I grew up in a very traditional Christian home but there was a period of time when I was not following God’s will or behaving in a responsible manner. Several months before I joined Southside my wife had asked me to leave the house because I was using drugs and alcohol. I was devastated but did leave. I had no place to go but was fortunate that members of the church I was attending on and off at the time, found me a trailer to live in. It was very cold and extremely lonely.
One day early in the fall, my friend Leo invited me to attend Southside. I was apprehensive because I had heard about it and knew it had a reputation for being “different”. It was with trepidation that I walked through the door one Sunday and sat down. Suddenly the music started and I began to listen to the lyrics. It seemed as though every song was written just for me and dealt with each and every issue that I had been dealing with in my life. I cried through the entire service! And as the tears were streaming down my cheeks, I suddenly felt the tender touch of a hand on my shoulder. A stranger sitting behind me had reached out and begun to pray for me. It was awesome to know that someone I had never met cared enough to pray for me.
I began to attend Celebrate Recovery and got to know who God was. He is not an angry God but a loving God. I gave my alcohol and drug addiction over to Him and it was gone instantly. God just took it away. I had quit drinking on my own before for 4 years but just turned to other addictive things, like drugs. But this time, I was not on my own and God was fighting for me. It was an entirely different story.
As I began to recover I realized that I had an abundance of grief in my life that I had never dealt with. My dad passed away when I was just 8 years old, and my mom when I was 17. Dinah and I lost a baby; she was stillborn in the 8th month of pregnancy. I also had a close friend commit suicide when I was in my early 30s. As I began my journey of getting to know God, I realized that because I was raised without a father, I did not understand what a father’s love was. Rather than looking towards a loving Father, I was using drugs and alcohol to try to get a grip on my grief. Through Celebrate Recovery and reading Wild at Heart, I began to grasp how a father demonstrates his love. I learned to praise God and to trust Him. After all, He gave us His only son so that we could have eternal life, and still we don’t trust Him with our issues?
It was awful living all alone for 5 months in a holiday trailer. It happened to be a year when there was so much snow that some days I couldn’t get in to the trailer. But God needed me to be alone, He needed me to understand that I wasn’t really alone and never was. There were days I felt panicky and thought I would never get to go back home to my family. It was ugly. One terrible windy, cold evening I went outside of my trailer for a cigarette. All of a sudden, it was warm and I felt something spread through my body. I interpreted this as God telling me “The storm was over”. It was then that I knew I would be ok. I was baptized on December 8th 2002. It was the right decision for me.
Five years later I have learned that it is easy to give things over to God and every time I do God gives me so much more than I asked for. I find I am still trying to prove myself to God and am getting involved in so much that it’s just like another addiction. I am learning to clearly think and pray about what I’m going to be involved in. I’d like to put my name on a sheet of paper and have God fill it in.
