I guess a good starting point for this story would be somewhere in my childhood. Since I was about 8 or 9 years of age I have been involved off and on at church, but like most children I didn't understand the Gospel at the time. I viewed the church more as a place to come and hang out with friends..even though they were a little on the weird side. The first church I can remember going to was First Assembly of God in Van Buren, AR. At First Assembly I was involved in a group called Royal Rangers (a type of boy scouts for the church) and since I liked the outdoors, I had a pretty good time.
In the year of 1994 (when I was about 10 years old) my family was involved in an event that changed our lives forever. For brevity, I will keep this story short and share it in detail later. On Halloween night, coming back from a spook trail with the Royal Rangers, a Tyson truck carrying a full load of live chickens in crates lost part of its load as we were passing by at speeds of 50-60 mph. Approximately 30 of the crates crashed into our truck, flattening the front of the cab. From the impact of the crates my mother was put into a coma and my father's neck was broken. I came out unscathed, wondering if my parents would live through the night. In short, they survived and recovered. Since they had such a close call with death, my parents began to think a lot more about their relationship with God.
A few years after this event we ended up moving to Greenwood, AR and began to attend First Assembly of God in that town. My parents began to really get involved at this church and would attend anytime the doors were open. My father began to preach a little and do homeless outreach with one of his buddies from the church. One event that I can remember was a revival that the church was having. The revival lasted a full week. On the third or fourth night the lady that was preaching invited the people to come up and get baptized in the Holy Spirit. One of my cousins happened to be visiting and went to the service with me. As people were coming forward and falling over one by one, I finally convinced my cousin to go up to the front with me to see what would happen. We went forward and the lady laid her hands on our foreheads while praying, slightly pushing us back. Since I thought it was the appropriate thing to do, I fell backwards and laid on the ground with my eyes closed. After laying there for what I though was a good amount of time like the others before me, I got up and went back to my seat where my cousin was already waiting on me. This happened about 3 times as the lady preacher would continue to invite the people down for a "second" and "triple dose" of the Holy Spirit. The reason I tell this particular story is because this event is the only time that I can remember that I was fired up about God and being a Christian while in my teens. This passion lasted for about two maybe three weeks and faded away.
As a grew older I began to loose interest in the church all together. I only went because my parents made me, plus there was a girl in the youth group that I would make out with on occasion. At this time in my life I thought the people in the youth group were a bunch of weirdos that made extremely immature corny jokes all the time. At the age of 15 I stole some weed and a few papers from my cousin that came to visit from Texas and smoked it for the first time with my friend that lived down the road. I tried many times to roll up the joint but I was not yet skilled in the art of rolling, so we just made a pipe out of tinfoil. In Greenwood my parents owned about 30 acres. In the back was a good stretch of woods to explore. My friend and I went up into the woods and smoked almost all the weed the best we knew how and lied to each other about high we were getting. I didn't feel a thing.
This started a progression of more weed smoking as I turned 16. Now I could drive and had more freedom. By the age of 17 I was smoking weed whenever I had the chance and picked up smoking cigarettes as well, though not addicted to either at this point. It was during the ages of 17 and 18 that I really started to doubt if God even existed. I would always argue and try to explain away spiritual things to my parents. I stopped going to church. I had an explanation for everything that happened to take away the credit from God. I started to become convinced that the people at church were weird and fake.
Since I could now buy cigarettes legally at age 18, I did. I started going to parties more often and getting deeper and deeper into the party scene. As my circle of friends began to expand I had more connections. The thought of God in my life was very distant, after all I was having a good time worshiping drugs and various other hollow things. I was first introduced to a drug called Oxycontin when I was 17. It was the first drug that I had tried besides weed and alcohol. I tried it orally and liked the feeling. I then began to chop it up and snort it for more of a rush. By 18 I had injected it into my vein for the first time. I remember telling myself that I would never do this...but I did. I remember always telling myself that I would never go to the next "level" but I always did. (I go into detail about these things to reveal the severity of the condition that Christ saved me from) Once I started "shooting up," addiction really started tightening its grip on my life. Now that I had opened this window of using drugs it became the norm for using all types of drugs including meth and cocaine.
Life at home began to fall apart between me and my parents. I would constantly lie to them and act like nothing was wrong. I hurt them deeply. I would always discourage their beliefs in God and the church, even to the point where they lost interest in going to church without me. They said that they would continually pray to God for me but I only got worse and worse. They finally stopped going to church. I started to get careless and sloppy, eventually leaving a trail of my drug use where my parents could find it. They started to notice that the spoons in the silverware drawer were getting lower in number and my car was filled with traces of drug use from the weekend. I agreed to get help at a local rehab, but only stayed for about 2 weeks...promising my parents that I would clean up on my own. That didn't happen! I started using more frequently. After graduation in 03 I tried going to college in Fort Smith but was never focused in class and always came high. So, I just decided to work until I could clean up enough to actually do well in college. While I was working I would spend my paycheck that I received in a single weekend. In 2004 I was in a wreck that broke my foot in half. I received a settlement out of the other person's insurance company because the permanent damage of my foot would effect me the rest of my life. I tried to be responsible with this money for a while but ended up going wild with it. This is when my addiction to opiates (mainly Oxycontin), and the casual use of other drugs, spun out of control.
While coming back from a trip across the border of Mexico, my friend and I got busted in the parking lot of a casino at about 3am in Oklahoma trying to get high one last time before we made it home. The police found everything that we had moved across the border and took us to the local jail to wait for our trial. I was able to get out on bond about 5 days later and the court decided to send me to a 30 day rehab for treatment. This was the first rehab that I completed. While I was there they lead me through the "12 steps" and told me to seek out my "higher power" whatever that may be...it could be a door knob or a frog...just something to help me overcome the other idol in my life that had led me here! Since I knew about Christ, I decided to believe that he was more powerful than a door knob but I never sought him for help to overcome my addiction. He was still a distant thought that was not very real in my daily life. After I graduated from the rehab and got my certificate, I had good intentions of really staying clean when I got back to Fort Smith. About a week later I stopped by one of my friend's house to hang out since I hadn't seen anyone in a month. Needless to say he hadn't changed but respected me trying to quit. I eventually deceived myself into doing a little and keeping it under control this time. Life just didn't seem as exciting without the drugs and partying. As you can probably guess, it went downhill from there. This time even more out of control than before. I quickly began to get back into my old life style while hiding it from my parents a little better (or so I thought) this time. I was making sure to do all the right things to make them think that I was still off the drugs. I learned from my previous failings before and knew what they were looking for and all the places they would check. I knew all the right things to say and do. I decided not to let myself be so careless this time around my parents.
Things eventually started to fall through the cracks and my real life began to bleed through. They were let down again and I decided to move out because of the havock I was causing. I thought that if I was the problem, then I would just leave. I moved in with a friend and began making regular trips out of town to buy heroin and cocaine. This was cheaper than the overpriced Oxycontin pills (which were 40-50 bucks a pop, and only lasted a couple hours) and in my mind it seemed like a more prestigious drug to use. Some mornings when I would open my eyes, I would find myself praying to God to help me quit because I knew my next mission would be to find some pills...something I could inject in my viens. My daily routine was alway the same...get up...make phone calls, make plans, scheme...whatever I had to do...find some type of drug and stay high all day if possible. I needed something to get me through the day. The guilt of my lifestyle and the hurt I was causing my family was treated by doing more drugs. My life's mission was how I was going to get my next fix..that was my vision. Deep down I knew it was a half hearted request when asking God to help. It was a faint cry deep within me that did not want to live the life that I was living, but by the day's end I would always find myself doing the same thing. I could not resist. I was in slavery. It got to the point where I could barely function without something. I really did not want to quit, but I did. I would always tell my parents, "this is not the real me!" and "I don't want to be this way!" Now that I look back on it I can remember these times when I would see myself for who I really was, God would occasionally open my eyes and move past my hardened heart to let me see what was happening to myself. I rememeber once instance when I my father was taking me to work one morning because I had wrecked my truck. Because I had wrecked my truck I couldn't go out and get any pills, so the next morning I was going through withdrawls. I remember literally telling my father that I was being tormented because that's what it felt like. My skin was crawling, I was angry and irritated...I felt like just screaming and ripping my skin off or jumping out of my own body to find some rest.
I ended up moving back in with my parents after the summer was over, making weak attempts to quit my addiction. Things continued to spiral downhill until my parents finally kicked me out of the house for pawning a bunch of their valuables including my father's guitar and my mother's diamond necklace. (The guys at the pawn shop saw me on a regular basis. I'm sure they would always quote me the worst price possible, knowing what I was after.) I had a little money so I stayed in a cheap hotel for the night until I could figure out what I was going to do.
I came back the next day to grab some more of my things and my parents told me that they had called Teen Challenge to get me a bed. The waiting list was usually about a month but they called back and said that they had a bed available for me that day. I really did not want to go back to rehab and live by their rules, but at this point I knew I had a serious problem and I could not quit on my own. My life was going nowhere. The countless attempts proved this over and over. I finally agreed to go, I really had no other option. It was either go to rehab or back to the hotel with nothing.
At Teen Challenge they get to the root of a person's drug addiction. They speak about Christ and how the Holy Spirit helps a person to change. They address addiction as a worship problem. They informed me that we all worsip something whether it be food, sex, ourselves or any other false savior. For so long I had worshiped a drug. I bowed down to it and obeyed it with no questions. I did whatever it told me to do. I loved it. I was a slave to it. I worshiped it. That's the brutal truth.
For the first two weeks or so I really hated it. I was convinced that everyone there was brain washed. They sang their old worship songs every morning and then studied foundational things of Christianity such as "How I know I'm a Christian," and read the Bible. "This is stupid!" I would think to myself. Of course I was angry at everthing and everyone because I was going through withdrawls...my God had been stripped away from me!
I remember the moment that I gave in. It was somewhere in the second or third week. I decided to give it a try, really because I had tried everything else and Jesus was my only other option that I had not sincerely tried yet. Everyone around me seemed to be letting the program help them except me and the others that had just arrived the day before. During the routine worship in the morning I always stood in the back of the room with my hands in my pockets, not opening my mouth. This day, while everyone was singing the old hymns, I decided to pray. As Jesus opened my heart I asked him if he would really change me if I gave it a chance. I started to sing the songs quietly and eventually clapped my hands a little. I felt a little awkward giving in, but everyone else was doing it. As I continued to give in bit by bit, I could actually notice how Christ was changing me, changing my desires, changing my heart. This encouraged me so I began to pursue Christ and wanted to learn as much as I could about him. He began to replace my craving for drugs and even cigarettes with a desire to please him and worship him. The desire to have a relationship with him was greater than the desire to do drugs. After about three months at Teen Challenge I decided to leave. (It is normally a 14 month program and I was about to graduate to the next level and get sent to there foundation in Missouri, but I was honestly so tired of doing rehab) The desire to do drugs had completely left and I was now partially rooted in Christ. I remember the first few weeks or so in the "real world," as they liked to called it in rehab. It was like I had never even lived, like I had lived in a dream world. I saw the world in a totally different way and thought about things that I had never even thought of before. I began to notice people and how they were suffering and in sin. I had a desire to tell people about Christ and how he could give them life and hope. The world seemed depressed and without hope. It was a new reality. To make an already long story a little shorter, since then Christ has continued to grow me and strengthen me to follow him. He has continued to give me passion for him.
To this day I still fall short with old habits in the works of changing, but I understand that Christ alone is my Savior... not my actions. Through keeping an honest and repentant heart towards Christ about who I am and the things I struggle with he has continued to transform me into his image. I now live for one purpose and that is, with his help, to glorify him and lift him up for all to see. I am thankful for his grace towards me and his power to transform.
Bound as I was, not with another man's irons, but by my own iron will. My will the enemy held, and thence had made a chain for me, and bound me. For of a froward will, was lust made; and lust served, became custom; and custom not registered became necessity. By which links, as it were, joined together (whence I called it a chain) a hard bondage held me enthralled.
Augustine, Confessions, Book 8
