Nov 18 to Nov 24, last year, was one of the darkest weeks of my life.

I was first made to fly from country to country in hopes of saving a relationship that was already destroying me. I was hurt, angry, humiliated, heartbroken, coming undone little by little and then all at once. I was upset at the world, upset at God, upset at myself.

I was provoking strangers in airports, moving reckless, and honestly wishing for somebody to hurt me, because I was already hurting that bad inside.

At the same time, my body was wrecked too. I was coming off of opiates after an emergency jaw surgery because my dental implants, from an old assault that happened to me, suddenly failed. I was taking Xanax to come off of the opiates. I was smoking crazy amounts of weed. I was drinking every single day.

By the end of that week, after the breakup fully consumed me, I ended up in a hospital in Chiang Mai, Thailand, needing emergency IV fluids, and my blood pressure was over 170/130. My pulse, resting, was over 150. My mind was gone. My body was collapsing. My spirit felt beyond repair.

The truth is, I still planned to keep going for a while after cleaning up a bit and then hopefully find some semi peaceful way to end my life somewhere without making a bigger mess of things.

That is how far gone I was. I was ready to die, fully.

Then by the grace of God, the very next day, I’m walking in some random park I had never been to before and I see two men having coffee. I say hello to them and ask them what they are doing there.

That was it.

And those two random strangers ended up being part of a fellowship that invited me in if I wanted to be part of it.

No strict requirements, no force, not even an ask to come back or mention of a penny.

And they loved me, fully, while I was still learning how to love myself again, or maybe learning for the first time ever what it truly means to love myself.

I started going to two or three meetings a day with them. I took every single suggestion they gave me, even the ones that I thought were too much. I read the books. I listened to their stories. I shared mine. I cried hard.

I felt pain deeper than I had ever let myself feel through all the healing work and therapy I’ve done the last years. And I was not judged. I was not kicked out. I was not told I was too much. I was met with people who had lived it too. People who understood addiction, pain, loss, shame, self destruction, and people who had a real plan to get better because they’d been working that plan themselves.

So I worked that program like my life depended on it... because it did.

Slowly my insides started changing. Not overnight. Not in some movie scene. Slowly. Day by day. Meeting by meeting. Prayer by prayer. Tear by tear. Choice by choice.

For me, the hardest trials in life always come through loss, a best friend getting killed, a girl leaving me, even transferring schools, cities, groups. Grief has a way of ripping open every single old wound in me.

And for a man with heavy childhood abandonment issues, institutional abuse since my young teenage years, deep seeded traumatic and violent events, and a fully rooted feeling of never really being enough, that kind of loss does not just sting. It can take me all the way under.

I’m 121 days in now, on something I’ve never tried before in my life.

Things are not magically fixed.

I still have wreckage from my past. I still have consequences. I still have uncomfortable feelings. I still have pain. I still have temptations to take an easier way and give into distractions and numbing of the mind. I still have things I’m facing that I wish I never created or had to go through.

And now, once again, I have been blessed by God to be put in a position to help other people the same way people helped me. I didn’t think I would make it here.

120 days may not sound like much to everybody else, and in truth, it’s not. I have a long way to go. But to me, this 121 means I survived one of the most dangerous seasons of my life.

It means God found me when I was gone. It means two strangers in a park helped save my life. It means pain did not get to finish me.

Blessed to still be here...
Grateful to be clear...
Recovery is possible.

All you have to do is want it.

And sometimes even when you don’t want it, God places in front of you another chance to save yourself. All you have to do is be willing to try it.

Why not?
You can always ruin your life again tomorrow.
Why not give today a shot?