Kelvin was raised by strong Christian parents and attended church his entire childhood. His grandmother was also a praying woman of God and he would often hear her crying out in her prayer closet as though the entire world depended on what she said to God! By the time Kelvin was in first grade, God had already begun to surround his life with truly great men and women of God, resulting in Kelvin witnessing many extraordinary miracles early in life.

His second oldest brother, Randy, had drowned at a church youth camp swimming pool and was pronounced dead by the medical doctor who was there. The doctor had already called to secure a place for Randy at the morgue of the local hospital so his parents could come and identify their son’s body. The pastor of their church was there that day and felt the Lord was directing him to pray for Randy one last time before they took his body away. Pastor Floyd Lawhon stopped the doctor and paramedics from moving the stretcher, and asked everyone to help him pray again.

The power of God gripped more than one hundred people as they all watched Randy’s lifeless body, his face already a dark blue, begin shaking and changing back to a normal color! He threw up quarts of pool water, and then started to cry and ask everyone to tell him what had happened. The doctor beside him could only say, “Son, all I know is that you were dead when I got here to the pool. You had already drowned. But that preacher just prayed for you and now you’re alive!”

God had used Floyd Lawhon to make a lasting impact on Kelvin that remains to this day. He looked up to Brother Lawhon like a giant and would be moved to tears every time he heard him preach. Kelvin’s dad even made him a toy microphone so he could pretend to preach! He would preach to the whole family, and then go outside and preach to his friends and even his own animals!

Years passed by and Kelvin somehow began losing interest in church altogether. He started smoking cigarettes with his neighborhood friends when he was only nine years old! It was downhill from there as Kelvin continued to make many more wrong choices. While his mother continued to pray and plead with him to return to church, instead he went further down into deeper sin and stronger bondage.

Smoking marijuana at the age of twelve caused his school grades to plummet and he began to stay out of school for days at a time. He found an older crowd to hang with for a while, which only led him into the dark world of harder drug addictions. After being arrested three or four times, Kelvin allowed the enemy to cause him to think there was no way out of his troubles at home and with the police. So, at fifteen years of age, Kelvin left school early one morning, caught a taxi to the local bus station, bought a ticket to south Florida, and never looked back for over two years! His life was a wreck as he teetered on the edge of destruction through deeper and heavier drug problems. While hitchhiking months later, a carload of hippies stopped and picked him up. They all immediately began to like Kelvin and he liked them as they talked and laughed together for hours as they rode. Later that night, they asked Kelvin if he wanted to get off the streets and move with them to New York. They were all in south Florida on vacation and had a house painting business in New York.

Kelvin was raised around paint contractors and knew he would at least have a chance if he went with them. By eleven that evening, they took the rental car back and Kelvin got on the plane with them as they flew back to New York City’s JFK airport. Things were getting much worse and Kelvin knew he should just go back home to Alabama where he had a family that cared for him very much. He knew he should, but he also knew that he was not going back, at least for a while.

Days and nights of abusing LSD and angel dust were burning Kelvin’s brain to charcoal
and he would not even know where he was, often for days at a time! To him, cars sounded like wind tunnels and the pavement on the road looked like a fast moving river. His brain was sizzling and he did not even have a driver’s license yet!

On one occasion, he was in an alley when two men tackled him, then picked him up, and slammed him against the wall of a building. They kept their knees on his stomach with the weight of their bodies pinning him so he could not move. One of them took out a huge knife and pressed the blade against his face and held it still. Kelvin knew if he moved at all, the knife would automatically slice open his face!

Terror gripped his heart at the thought they might cut him badly and leave him to bleed in that alley. He knew he was hundreds of miles away from his family and nobody was there to help him at all. Suddenly, the most unexpected and unimaginable thing happened. One guy said something to the other guy who was holding the knife. Kelvin could not understand, because it was not in English. Whatever was said, it made the guy pressing the knife against his face suddenly very upset and angry. Kelvin could see a fierce look come upon his face!

He snatched the knife away from Kelvin’s face so fast that Kelvin thought he had been severely cut and grabbed his face. To his shock, his face was not bleeding and he was not feeling any pain! The guy was so unbelievably angry and balled his fists tight and started slamming them into the side of the other guy’s head and face! He never looked back at Kelvin; instead, he just kept beating and stomping his partner in crime until Kelvin saw the chance to run!

Kelvin was very shaken and decided he was going back home to Alabama. His parents bought him a plane ticket and, for the first time in almost two years, he went back home to his family. As soon as he was inside his Mom’s car, she asked what had happened to him on Thanksgiving evening. That was the night he was almost robbed and hurt in the alley! Kelvin had told nobody else about what had happened, because he had just arrived.

He asked his mother, “What are you talking about?” His heart started racing when she said, “Kelvin, we were praying for you that evening and I know you were in danger somewhere!” He felt like his heart was coming out of his throat! How did she know? “Kelvin,” she continued, “Around six o’clock that evening, we felt very burdened to pray for you and the Lord spoke to us that you were in great danger and that Satan was trying to kill you at that very moment!” She said six o’clock! Kelvin could hardly believe what he was hearing. Six o’clock in the evening in Alabama was seven o’clock in New York City! That is exactly the time it had happened, because Kelvin had taken the alley as a shortcut to catch the seven o’clock train going upstate! Kelvin had still not said a thing about what happened.

“ Yes, Kelvin,” his mother said to him. “We had only been praying for a minute or so and the Spirit of the Lord came into the room and clearly told me that the danger you were in was real, but He promised me that He was going to go where you were in danger and that He was going to stop the enemy from killing you in your sins and sending you to hell! He said that you would be so shaken that you would come home very soon and that not too long after you came home, He was going to touch you and cause you to want to be saved!”

Kelvin broke down and cried for over an hour. He knew God had performed a miracle for him to be alive! He knew it was so strange that those guys got into a fight right in the middle of the robbery attempt. He knew it was almost unheard of that they would just let you run off like that without trying to stop you! God had known the whole time exactly where Kelvin was, even in a dark, dangerous alley in the middle of New York City!

Kelvin ended up going through a powerful drug rehabilitation program through the local authorities of the court. Seventeen months later, he came out and shortly after that, was saved in a mighty three-week revival where he met Anita. Anita was the greatest thing, other than getting saved, that ever happened to Kelvin. She was a strong and powerful Christian who had loved the Lord very deeply her entire life. She had prayed for years that God would use her to see many people saved. Her family and their church had supported many missionary families throughout the world. God had given her a love for missions from a very young age.

Four years later, they were married. The Lord has taken them around the world to build an international soul-winning ministry that continues to impact tens of thousands in some of the most challenging missions fields on earth! The McDaniels reside in Tennessee with their two children, Leah and Micah.