Christian was on a path of addiction and crime. His life had became a revolving door of treatments and relapse.

“I didn’t know how to live. Every time a stress would happen at work, I didn’t know how to deal with it. When someone close to me would die, I didn’t want to deal with that. When my wife tried to love me, I didn’t know how to deal with that, and I surely didn’t know how to show love to other people the way they deserved it. And it all came to a head last year.”

Despite his wife’s efforts to get through to him, nothing seemed to be able to stop the vicious cycle.

“My wife was gone. I had kicked her out and told her I wanted a divorce. She’s a great woman. She kept telling me how she didn’t want to see me die like this. She was tired of watching me do this to myself and didn’t want her or the kids to see me die like this. I told her, ‘I don’t want to hear you tell me about this anymore,’ and the whole time she just wanted me to do good.”

“I got tired of hearing her so she was gone, the kids were gone, they didn’t want to have anything to do with me. My family was gone, and I figured it’s not worth anymore, life’s not worth living and I ended up overdosing on methamphetamine.”

It was only then, with his life on the line, that his wife’s words finally took new meaning.

“My mother drove me to the hospital, and she was in the corner crying. I remember I was in and out of consciousness and it finally hit me: ‘I did not want to die like this.’ A couple of days later I went into the Teen Challenge program. I got there and I decided to surrender it all.”

This act of surrender to God was the beginning of a complete life change for Christian as he’s still clean and sober today and his family is back in his life.

Surrendering it all