The all important First Step

Principle 1 says: "Realize I'm not God. I admit that I am powerless to control my tendency to do the wrong thing and that my life is unmanageable."

Once my world came crashing down around me, this was actually a very easy step for me. God slapped me in the face and told me to wake up! I was about to lose the woman I am supposed to marry. I was losing my home. I was leading my 6 year old son straight to the Devil through video games and the media. I was putting my addictions over anybody else, including God.

I got the message loud and clear, either give it up or lose it all. Up until this time though, I had always fought God. I thought I was in control. I thought I controlled my own "destiny". I did have control to an extent, I had control over making things worse. Even to this day, I consider myself to be above average intelligence, but I used to be soooo cocky and rude about it. I thought everybody else was an idiot. I thought I knew everything and if you didn't agree with me you were wrong. It's a miracle anybody liked me at all. I was a jerk. Of course I had my good moments, but behind closed doors I loved to talk about and judge others. I still struggle with that today and pray daily for God to take those defects of character from me. I have to swallow my pride and remember I'm not in control. Everything I have belongs to God. Everything I do should be to honor Him. I don't need to fear this world or anything in it.

After 14 years of drug and alcohol abuse, God broke the shackles and freed me...and all I had to do was ask. He's waiting for you too...He loves you more than you'll ever be able to comprehend. No matter how far we stray, He's always waiting for us to come home and will accept us with open arms. All we have to do is ask.

I'm currently praying for my future mother-in-law to surrender. My fiancee has serious mother wound issues and her mother severely struggles with control and co-dependency issues. Her mother's identity consists of her 2 daughters and she seems to absolutely despise the rest of the world. There's a back story to all of that, but maybe I'll cover that another day. That's a loooong story. Bottom line is that my fiancee is finally getting help so that we may have a healthy marriage and she's finally learning about healthy boundaries. She had a talk with her mom last night and her mother seriously verbally abused her. She mentioned surrendering everything to God and her mom just lost it. There was a verbal attack towards my fiancee and God and basically her mom said she is in control of her own life and nobody can fix her problems but her. It's very sad but we will never stop praying for her. Anything is possible through Christ, I'm living proof of that.

So please take the leap if you're struggling in your life. If you are serious about it and are truly open to Him taking control, He will. It will be the best decision you've ever made. Feel free to reach out to me anytime. I would love to hear from old friends and new people as well. We are all on this journey together.

God Bless.

How I was saved by Jesus

So my experience of coming to Christ was truly the "lightning bolt" experience! I had been to church on and off as a kid, but my parents weren't really Christians and I pretty much only went when I spent the night over at a friend's house who went. Needless to say Jesus was never a priority in my life. I was very selfish, and judgemental and at 16, I started my journey of drugs and alcohol. Over the last 14 years I've abused drugs heavily and have also had major problems with alcohol.

At 17 my mom got transferred from Illinois down to Florida for her job. I went with her. This was the start of my "hard drug" addiction. I met the guy who lived across the street from me and we smoked a joint together the first day we met. Shortly into our "friendship" I was introduced to ecstasy...this was the start of a very severe downward spiral for me. Along with the ecstasy he introduced me to the rave scene. I've heard people say it's about the music and dancing, which is true to a degree, but it's really about the drugs when it comes down to it. Sure, there were probably a few people at the raves who weren't doing drugs, but the other 98% of the crowd were in a whole other world. I lived in Florida for 3 years and for those 3 years I did enough drugs to kill an elephant. It's only by the grace of God that I'm alive today. I've done just about everything I can think of except for smoke crack or inject anything into my veins. Ecstasy, heroine, coke, meth, acid, shrooms, special k, any and all types of pain killers, xanax, roofies, GHB...and the list goes on. Like I said, you name it, I've probably done it. I truly thank God that I'm here today. So after 3 years of that, and hopping from job to job, and sleeping around with countless women and doing a ton of other things that separated me from God, I moved to the Seattle area because my parents knew I was in trouble in Florida. I don't think the truly know everything I was doing, but they knew I was in trouble. My brother was out here with his family and had a good job in the cable industry so he offered to take me in and get me a job with him.

So I moved to the Seattle area in 1999. I lived with my brother doing cable and didn't really know anybody out here, so I didn't really know where to find any "hard" drugs at, but the pot smoking and drinking continued in full swing. My brother is a partier too so we weren't exactly a healthy combo for each other. We would pawn off cable jobs to other techs and meet up at a buddies house in the middle of the day and get trashed. Not good! So within 3 months of moving here I was introduced to my ex-wife. She was in the restaurant industry and if you're familiar with the restaurant industry, you know it's full of drinking and drugs. So my ex-wife and I hit it off immediately and for 3 years we partied, and partied, and partied some more. Then she got pregnant. Immediately we thought getting married was the right thing to do. We had already been having problems and had already split up and got back together by that point. We should NOT have been married, but we did it and we can't go back and change that. My son was born in June of 2002 and he is definitely one of the best things to ever happen to me besides my relationship with Jesus and my fiancee and future stepson. Well the marriage lasted about a year. We fought constantly and having a kid didn't fix things. So I've been divorced for about 6 years now.

Over those 6 years I've had a serious girlfriend here or there, but it's mainly been selfishness. I continued with my addicition mainly with pot and alcohol at this point. But if something came around like coke or pills, I would do them. But I smoked weed daily and drank like a fish. I had my son every weekend and never abandoned him, and we have a great relationship, but I was high on weed every day (he never saw that) and I was basically a zombie all the time. Sure, we did plenty of cool stuff on the weekend like the zoo and science center and all kinds of other stuff. But I definitely over-spoiled him and acted more like a friend to him instead of a dad. If we were home, we were doing nothing but playing video games. By the time he was 4 or 5 I had already made a video game addict out of him. I was letting him see mature games like Gears of War and thought it was ok because I was telling him that "this or that word is naughty". I was thinking he was an adult and could reason like one. I was leading him down the Devil's path and am not proud of that fact at all.

In August of 2007 I met my fiancee. I wasn't really honest with how much I drank or smoked weed, but she accepted me and fell in love with me anyways. She is a Christian but I never really took her seriously because she cussed, and I got her started on drinking again, and smoking cigarettes, and she even took a hit of weed with me a couple of times. We were also having sex and about 10 months into the relationship we moved in together. I was soooooo selfish. I wanted everything to be my way and wasn't willing to include her or her son into my or my son's life. We argued all the time. I started comparing her to my ex-wife. She tried many times to get me to quit the drugs and alcohol and come to church with her but I fought it tooth and nail. I've always been the "science guy" when it came to religion or spirituality. I always wanted physical proof that I could see, taste or touch. I criticized Christians and always thought Christianity was a form of "crowd control". I thought they were mindless sheep believing in something that didn't exist.

How wrong I was. After enduring as much as she could, my fiancee told me I needed to move out. At first I played the tough guy role and treated her like crap and acted like I didn't care. Then one day we had a huge fight and she told me that she would have done anything for me and that I really didn't know what I had in her. God really stuck those words in my head and I thought about what she said alot over the next few days. My heart changed and I decided by that point that I WAS out of control and she was the woman who I wanted to spend eternity with. The problem was she had already let go of me at this point. I had put my drugs, alcohol, son, porn, video games, TV, and just about everything else before her or her son. She had taken as much as she could take.

So this is the cool part, I know it took alot of reading to get here, but it's worth it. My fiancee's sister had given her a book called "More than a Carpenter" by Josh McDowell. This book forever changed my life. My fiancee knew I was the science guy and needed proof that Jesus did the things the Bible says He did. Well if you haven't read this book and have ANY doubts, this book will break down the facts for you. After I had read the book I asked Jesus into my life and immediately things started to change. That was just a couple of months ago in January 2009.

My fiancee had always been telling me about her church, so I went to their website and reached out to the head pastor, and was referred to my current sponsor, who is also a pastor at our church. He heads up the Celebrate Recovery program and invited me out. I had moved out of my fiancees place by this time and was living with my parents at 30 years old. I spent the first night just one on one with Drew, who is now my sponsor. I balled my eyes out and he assured me that God will be with me every step of the way and many great things were in store for me. It's amazing that as soon as I had accepted Jesus into my life my cravings for drugs and alcohol were gone. I just stopped and haven't had the urge to go back for a single minute.

God has shown Himself to me in supernatural ways that can't be explained. One example is when I went to buy my first Bible. I obviously had no idea what kind of Bible I was looking for, so the lady at the Christian store pulled 3 different kinds off the shelf and put me at a table and told me to glance through them and decide which one was going to best fit me. At this point, I wasn't really back together with my fiancee and I was in constant turmoil over worrying about losing her forever. This freaked me out, but when I sat at the table and opened the first Bible...the very first page I opened it to was a lesson on how we aren't to worry because it shows a lack of trust in God. If that wasn't God speaking directly to me, then I don't know what is.

My fiancee, although understandably skeptical, took me to church a couple of times and resumed talking with me. She saw that I was in the Celebrate Recovery program and saw that I had truly repented for my past sins and had completely accepted Christ into my life. I read my Bible daily and am growing in Him by leaps and bounds day by day. Staying away from drugs and alcohol hasn't been a problem and I've severed past relationships with people who are still into that lifestyle. I've been pressured and criticized, but I've never been one to really care what others say or think about me, so it really hasn't affected me.

Jesus made Himself known to me in a BIG way. He's changed me almost overnight. My fiancee still has a hard time grasping it sometimes and still asks herself, "Mike's really a Christian?". LOL...and the answer is a resounding yes! There were other supernatural events where God showed Himself to me, and I'll probably talk about those in other posts. But He did come into my life like a lightning bolt and has blessed me with soooooo much. I have a beautiful son who is 6, and is still adjusting to his "new" version of dad, but I will never lead him down the wrong path again and will do everything in my power to bring him to Jesus. I've also been blessed with a wonderful fiancee who listened to God and took me back and we are getting married on August 15th. Since we got back together we agreed to honor God by not having sex again until we are married and we are currently in an 8 week pre-marriage course through our church. On top of all that I've been blessed with her son, who is also 6. He has autism and has been put in my life for a reason. I'll talk more about him later as well. Now that I've been saved I really appreciate the little things God has blessed us with as well, like a roof over my head, food in the pantry, clean water to drink, family to love, a job, and a car that runs. Blessings pour out around us each and every day.

All things are possible through Christ. If you're reading this and are struggling with addiction of any kind, not just drugs, maybe it's anger or co-dependency. Whatever it is, He will take it from you. You just have to surrender it to Him and admit you're powerless and He will take it. That's the first step, and one of the hardest ones, but it will transform you into a new person if you are honest and faithful with our Lord and Savior. I thank God every day from saving me from Hell and I can't wait to meet Jesus face to face and spend the rest of eternity basking in His glory!

1st blog...Hello! This is me.

Hello all,



Well this is the beginning of what will hopefully be a long and wonderful journey. My name is Mike and I live in the Seattle area in the very green state of Washington. I'm starting this site to not only share my journey both past and present, but to learn more about myself and my recovery, and share all of this with others to hopefully lead them to victory over addiction through Jesus.

So a little about me and a bit about my past. I'm 3o and was born and raised in Illinois about an hour north of Chicago. At 16 I started drinking and smoking pot and from the start it was much more than casual use. I was an addict almost immediately and was expelled from school halfway through my senior year of high school for coming to school blackout drunk. This was the start of years and years (14 to be exact) of drug and alcohol abuse. I should probably be dead today, but obviously that wasn't God's plan. I've done just about every drug I can think of except for injecting anything with needles or smoking crack. My drug of choice was weed and ecstasy, but I would do anything I could get my hands on...in large quantities.

I will elaborate on my past more as time goes on, but for now I'll just say I was about as far away from God as one can get. Not only was I addicted to drugs and alcohol, I was addicted to just about every other worldly pleasure or behavior. Porn, video games, anger, co-dependency, among many more of Satan's vices were my addictions. It cost me a marriage in the past, and I was leading my 6 year old son down a very destructive path. I'm now with the woman who God intended for me to be with and will be getting married in August, and I'm proud to say that I finally found Jesus, and he has invaded my life and has taken control of my past hurts and hang ups and I am truly experiencing victory through Him. He is real and he loves each and every one of us. Even though I'm a relatively new Christian, he has blessed me with the gift of wisdom and I've really turned my entire life around in a very short time. I'm not all the way through the 12 steps yet, but I'm making great progress and am strong in the Lord.

Join me in my journey of recovery through Christ. The specific program I'm going through is Celebrate Recovery and it's a biblical based program. I look foward to sharing with old friends, and making new friends as well. All things are possible through Christ and nothing is too great for Him to conquer.