Unaware of the hard trials that awaited him, at the age of 21, Gabriel Arruda enrolled in an art school. In his fourth year, in the midst of struggles, he felt God calling him to something greater! Join Gabriel as he shares his story of God’s power to snatch him from the fowler’s snare.

<p>Unaware of the hard trials that awaited him, at the age of 21, Gabriel Arruda enrolled in an art school. In his fourth year, in the midst of struggles, he felt God calling him to something greater! Join Gabriel as he shares his story of God’s power to snatch him from the fowler’s snare.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Gabriel Arruda

How God Saved Me from the Devil’s Workshop

I'd like to share a portion of my testimony I call Saved from the Devil's Workshop.

But before I get into it, I'd like to say an additional word of prayer.

Our Father in heaven, I just feel compelled to again ask for your mercies and ask for your spirit to please come to be our teacher and our instructor.

Teach us, help each and every 1 of us to walk away with that which you were hoping we would walk away with.

Help me, Lord, as the sower of the seed to be open to your working and your power and help us all as learners and listeners to be open and to allow that seed to enter into our hearts and to germinate and to bear up, bear fruit unto eternal life.

I grew up in a loving Seventh-day Adventist home.

Can anyone say praise the Lord for loving Seventh-day Adventist homes?

I was so happy to have the honor and privilege to have grown up in a wonderful, loving home like that.

And so after Academy, and after 2 years of junior college, I was really asking myself the question, what do I want to do with my life?

I was good at snowboarding, and I was good at art.

And at the age of 20, I almost cracked my skull open on a backflip gone bad on a snowboard trip.

And so I figured that's probably not the direction I'm going to head.

And so at the age of 21, I worked up the guts, and I signed up, and I shipped out, and I went to art school.

I decided to pursue my dream as an artist, and I enrolled in the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, which wasn't too far from where I grew up, in Sacramento area.

And my major was illustration, I was an illustration major, and my specific concentration within that major was to be a concept artist.

Now for those of you who don't know what a concept artist is, that's the person who gets hired by a big motion picture company or a big gaming company and draws all this amazing stuff that they just wanted to do since they were kids.

And they're the ones that actually design what the armor is going to look like, what the character is gonna look like, what the guns are gonna look like before they actually make it on the screen or they make it on the game or the comic or whatever it is.

And this was like the really cool thing to do in the illustration department as an illustrator because they threw gobs of money at you.

You got to work for some high profile company or motion picture company, and they paid you to draw amazing stuff, and you got to see your stuff in movies, and you got to go to premieres, and This was exactly what I wanted to do.

I was completely enamored and captivated with this goal in life.

As a matter of fact, at the school I went to, they had something at the end of the year called the Spring Show.

And it's when all of the artists you had to qualify to enter but all the artists especially the senior students would show their work and they would illustrate their work and companies would come and they would hire students on the spot and as a matter of fact they had a special room for George Lucas.

For those of you who don't know who he is, he's the Star Wars guy.

He's the director of ILM, Industrial Light and Magic.

And he would come and he would look at senior portfolios, and there were some kids that would get hired right on the spot to work for ILM.

And so, you know, I thought to myself, man, this is my chance.

You know, everyone's told me you'll never make money in art.

And you know, you're really gonna waste a lot of money going to that school.

And you know, I'm gonna prove them wrong.

I'm gonna go do it and it's gonna be awesome and I'm gonna get paid gobs of money to do what I love to do.

And so I was working really hard and I was on the fast track to becoming a concept artist working for some motion picture company, some gaming company perhaps, but little did I know at the time, God did not want me to work for the entertainment industry.

And he would make that very clear and he would radically intervene in my life.

You know, had God not done this, it's very likely that that's exactly where I would have ended up in the entertainment industry working somewhere, because that's where all of my old art school friends are today.

I roomed with this guy for a year, Mark Harris, and he is an animator at Pixar.

He worked on that movie there, Up, came out several years ago, and found a blog of his, and he's here talking on some animation website about this sequence he animated for some Pixar movie.

And he's talking about, I don't even know what movie this is, but he's got this blog where he's talking about this, how he pulled this off.

And good friend of mine, roomed together for a year.

Also, Tim Evatt, he was also an illustration major, really, really amazing concept artist, even as a student.

And He works as a concept artist for Pixar now as well.

But another friend who's another animator there, Nick.

And this guy here, he was actually a mentor of mine in art school and really helped hone my skills as an artist.

And now he's working for doing concept art for video games and he works for Cartoon Network, doing some projects for them.

Another friend of mine, we lived on the same dorm room level together, and we hung out with the same group of friends, Greg Towner, and he does special effects, and he actually got hired by ILM.

And his first project, he was working on King Kong, which came out in 2009, And the Academy of Art decided to do a write-up on him because, you know, it was a big success, a graduate getting hired by LLM and working with them.

And some of the more recent movies he worked on, Transformers 2, Pirates of the Caribbean 2, things that, you know, pretty much everyone knows about.

And, you know, so these guys, my old classmates, they're out there producing the movies that the mass millions are paying money to go watch.

And that's probably where I would have been.

But God did something absolutely amazing for me.

While living in 1 of the most liberal, wicked cities in the country, going to 1 of the most liberal, wicked schools in that city, I was converted.

God got a hold of me and radically changed my life.

Now that particular story is a whole different story and hopefully I'll get an opportunity to share how that all came about.

But God opened my eyes for the first time in my life and showed me what a wonderful person he was and what a terrible person I was.

And he helped me to see that everything good in my life was because of him.

Anything good that had ever happened in my life was directly because of him.

And he revealed to me through a series of painful but wonderful circumstances that Jesus was the best friend I could ever have.

Even my own parents would let me down, but never Jesus.

And despite this, however, I still had lots of junk in my head from decades of TV education.

And despite this conversion experience that I went through in San Francisco, I was still very determined to work as a concept artist.

And so God had to do something else very radical to get my attention in that area of my life.

In My third year of art school, well, let me back up.

The first 2 years I lived in downtown San Francisco, I mean, right in the middle of all those big buildings.

And I was really enamored at first, you know, this kid that came from the suburbs and all these bright lights.

But about the turn of my second year, I absolutely hated it.

It's just the craziness, the noise, the homeless people hitting you up constantly and it just I couldn't stand it anymore.

So I decided to get out of there and move to a more, I don't want to say rural because it was San Francisco, a more suburban area of the city out in the outer Richmond.

And my third year I moved to a corner place and this is actually it right here on a 40 49th and Fulton and a friend of mine at church had told me he lived in the bottom level of this place and the first level and he said you know the unit above me is available You ought to come and see if, you know, this lady will rent to you.

She was a really nice landlord and everything worked out perfect.

Sweet little old lady landlord, just wonderful woman.

And I moved in, signed the lease, and paid my first and last, and I moved in.

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How God Saved Me from the Devil’s Workshop

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