|
|
|
|
Testimonies
Jeremy’s Testimony
My name is Jeremy. I am 22 and like many of the guys here I got mixed up in drugs and alcohol before I made it to the eighth grade. Growing up in Green Bay I wasn’t a criminal but at one point I had an altercation with a police officer in New Richmond, WI. After that I spent some time in St. Croix County Jail.
When I got out I ‘bounced’ around and ended up back with my mom for a little while. I was still into drugs and I hate to think about it, but my mom saw me overdose one day. She said, “This is killing me. You can’t stay here.” I ended up ‘bouncing’ from place to place and living in my car.
All at once I was fed up with the way I was living; tired of |
|
 |
being out of control. I turned myself in. I knew I needed help if I was going to live any kind of a life. After a time I found myself at Teen Challenge where I met a man by the name of John Hancock. He helped me and told me about the great things happening over at Midwest Challenge.
Since I have been living here I have been baptized and lived the longest time sober that I can remember. Everything is getting better. I am in school and doing well. My relationship with my mom is better than it has been in a long time.
Thank you everyone who has given me the chance to be a better person.
- Jeremy
Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten in God's sight. But even the hairs of your head are all counted. Do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows. (Luke 12:6-7)
Nick’s Testimony
I spent one day, twenty hours and ten minutes on a Greyhound from Los Angeles to Minneapolis. It was a long ride and I had a lot to think about, but it was not even close to as long as it will take to get to where the Lord wants me to be.
I was about ten months old when my dad committed suicide leaving my mom and my older brother and me to find our way. It would be years before I would understand that it was because of my father’s addictions to drugs and alcohol that he crossed that line and decided to end his life.
To find a new life for the three of us, my mother remarried and we moved with my step-father to California. There my brother and I realized that we had inherited not only our father’s musical talent, but the addictive nature that all too often accompanies the lifestyle of a musician in Los Angeles.
My brother and I loved to jam with the guys we grew up with. I was blessed with the passion for music that my father’s brothers have. Drugs weren’t always around, but increasingly they made their way to as many jam sessions as our instruments.
Joe Perry of Aerosmith described the path we were on when he said “We were drug addicts dabbling in music rather than musicians dabbling in drugs." I am still alive to quote him, my brother was not so fortunate. A few years ago he disappeared from a rehab facility and was found dead of an over dose. That was when my path turned severely and after a series of arrests, a life of dealing, stealing and self destruction I found myself homeless on LA’s Skid Row.
I spent some time sober only to lose control when I found out that a girl I had been seeing aborted a child we both assumed to be mine. I recall standing over a barbecue at a party for a friend in L.A. with a stolen bottle of vodka in my hand. My next recollection was of waking up in a hospital bed about a mile away from where I had stood with the bottle. Thinking that I was a victim of some sick joke that my friends were playing on me, I got up and ripped the IV out of my arm and walked out. I walked the mile back to my friend’s place. When he opened the door I cursed at him for playing the joke on me. His response was, “Dude, feel the back of your head!” When I did as he said, I felt the staples that were holding my scalp together. The night before apparently didn’t end where my memory did. I had fallen and split my head open in the middle of a nearby street and was taken to the hospital by officers who could not arrest me because I was on a private road.
Getting off of the bus and feeling the frigid Minneapolis air woke me up a little more to the reality that I survived against many odds and hurdles I created myself. The staples were still there, but soon my head would heal and I knew it was time to heal the rest of me.
I am here at Midwest Challenge now. I am safe, warm, fed and thankful that the Lord has given me the opportunity to live my dad’s dream of continuing music and living a life he would have wanted for me.
- Nick
“But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, And by His scourging we are healed.” Isaiah 53:5 |
|
|
