“remember that time” is my pile of word-stones, my alter of remembrance-narrative for the burning-bush, parted-seas and manna-from-the-sky moments.

FALL 2012: I was taking a mini-term on “social entrepreneurship” in my final semester.  This was a reflection assignment that turned into a snapshot of an important season in my life. 

I ask, while I attempt to articulate my experience, that you hear beyond my words and understand my heart.  My inability to clearly express my experience may, as I’ve seen in recent communications, be perceived as blunt and sometimes harsh.  But please know that the pace of this broken and lame, cynical sinner attempting to newly walk in stride with the Lord is not smooth or graceful, but rather a clumsy tempo punctuated with many missteps and stumbles.

At the beginning of the week we were asked if we came into that moment with any preconceived ideas, any unmentioned bias.  I certainly am not in a place where I’m comfortable sharing my experience in front of a classroom of people, but in the spirit of transparency and authenticity, I will, in abbreviated version, tell that story now.

I am a recovering alcoholic and addict with a little over 10 months sobriety.  These past 310 “one day at a time’s” out of addiction were incredibly painful and difficult, but nothing compared to the desert that was my life leading into that dependence.  In January of 2006, I bought a one-way ticket to NYC, dropping out of college, leaving my friends, family and faith behind, running 3000 miles in the opposite direction of everything I knew.  I prided myself in my own self-sufficiency and newfound freedom.  For the better part of those six years, I turned off my soul and chased the desires of my sinful heart.  Ironically, I was pretty successful at most things I put my mind to.  I rose up in the ranks at my job, eventually achieving autonomy and the unfailing trust of my employers.  I started and ran my own business, building a pretty solid reputation with many exciting opportunities on the horizon.  I had money in the bank, a great apartment, great friends and was having a great time.  But to maintain this relentless routine, I found myself becoming increasingly dependent on uppers, downers and in-betweeners to perform appropriately at any given moment.  Somehow I rationalized that it was acceptable as long as I was working hard, secretly joining the ranks of a surprisingly massive population of delusional, white-collar, corporate addicts who party all night and still get to work at 8am.  I had just discovered my favorite enhancement “cocktail” when the tower of cards came tumbling down.  And I fell with them to the bottom, very quickly and very hard.  The lies I had weaved, particularly with my employer, quickly became untangled and I was given a bottom line: jail or rehab.  So, in December of 2011, I humbly accepted their overwhelmingly merciful offer and went to rehab.  After 28 days of open-heart surgery, I moved home with a massive, ugly, angry emotional scar.  I lost everything: my job, my business, many friends and my dreams.  Also dealing with a long overdue psychological diagnosis, the first couple months of sobriety were full of prescription ‘pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey’ attempts, self-pity parties, angry outbursts and painful regrets. With a severely under-whelming enthusiasm and literally no idea where I was headed, I took the next closest step and decided to re-enroll in school and finish something I started nearly 10 years ago. I had begrudgingly resigned myself to a penance for my past: the imminent world of suburbia, a pointless, paper-pushing 9 to 5 and the end of any glamorous dreams of personal glory.  But slowly, despite my best efforts to analytically refute it, the Lord softened me to hear, see and feel his divine pursuit of my heart.  Truth began to find its way into my mind and I began to see the ruse of the circumstantial world I had built for what it was: sometimes beautiful and personally beneficial, but ultimately not the path the Lord had made for me.  There was a minimal level of renewed faith, but still an intense anxiety over my future: the future of completing what I hated to admit was probably a pointless degree, the future logistics of a job, bills and a mountain of debt, the future of my non-existent social life and singleness, the future inside my chemically unbalanced and newly medicated mind, etc.  All of that to say, I came into this semester and more specifically, this fall break mini-term with a crushingly divided and confused agenda.

Having been out of the traditional classroom for six years as an online student, the first day of class was filled with trepidation.  I hated the initial introductions and my lame cover story.  After everyone spoke, I felt like I needed to backtrack and prove why I was just as legitimate, despite being an 7th year senior.  So I was already feeling wildly insecure when Mr. Porter* came to speak (*attorney who started a non-profit to use legal tactics to ‘take back’ the neighborhoods in East Dallas from drug lords and pimps).  Always the cynic, I asked him if he did any research or had information on who precisely were the inhabitants of these shanty homes he was shutting down and were there any intermediary organizations that he partnered with to get them help.  His reply was that they simply worked very closely with the Dallas Police Department.  Upon further prodding of the efficacy of simply eliminating the “home base” but not the “ballplayers” he said, “when roaches scatter, they usually don’t all come back up together…they may come back, but in far less percentage”.  I was horrified, to say the least. The Lord so graciously and miraculously delivered me out of that hell before I had to resort to extreme measures to feed my addiction.  But I went to and in-patient rehab and lived amongst, loved on and formed relationships with women that did indeed sell their bodies and all manner of other awful things to survive.   At that point in their lives, survival was not just food and water: the need for drugs surpassed even that of nutrition.  Many of those broken women went to jail and never received an ounce of healing or rehabilitation there.  I could have gone to jail!  I should have gone to jail! I broke the law, multiple times over months and months.  But instead of filing charges, my bosses showed mercy and sent me to rehab.  But these women had nothing.  They have even less when someone looks at them as scum, a stain on the fabric of the community or a bug underfoot. So that day I went home, feeling like a roach.

My insecurity morphed into a mission on day 2.  I had pegged this week as a test in endurance: shut my mouth, keep my head down and make it through.  Honestly, I was probably focused more on the anxiety of how to make it through the morning without a cigarette than anything else!  The less I was able to isolate and the more vulnerable I felt, the more I over-compensated.  Feign interest, act engaged, play the part!  And then we got to Bonton* (*small low-income, crime-ridden neighborhood in East Dallas).  All the pretense and perceived judgment I felt fell away.  I felt among friends.  And I clued in.  As the men* (*former addicts, drug dealers, crime bosses, etc.) told their stories, I was held in complete rapture. And more importantly, I looked around and so was everyone else.  They didn’t run away or turn their noses up at stories of drug addiction, rape or repeated incarcerations. They listened and cared and asked questions and stood for hours in genuine, spirit filled love.  And these men just gave their hearts away: they’re exposing their hearts to us in love, they’re offering their hearts to the community in service and they’re submitting their hearts to Christ in faith. Something happened there on that driveway.  The perfect love of God collided into my heart, saying:  You are forgiven.  You are loved. Do not hang your head in shame and regret.  You are worthy, by the power of the Holy Spirit through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.  And you have a purpose, not in spite of but because of your story.

So, needless to say, the rest of the week was a blur.  My head and heart completely exploded. The “Half the Sky” documentary on PBS ironically coincided with the course and it was amazing to see more incredible examples of how real people are testing and stretching the limits of their own ability to weave into the tapestry of others lives.  And finally, Bimnet’s* (*teacher’s assistant) lecture on Friday about finding the purpose God has given each of us culminated all of these things.  A couple phrases literally brought me to tears:

Its not about finding solutions, but finding Jesus in the problem.

Do what you can, using exactly what you have, exactly where you are.

You can be the hopeful.

Will you be the middleman?

This class didn’t just teach me about how I can be a part of changing the world.  This week led me out of my self-imposed darkness, and back into the presence of the God of the universe.  He’s given me salvation.  And He’s given me a story.  Now, I get to give Him my life.