My story begins simply enough. It’s probably not all that uncommon a story really, I’m sure. Yet it was this one experience that I can pinpoint as the one moment in time wherein my one life was changed.

I was a bit troubled after the ugly separation and divorce of my parents at the tender age of 9. But that was only the beginning of a series of traumatic events and later child abuse that would ultimately end in some pretty serious drug abuse, increasingly bizarre and perverse behavior and a careless disregard of life and people. (The abuse I suffered was not at the hand of my parents. I would just like to make that clear).

I spent many years trying to recover from the unusual circumstances of my youth. Traveling extensively, I spent most of the time drunk or feasting on a smorgasbord of drugs of one sort or another, having meaningless sex with anonymous partners, living without purpose, empty from a lack of contact with my terminally ill father and broken hearted, missing the one girl who had become the love of my life and the thread by which it was tethered.

It wasn’t until I received the phone call announcing the imminent death of my father that I realized I couldn’t go on any longer on my own. The burden of a life lost, my longing for a love fulfilled and an out of control lifestyle meant to blot out the pain, led me to the breaking point. Wondering drunk and stoned through a completely unfamiliar neighborhood in an unfamiliar town, begging for the life of my father and to be reunited with my missing soulmate, I unintentionally stumbled onto the sprawling lawn of a local church and found myself gazing up at a giant cross adorning the front of the church. I instantly and without hesitation dropped to my knees, weeping openly, begging God to help me make it through.

It was then that I set out on the one path leading to a relationship with the One, God, which then led me a couple of years later to a personal relationship with the one Christ.

No similar stories.