I started to get in a lot of trouble in school fighting and stealing and was kicked out of every school I ever went to. By the age of 15, I had gotten another chance to go to the first school I was kicked out of, where I met the girl who is now my wife. I had straightened up a lot when I started dating her, but it wasn’t enough for me to get my life together. I was young and by this time had made a lot of so-called friends and was always in some kind of trouble. Before I knew it, my girlfriend became pregnant and had our first kid at age 16. I got into a lot of trouble with the court while she was pregnant for missing so much school. I then was sent to a di.erent school where I was finally kicked out again and from there, I had my mom sign me out so that I could get a job and move out on my own and become a “man”. I had no idea that the world would chew me up and spit me out the way it did time and time again. That led to heavier drug use and by the time I was 17 I was a full-blown drug addict doing pain and nerve pills daily. I was selling to support my habit and working on top of that, and nothing ever was enough. I became really good at living a double life for the longest time and nobody really knew how bad on drugs I was. They always knew I done something, but it kept me calm and out of trouble, so nobody ever intervened. By the time I was 18, I was a known drug dealer and was robbing people to support this habit that seemed to have taken my life. I ended up getting arrested for drug related charges and got put in drug court. I went on to complete drug court even though it took me longer than expected. A couple months after I completed drug court, I relapsed. This time was so much worse than what I was before I got sober. I had child #2 on the way, and started injecting drugs IV, one being suboxone. I was led to believe that suboxone wasn’t so bad and that even though I was injecting it, I convinced myself that as long as I wasn’t doing “hard stu.’ then it would be better than before. I was so wrong. The first time I tried to quit suboxone, the withdrawals were so severe that it made me go crazy and I became violent. I destroyed my apartment and ended up leaving and tried to do meth to stop from going back to suboxone. Meth grabbed ahold of me in a way that I didn’t expect. I had tried it when I was younger a couple of times but didn’t like it. However, when I tried it this time, I liked it so much that I learned how to make it. I was always paranoid, and I never stayed home. I was always hiding from my family and the only people I talked to were the people that I sold drugs to. I tried so many times to go home and when I would I was so hard to put up with that me and my wife couldn’t get along. I couldn’t stay there because of my kids and the way I was treating her. Deep down I knew I was no good for anyone. I had finally reached a breaking point and I stopped selling and making drugs and decided to go home. My wife was always the type that she would try to make it work, and I knew that, so I quit and decided it was best to go back to Suboxone. I went to the clinic, and it was so easy to get. 􀀀 I’ve done that for about seven or eight years. 􀀀 during that time, my wife, and I had some more children, and I eventually broke her enough to where she went down the road of addiction herself. She started o. using pain medicine, and I realized how easy it was for me to buy her a couple pills a day and control her life that way I could do what I wanted to. we were so broken and we’re always searching for something, but I didn’t know what it was. There was never enough drugs, nor money that satisfied. I was always in and out of jail, and never could break the vicious cycle that the devil had me bound in. The last time I went to jail in 2021, my wife went with me. we ended up losing all 5 of our kids. It felt like the worst thing that could possibly happen. The Lord had di.erent plans for our lives even though we couldn’t see it at the time. We got o.ered to go to a Christcentered treatment center􀀀 — Redemption Road and Hope City. I didn’t know what it looked like for me, but I did know that the life we were living couldn’t have been any worse. Thankfully, what time we were there and had time apart, we met the Lord. He saved us and delivered us from addiction and all the chains the enemy had weighed us down with. After we completed the program, we were ordered jobs at the facilities and God showed up in the court room and gave us custody of all 5 of our kids! We both deserve to be dead and in prison for the rest of our lives, but thankfully God had intervened and done such a work in us. He comes to work in our lives today, and he guides us daily to walk in His will.”