Category: Blog

My first trip to church was not painful and people were courteous. I am used to getting the “stink eye” or the sideways glances and such. You don’t walk around looking like I look and not expect some of that. The thing that was most important to me was I felt a little bit of hope. I set around day by day clinging to the miracle God had sent me, trying to dare to believe that Church and Jesus could be my answer. I was willing; every time those church doors opened I was there. I immediately started attending the Wednesday night bible study along with Saturday night church and Sunday church.

I was having a really hard time staying clean. I would often walk down to the bar and have a couple drinks to just to try to sleep. The suboxone helped but it wasn’t magic. One of the first scriptures I really grabbed ahold of was texted to me by my friend Eric who was taking me to church.

1st Corinthians 10:13, No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.

This scripture absolutely saved my life. It was the first I memorized and I recited it hundreds of time a day, sometimes out loud and some just whispering it to the depths of my soul. At one of the early bible studies, I went up to the pastor and asked him if he thought God would remove my desire to get high. I told him that if God didn’t, I wasn’t going to make it. The pastor paused for a moment and then told me one of the most important truths of my life, he said “Steve, God can remove the desire, but I can’t promise you that he will. But I can promise you that if you completely give your life to Christ, get baptized and try, even if you fail and even if you die getting high, you will be ok and you will go to heaven and spend eternity with Jesus.” That was one of the first real moments of understanding and peace I had. To me the fact that this man was willing to tell me the hard truth even when it may not be the answer that I wanted allowed me to trust, trust him, trust Gods plan and let go of some of the pressure that was pounding me every day. I was able to start to get a small glimpse that my salvation was the work of what Jesus did and not based on my next move.

I got baptized soon after and it was predicated by me settling a couple things with myself. First if I was going to do this I was going to do it with all I had. Every day I was still deeply impacted, to my very core by what God had done that night I prayed. To me it was the realist and most significant moment of my existence. Second was I was going to accept every single word of the bible as true, whether I understood it or not. There was going to be no just picking and choosing. Every verse in the bible is either a verse I understand or a verse I don’t understand but to me every one is true and powerful and the word of God to me. Third I knew it was going to require submission. For me that was very hard and yet when you look at what I had done to my life it should had been easy to let someone else take over. But all we really have is some idea or notion of independence and choice. I sorted these things out and was willing to follow this path even if it was to any loss or even to death. The moment I chose to commit my life to Christ there has never been one moment of regret or desire to change that decision. I have failed and fallen in a thousand different ways but that commitment has never wavered.

I did my last shot of dope in a dingy bathroom lit by a candle on December 1st 2007.

Now, in my mind, I was sure things would get better and I would be able to bounce back soon. Through a series of events, things got worse and even though I was sticking to the suboxone program, my life completely fell apart. I found myself broke, sleeping in a friends spare room while my kids lived in a beat up old RV behind the house. Struggling to stay clean and having absolutely no real hope for a future, the threads that were holding my mind together were snapping one after another. I slept with a sig sauer 229 next to my head on a pillow every night, just in case it got too hard to go on. Honestly, if not for my kids, I would have ate a bullet just to put an end to the whole twisted play I had written and that somehow made it even worse. I had two people really relying on me getting it together and the pressure was enormous. I had nothing left on any level.

I was setting on my friend’s porch smoking cigarettes one night, a couple months clean but really struggling, severely depressed and about half out of my gourd. This was a pretty shady neighborhood and this guy came walking by with some stuff he had stolen from Walmart. He asked if I wanted to buy a Maglite flashlight. I happened to have a few bucks from some stuff I had sold that day so I asked him if he had anything else. He said he had a mp3 player and I think I gave him 20 bucks for both of them. It was a Phillips go gear preloaded with hits from 1985. I set on the porch the rest of the evening, listening to songs and then went to go to bed. I don’t know why tonight was the night but I really had nothing left and the desperation was so heavy. The thought of taking my life was just so strong! I finally got to such a point of absolute brokenness that the only possible thing left for me was to get down on my knees. Try one last prayer of complete desperation and honestly, I had no confidence of anything happening. Even getting clean hadn’t helped and I really wouldn’t have blamed God for just letting me roll out and get what I had coming. By this time, I had no illusions about what I was and what I deserved. I had no defense to even throw up.

For a little back story, I had an ex-wife who was the mother of the 2 kids that were with me. She had her own drug problem and hadn’t been a part of the kid’s life for the last 15 years or so but would call from time to time, often when she was in trouble or some super dramatic dope fiend drama. Often, I would try to talk her thru the rough spot and then might not hear from her for a year or two.

I prayed and I didn’t feel any real inspiration or hope so I went to bed and put on the head phones of that stolen mp3 player. In 1985, the band Cheap Trick had a hit called “The Flame.” It was never a favorite of mine. I was more into some of their older stuff from back in Jr.high . But I listened to it anyway a couple times and then fell asleep.

At 4:24 in the morning, my phone rang and it was my ex-wife from Texas. She said she was up listening to old music on the computer and she listened to Cheap Tricks “The Flame” and had an overwhelming urge to just call me and tell me that I was doing good and it was going to be ok. I barely even woke up and told her I would talk to her later. When I woke up in the morning, I remembered all this and checked my phone and seen that she had really called, thinking it was a dream. I called her back and asked why she called the night before and she told me the same thing. I got off the phone and my mind was trying to figure out if all this was even real and what are the odds of 2 people both listening to the same old song a thousand mile away and then for one to have the urge to call someone they rarely talked to and tell them all that. Instantly, I knew that God had reached out to me, through a way that would demolish all my abilities to chalk it up to chance or deny its power. From the guy walking by with the mp3 player, to my desperate prayer and song choice all the way to a crack addict in Texas. All the pieces went together to be a miracle, built for me, at the time I needed it most and when I was the most willing to receive it.

I almost don’t like writing about that night. It was the single most important night in my life. Yet trying to put it in words falls short of how huge and meaningful it really was. I know that most people won’t get how impossible it was for those events to line up in such a way to save my life. But I think that is kind of why it was so big! God knew absolutely what would work for me and then brought that to pass.

If I had any really feeling at all, it was too make a move! Do something to grab a hold of this moment not knowing what it meant or its ramifications. Grab it like a life saver thrown to a drowning man. The only thing I knew to do was call an old friend who used to come by my Tattoo shop and talk to me about how he was a Christian now and how Jesus was the only true way. I used to get a big laugh at him but we went way back so I always let him babble. So my move, my grab at the ring, was to call and ask him to take me to church with him.