Joshua Humphrey went from surfing films and addiction to full-time ministry after a single encounter with God in his bedroom on Mother's Day 2004.
Mother's Day 2004 started with a restaurant brawl and ended with Joshua Humphrey face-down on his bedroom floor, shaking, weeping, and completely set free from years of addiction. No 12-step program. No counseling sessions. No medication. One encounter with the power of God, and his life was unrecognizable by morning.
Joshua and his wife Kristen Humphrey lead River Church of the Islands out of Hawaii's Big Island, and they've spent nearly a decade taking that same encounter-driven faith to nations across the world. Their stories, told together, form something of a two-sided testimony: one shaped by a childhood hunger for God, the other by a dramatic collision with him at the absolute bottom.
Kristen grew up in a Christian home where speaking in tongues was normal, but the person of the Holy Spirit remained abstract to her until she was thirteen. When she finally saw the anointing move in a service, something locked into place. She didn't just want to observe it. She wanted to carry it.
"When the touch of God comes on you, even at a young age, you're never the same. You'll never be the same."
By fifteen, she had made a decision that most teenagers would find extreme: no television for a full year. Not as a religious rule, but as a trade. Every hour she would have spent watching her favorite shows, she redirected into her bedroom, pressing into the presence of God.
"Pressing in," she's quick to clarify, is not a mystical technique. It's simply going after God with everything inside you. In practice, that meant asking the Holy Spirit to teach her how to pray, how to read the Bible, how to understand a word that felt dead on the page without him. She describes getting lost in worship in her bedroom, entering a presence she never wanted to leave.
To get hungry for God, starve yourself from the things of the world. The spiritual begins to grow as the natural gets starved.
She's also honest that hunger isn't always at full volume. On the days it isn't, she says, you can pray for it. "Just give me a supernatural hunger." That reframe matters: hunger itself is something you can seek, not just something that either shows up or doesn't.
Joshua's path to God ran through North Dallas, surfing films, and years of spiraling addiction. He'd actually had a genuine encounter with God at a youth camp as a teenager, got filled with the Holy Spirit, and came home on fire. Then the church leadership pulled the youth group aside after their first Sunday back and told them plainly: what happened at camp was emotion, not God, and it would not be welcome in Sunday morning services again.
The real disruption isn't technical.
That rejection sent him looking for the feeling he'd had in the presence of God, and he looked for it everywhere wrong. Relationships. Drinking. Drugs. By his late twenties, living on the North Shore of Oahu and making surf films, he couldn't go a day without a six-pack or an hour without smoking a joint. He was popping pills, addicted to pornography, and by his own description deeply depressed and miserable beneath a life that looked like a dream.
The Mother's Day fight with his brother at a packed Ruby Tuesday's, the drive home with a concussion swelling his temple like a racquetball, the panic attack on the front porch: all of it stacked up into one undeniable moment of reckoning. And then a voice, still and small, spoke his name.
Joshua, go to your room, cry out to me, and I'll save you.
He asked for it a third time, just to be sure. It came the same way, with the same words. He ran inside, opened his bedroom door, and the power of God hit him before he could take another step. He fell face-first on the floor with no one else in the room.
"I tell people it was actually almost physically painful," he says. "It was like the hand of God reached in to grab my heart." What came out was the addiction, the hurt, the bondage, the deep things nobody knew about. What came in was love, joy, peace, and a clarity he hadn't felt in years. When he walked out of that room, the swelling in his temple was gone. His head didn't hurt. He was sober in his mind for the first time he could remember.
The following Sunday he went back to church and answered an altar call. A South African pastor prayed over him, and before the man's hand even touched him, Joshua was on the floor speaking in tongues. When he got up, the pastor called him over and told him, matter-of-factly, that the Lord said he was done with chewing tobacco. The last thing that had any hold on his life. And that was the end of it.
Both Joshua and Kristen are deliberate about sharing their stories not as exceptional cases but as an invitation. The point, as Joshua frames it, is that God is not a respecter of persons. He didn't do something for Joshua that he won't do for anyone else. The same anointing that sets someone free becomes the anointing they carry to set other people free.
"Your testimony will actually be the key that the Holy Ghost will use to unlock somebody's heart, to be open to receive from the Lord that may have been closed off or stuck or bound before."
The obstacle, in their observation, isn't that God is selective. It's that most people aren't yet hungry enough for God to outweigh the things keeping them stuck. And underneath that, often, is a lack of obedience to something specific God has already said. "Did you do what he told you to do? Well, no, I haven't done that quite yet. Well, that's why you haven't experienced all that God has for you."
When they talk about ministry that felt like the book of Acts, Joshua and Kristen both land on their first trip to Asia. Kristen laughs remembering her bedroom prayers: Lord, I'll go anywhere, just maybe not Asia. Maybe not Africa. Somewhere European, comfortable, not too far out.
The first place God sent them was Thailand.
They arrived jet-lagged, with lost luggage, wearing the same clothes for five days, washing underwear in the sink. At one point they were standing in the middle of a road in Bangkok, unable to speak the language, unable to reach anyone who could help, circling in a cab with a frustrated driver near a church they couldn't locate.
Kristen scanned the buildings and spotted a red roof in the distance. The Holy Spirit spoke: go to the red roof building. And then, just as clearly: I brought you here to teach you to trust me like you've never trusted me before.
When you step out in him, you don't go alone. He's always there to back you.
She started weeping in the middle of the road. Joshua, not yet knowing what was happening, assumed she was having a breakdown. They started walking toward the red roof. A car pulled up beside them, and two women who had been at the previous night's meeting jumped out, took them by the hand, and led them through alleyways straight to the building.
That, Joshua says, is where ministry actually lives: past the point where you can manage it yourself. "When you get past yourself, that's when he comes in and he takes over."
Their prayer, the one they've carried through years of ministry in multiple nations, stays simple: Lord, if man never sees us, we will not go unless you go with us. They mean it both ways. They won't perform without his presence, and they trust that when they step out, he steps with them. That combination, encounter plus obedience, is the only engine they know how to run on.
