God, he was called to lay his life down for others (1 John 3:16). “That’s the model of Christ and that’s what we’re called to do,” Joshua observes, “to focus less on Self.”

God continued to grow him as a Servant Leader for the next two years, where he learned more humility in his responsibilities. From there he became an instructor for the Resident Program, where God developed his gifts for teaching and shaped his love for biblical truth. God then used that passion to help him shepherd and advocate for men in addiction as the Men’s Program Administrator for over a year.

In 2019 God led Joshua to live out Christ’s heart for sinners outside His Mansion. Within six months he moved to Texas, got married, started a job in IT and bought a house. In his job interview he promised to apply the principles of hard work that the Lord had taught him at His Mansion, and he still works for that company today. God also shifted his heart to serving both his growing family and his local church: leading worship, joining the leadership team, developing children’s ministry and teaching a few classes. “It’s not whether you will be a theologian,” Joshua says. “It’s what kind of theologian you will be: a bad one or a good one. Because that has ramifications for how you love your wife, how you love your kids, how you work and your vocation, whatever it is.”

As God continues to reveal His heart for sinners at His Mansion, He equips His children for following Him the rest of their lives.

“What is the goal of the year at His Mansion? It’s supposed to be a launching pad, preparing you to go and do whatever the Lord has you to do for the rest of your life. An ordinary life lived with faithfulness and godliness is an extraordinary life.”

The Taylor family is Joshua, Rachael, Leo James and John Knox.

Partnership opportunities

• Join the His Mansion team. Visit the website to check out employment opportunities.
• His Mansion is in need of trucks for the farming and wood operation. Consider donating a truck for the work that takes place on The Hill.
• The His Mansion pavilion is in the planning stages. Consider blessing the campus through a gift to the building fund.
• Be an advocate. Tell others about this ministry.
• Keep His Mansion in your daily prayers.

Prayer requests

• October is intake month for the men’s program. Pray for the new men arriving on The Hill to be hungry for change and to find true life that only comes through knowing Jesus.
• That more communities and churches will be connected to His Mansion and find a life-changing resource for hurting people in need of the hope of Jesus Christ.
• During His Mansion’s monthly campus prayer walk, the staff pray for the Kingdom of Heaven to come, for God to be glorified on The Hill, and for His Mansion to be a place where Jesus is loved. Would you join in this prayer?
• His Mansion has had a bountiful harvest in the gardens this year. Offer a prayer of thanksgiving to God for blessing the efforts of staff, Servant Leaders, Residents and volunteer work groups.