My Story
I’ll begin by providing the short version of my testimony and then unpack it. After years of looking for fulfillment and purpose in all the wrong places, I became dissatisfied with life and myself—so I began drinking extravagantly. I wrecked my life extravagantly, so I sought extravagant help from the One who delights in and has the power to turn lives around in an extravagant way.
When I arrived at the Adult and Teen Challenge program in Neosho, Missouri in the summer of 2018, I did not know if there was hope for me. I had grown up in a Christian home, attended church services regularly, and knew the word of God—in fact, I am the son of Assemblies of God missionaries. But growing up in a missionary family meant we moved around quite a bit. In fact, when I think about it, I really believe that moving was in our DNA—my mother is from England, my dad from New York, they met in Japan, and married in Texas where I was born. Shortly after, my parents were called to missions and served in Costa Rica, Spain, Ecuador and the States for over 20 years.
By the time I graduated High School I had lived in fourteen homes, attended eight schools, and lived in four countries on three continents. By my early twenties I had gone on several mission trips to Central America and Asia, graduated from Evangel University with a degree in broadcasting, and started a family. Then in 2004, I co-founded a graphic design and web development company that served missionaries and ministries around the world.
But despite my upbringing and life experiences, long ago I began to chart my own course through life, seeking to build my own kingdom, not His. And in my attempt to live life on my terms, I sought purpose in my own ambitions, meaning in material things, and joy in pleasures. But what the world has to offer does not satisfy—it leaves you empty, broken, and lost. It invites you to endlessly seek out something more to satisfy the craving for fulfillment.
In time I grew very bitter and blamed God and the church for my insecurities and dissatisfactions with life and myself—I despised who I had become and I believed that I had no power to change. So after years of living like this, I began to battle a debilitating depression. And after many failed attempts to curb my discontent with prescription medications and counseling, I decided to simply medicate myself with alcohol, allowing me to go about life unconcerned and numb to the dissatisfaction I carried inside.
So for 5 tumultuous years I battled with alcoholism, leaving a massive wake of destruction in my path—a marriage on the rocks, the relationship with my daughter fractured, the trust of my business partner erased, and a sickened body that sent me to the emergency room twice. Even when provided opportunities to change course, I continually found myself content with drowning out my discontent with a bottle. It was too cheap, too available, and too easy to take and drown out the guilt and shame.
But in the final months of my addiction, I began to pray a simple prayer to a God I was not certain would listen—“God, don’t let me die and not be ready to see you.” I could feel my mind and body completely under the power of addiction and I knew no escape. But with perhaps the very last ounce of hope left in me, perhaps only a mustard seed worth of faith, I cried out to the only one I knew could save me.
Then in May of 2018, my world turned upside down. After getting a second DWI charge in the span of 3 years and on the brink of total destruction, I knew that it was time to get some serious help. So I sold my interest in the business I had started 14 years prior, packed my bags, and enrolled in an Adult and Teen Challenge center—a place I had heard all about growing up on the mission field.
At the time my life looked wrecked, ravaged, and ruined, but in looking back, I now realize that the turmoil and pain I experienced was actually the answer to my simple prayer. God had set in motion exactly what needed to happen for me to go to Adult and Teen Challenge for a year and seek Him—because it is in the midst of pain that God can get our attention, and when we offer up a broken and repentant heart, He steps in and pulls us back from the edge of destruction.
But God not only wants to rescue us, He wants us to follow Him. He desires this because we are His treasure, and he wants nothing less than for us to make Him our treasure—the invitation of grace calls us to pursue Him, serve in His kingdom—but for decades I lived convinced I was a hopeless case with no expectation that I could change course and live a changed life. But I’ve come to realize that God is relentless in His pursuit and absolutely determined to use people who look hopeless to the world and who think of themselves as hopeless too. In fact, I’m convinced that God recruits and scholarships hopeless cases, because He’s intent to accomplish His plans through people of weakness.
Throughout history, God has seen fit to use a whole lot of misfits—people like Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Samson, Rahab, David, Jacob, Jonah, Peter, Paul, and countless other great heroes of the faith. Individuals who doubted, failed, ran away, or learned the hard way. But from their stories, I have come to believe that God enjoys the world's reaction when He transforms the lives of seemingly hopeless people, choosing them to do great things in His kingdom.
As the story of Jonah tells us, God had a desire for the people of Nineveh to have an encounter with Him. But God also wanted to have an encounter with Jonah, the one He commissioned to go to Nineveh. But as this story demonstrates, sometimes in God's miraculous plans, His intended target is not only the spiritually lost multitudes of a city, but for the broken and bankrupt person who is called to go, but is running away and far from Him.
Thankfully, if we choose to take a detour off of His path, He is faithful to intervene and offer us an opportunity to course-correct, and when we do, His mercy provides an open door for us to step back into His purpose for our lives, or as in Jonah's case, be vomited back into the purpose God has.
But the great opportunity to be transformed by the grace and power of God only comes when we completely surrender our lives to Him. Not one foot in, one foot out. Not riding the fence, not on the sidelines of faith, but all in. Luke chapter 13, verses 6-9 records for us a parable Jesus told, and it’s a story that resonated with me during my time in the program—a story of a man who owned a garden where he had planted a fig tree. And for years the man would go see if the tree he had planted had produced any fruit, but he always came back disappointed. So he says to his gardener, “I’ve waited a long time, and there’s still no fruit on this tree. Let’s cut it down, it’s just taking up space”. But the gardener has faith and tells the man to give him one year in order to work with the tree, promising to give it special attention and provide it with everything it needs to grow and become fruitful. The gardener tells the owner that in one year they can return to the tree and see if it has produced any fruit.
In this story Jesus told, the tree in the garden faces a crisis moment in its existence, but if the tree accepts and receives the work of the gardener, it can be brought to bear fruit and given new life. What a difference a year can make in the care of the gardener! He has transformed my life and today I carry a new hope, revived by the One who has breathed new life into mine. Our God brings His people out of exile, He pursues the lost ‘one’ until it is found, He welcomes prodigals home with open arms, and He orchestrates all of heaven to roar when a single soul returns to Him.
Today I am back home answering the call of God on my life—for me to be a godly husband, and father, and son, brother, and friend to the people God has woven into my life. People who did not lose hope and lifted me up in prayer. But I also have returned home to answer another call in my life. 28 years ago God etched on my heart a burden to reach lost and hurting young people. It’s a call I have run from, but have never forgotten. So in answer to His call and doors He has opened, today I am serving at Ozarks Teen Challenge, a juvenile boys program in Branson West, Missouri, and pursuing a master’s degree in ministerial studies. Where the call will lead or what it will look like in the future, I do not know yet, but I believe it will be a life of service in Adult and Teen Challenge, the place of rescue that God provided when I needed rescue. And as I step out into this new life, I walk in faith because I know our God plans and purposes nothing less than the perfect and powerful for His people, so that we can stand and rejoice on the other side of the finish line in victory, having won the race, and hear “well done.”
Adult and Teen Challenge Graduation Day
