A Pastoral Word Before You Read

This testimony is offered as a single, complete story. It does not require familiarity with my other writing, nor does it ask the reader to agree with every conclusion drawn here. It is simply a witness to what can happen when resistance gives way to surrender, and when God meets a person in places they never would have chosen. If you are reading from a place of struggle, grief, or weariness, take your time. Read only what you are able. Nothing here is meant to rush you, persuade you, or demand a response.

From Exile to Eden

A Story of Recovery

Prologue — The Far Shore

Today, I am happy, joyous, and free in sobriety.
But my journey here was anything but easy.

For years, I tried to escape addiction through understanding. I believed that if I could think hard enough, analyze deeply enough, or gain enough insight, I could break free. But in the end, addiction does not respond to intelligence. It responds to surrender.

Instead of deliverance, I lived through a long, grinding cycle—brief seasons of progress followed by collapse. Again and again, I returned to the same place, confused and exhausted by my own inability to change. Over time, I came to understand a truth that still humbles me: I am powerless over this condition. Every day, I must ask for the willingness to do whatever it takes to remain sober.

The Big Book says it plainly:

“The source and center of all my problems is selfishness.”

That sentence dismantled me. I had always thought selfishness meant wanting too much or caring too little. What I began to see was deeper: my life was governed by self-will. I trusted my own thinking to save me, even when it repeatedly failed. Until that will was surrendered, nothing truly changed. Only a spiritual experience—not an intellectual one—could bring lasting freedom.

I had spent years wanting relief, not transformation. I wanted the pain to stop. I wanted the shame to fade. I wanted life to feel manageable again. Even my early desire for recovery was centered on myself.

What had to change was not just what I was asking for, but why I was asking at all.

Part I — The Illusion of Control

For much of my life, fear shaped the way I moved through the world. My childhood home was unpredictable, marked by anger and tension that kept everyone on edge. I learned early how to retreat inward, how to self-protect, how to find relief wherever I could. I turned to a fantasy world where I made all the rules, a place where I was never wrong.

What began as coping eventually became captivity.

Each time I promised myself I would never return to old patterns, I meant it with sincerity. With each repeated failure, the weight of disappointment grew heavier. I was not simply breaking promises—I was reinforcing the belief that something was fundamentally wrong with me.

In my marriage, secrecy wasn’t driven by a belief that I could get away with anything. It came from shame. It wasn’t that I feared my wife would leave if she ever found out. I believed I deserved abandonment. What I feared was that full exposure would confirm what I already suspected about myself.

Looking back now, I can see how distorted my thinking had become. I lived as though every interaction revolved around me—my needs, my fears, my internal turmoil. I moved through life impaired, unaware of how deeply that impairment affected everyone around me. My vision was bent inward; I was present in body but often absent in attention, patience, and care, correcting, controlling, and withdrawing without realizing how much of myself was missing in the process.

When I was younger, I was often compared to who I should have been, rather than seen for who I was. It took years for me to realize that I was not created to be someone else. I was created to be me—and something in me had gone terribly off course.

Even moments that felt like confession or progress were incomplete. When I finally named my struggle out loud in a faith setting, the response was quiet, unremarkable. At the time, that felt devastating. Now I see it as mercy. God was at work beneath the surface, unconcerned with spectacle, always working within His time.

I entered recovery spaces more than once convinced that insight alone would be enough. When early progress came easily, I mistook momentum for healing. I believed I was different.

I wasn’t.

Part II — From Living to Alive

On February 28, 2023, my world changed in ways I could never have imagined.

For a long time before that day, I knew my hidden life would eventually come into the light. I had tried many ways to escape its grip—books, conferences, counseling, twelve-step groups, fasting, prayer. And yet, despite all of it, I never made the changes required to truly walk in freedom. I accept full responsibility for that.

I lived with a constant inner fracture. I hated the life I was living, and I hated myself for being unable—or unwilling—to stop living it.

I knew my actions were sinful. I knew they did not honor God. I knew they caused harm. Over time, that life eroded nearly every part of my spiritual walk—my prayer life, my time in Scripture, my worship, even my trust in God. I could see it happening. I hated it. But I could not stop.

I was painfully aware that my choices were hurting my wife—the first person I had ever truly loved. I admired her faith and was often challenged by it. I wanted to give her everything she deserved, yet my actions contradicted my words. That contradiction caused damage I could see but felt powerless to repair.

I knew I was also failing my children. My attention was divided between pursuing relief and fighting myself. In that conflict, I missed moments I can never reclaim. I once dreamed of raising children who loved God deeply, and I watched pieces of that dream slip quietly past me.

Shame settled deep. There were moments when despair felt overwhelming, when I could not see a way forward. What kept me from giving up was not strength, but love—and the knowledge that my absence would only deepen the harm already done.

The week before my arrest, something shifted. I entered a season of sobriety that would continue, though I did not yet understand what it would cost. I waited, cautious, unwilling to trust myself too quickly.

Then came the arrest.

And suddenly, I had time.

Part III — Exile

Cold was my first constant companion.

They said it was for health reasons. Whatever the reason, I was cold all the time. The kind of cold that settles into your bones and never quite leaves.

Booking was sterile and disorienting. Fear narrowed my thinking until there was room for little else. Everything was unfamiliar. Every sound felt louder than it should have been. Time lost its meaning.

After hours I couldn’t measure, I was moved into a holding cell. It was large in theory, but not in practice. There was space for a dozen men to sit, yet far more than that were crammed inside. The surfaces bore the marks of years—layers of paint, stains that never quite disappeared. A toilet sat in the corner, uncovered, accompanied only by a small partition suggesting privacy. The lighting was poor. Cameras watched from above. I slept on the floor for two nights with no blanket, no pillow—just the clothes I had been arrested in. And the cold.

Fear never fully left. I had heard stories about jail. Some proved exaggerated. Others did not. I didn’t know who anyone was or why they were there, and my mind filled in the blanks with worst-case assumptions. I reminded myself constantly to stay quiet, to stay observant, to avoid attention.

One question echoed through the room again and again: “What are you here for?”
It terrified me. I answered vaguely, careful not to invite further conversation.

The noise was relentless. Concrete walls, steel benches, hard floors—every sound bounced back amplified. Men raised their voices just to be heard, then raised them again to be heard over the echo. Conversations overlapped, repeated, collided. And underneath it all, the cold.

Music, which had offered my only refuge from addiction, was now painfully absent. I used to joke that ninety-eight percent of my brain capacity was filled with song lyrics. Suddenly, I was unable to recall a single line from any song. This added unimaginable weight to my fear and loneliness. It forced me deeper into prayer. “Oh God, give me a song.” It took two full days before a single chorus returned:

“Hold me Jesus, ’cause I’m shaking like a leaf.
You have been King of my glory.
Won’t You be my Prince of Peace.”
(Rich Mullins, “Hold Me Jesus”)

Over and over, I sang those words before His peace finally began to seep in.

Classification was my first small mercy. An older cellmate took the time to explain the basic rhythms of jail life—the unspoken rules, what mattered and what didn’t. His quiet guidance eased my fear more than he probably knew.

After nearly a week in jail, I was assigned to general population.

My first cell was smaller than my bedroom closet at home. Two steel bunks were bolted to one wall. A narrow desk at their foot. The sink and toilet shared the back wall. The door, with its large window, faced the toilet directly. Privacy did not exist. The uniform was thin—short sleeves, no jacket. I was still cold. Always cold.

The world grew smaller by the day. I learned the sky in fragments—thin slices visible only at certain angles. I missed the feel of grass beneath my feet, the quiet dignity of ordinary beauty. Even the language around me wore me down. Profanity filled the air like exhaust, constant and unavoidable, until silence itself felt holy.

Many of the men around me carried affiliations and histories I did not share. I kept my distance at first, unsure of where I fit or if I fit at all. They spoke a language—both spoken and unspoken—that I didn’t yet understand. Most had been incarcerated before. They knew the routines, the expectations, how to speak to officers, how to move through the day. I learned slowly—sometimes by watching, sometimes by missteps. Over time, as I adapted, I became less invisible and less afraid.

Occasionally, in the yard, a bird would fly overhead. For a moment, the entire space would change. Men stopped talking. Heads tilted upward. Freedom passed above us on wings, and for reasons I still can’t fully explain, that small, ordinary moment felt like grace.

Because I spent so much time reading my Bible, I began bringing it with me during free time. A few men noticed and started asking questions. Conversations followed. Then more conversations. Gradually, something like a small church took shape—not organized, not formal, just men searching for meaning in a place where meaning was hard to find.

Some began to look to me as a pastor, a role I knew well but no longer felt worthy of. Yet it became clear that God was not finished with me. That realization often left me awake at night, overwhelmed by the thought that He would still choose to work through someone with my past.

I was privileged to walk alongside men who were beginning to rediscover faith—or encountering it for the first time. Their questions pushed me deeper into Scripture. And God met me there, again and again.

It became clear that what I was learning was not only for survival inside those walls. These lessons would matter long after I left.

So I began to write.

Nearly every day, I wrote about grace, mercy, forgiveness, judgment, and love. I wrote as quickly as I could with the short, flexible pens we were allowed. Sometimes my fingers ached so badly I had to stop. But I kept writing.

Slowly, I became aware that something had changed. This was not a change from how I had begun reading Scripture in jail, but from how I had read it before I ever arrived.

I was no longer reading Scripture to prepare lessons for others. I was reading to listen—to hear what God was saying to me. What I didn’t expect was that these words, meant first for me, would also find their way to others. Grace, as it turns out, rarely stops where it begins.

My prayer shifted into something simple and honest:

Thank You for bringing me here where I can finally hear You.
I know You brought me here for a reason.
I don’t want to leave until Your purpose here is complete.

That prayer has never really stopped shaping me.

We were locked down nearly twenty-three hours a day. Two men, sometimes three, in a space barely meant for one. And nothing to do.

So I read. Twelve, sometimes eighteen hours a day. I read dozens of books, but I always returned to Scripture. Over twenty-two months, I read the Bible fourteen times. In the long silences of the cell, God spoke.

He showed me my sin.
He showed me His love.

I began to see that throughout all the years of struggle, He had never abandoned me. He had been carrying me—even when I did not know it, even when I resisted it.

My prayer life truly began in confinement. I prayed from a depth I had never reached before. What surprised me most was not how desperate those prayers were, but how focused they became. I did not pray for release. I prayed for wisdom, endurance, and clarity. I welcomed trials and difficulty as God’s agents of change, because I was desperate for that change.

I had always believed addiction was my greatest problem. Slowly, I came to see that it was not the root, but a symptom. My failures flowed from a heart that had resisted surrender for decades.

So I asked God to show me the full truth about myself.

That prayer marked the real beginning of my escape from exile.

Part IV — Eden in Exile

In response to prayers I had prayed for decades, God answered in a way I never expected.

Exile felt like punishment.
It felt like abandonment.
It felt like the end.

And yet, it became the place where everything changed.

The prophet Jeremiah once told exiles to build lives where they were—to plant, to grow, to flourish even in displacement. I began to understand that God was inviting me to do the same.

In that place, stripped of distraction and illusion, I encountered the presence of God in ways I never had before.

I found peace.
I found clarity.
I found myself.

What I once believed was evidence of abandonment revealed itself as rescue.

To find the presence of Christ in a place I feared most is a grace I still struggle to describe.

Epilogue — The Return

My addiction shaped who I once was.
My recovery is shaping who I am becoming.

I once believed God had left me.
Now I understand He was saving me.

Today, I live with these truths:

I am powerless—but not helpless.
Powerless—but not without choice.
Powerless—but never abandoned.

I seek a spiritual experience, not control.
I pray each day for willingness.
I return to grace, not because I am consistent, but because God is.

And by grace alone, I live sober today.

Happy.
Joyous.
And free.