The first time I remember my dad getting mad at me he called
me a "son of a bitch" after I was being a sore loser from a board
game. I was somewhere below 3rd grade. I still remember his face and his
pointer finger extended out at me.
On the outside, I was just like any other kid growing up.
Generic. I played sports, video games, hung out with friends and was generally
interested in young boy things. But I was also different. I think a large
amount of that was my desire for adventure. That desire always lead me to
getting into trouble and being punished by my Dad all the time. Sounds like any
other kid right? But the way I believed I was being treated sent me down the
wrong path. I truly believe I created a demented world and I believed I was the
only one apart of it. I have never met someone like me. You know how people say
they are just like their best friend? Yeah I've never had that. I've wanted
that, but I haven't met another man like me. Sometimes I like that. But
sometimes I hate it. There's a lot of experiences that have influenced my
worldview. For example, my Dad has always been really hard on me so I tend to
be really hard on other people. It made relationships difficult because I
demanded so much from others; all because I felt like I was doing the same for
them. It made me lose hope in other people so I felt like I was alone in this
world.
Anyways back to my story. I grew up in a house that went to
a Methodist church and attended a Sunday school before worship. We did what a
lot of people do at church; go through the motions. I say that because the only
times I heard the Word being taught was at church. I was baptized as an infant
and later went through confirmation. I attended the same church from the age of
six until I left for college. My parents still go to that church.
I remember my dad talking to me about God a few times. The
earliest I can remember was a time when I was upset because I wanted to play
with friends and my dad started counting on his fingers. He said God comes
first, then family, then school, and then friends. Besides that time, the only
times my parents talked to me about God was when I was in trouble or it was a
Christian holiday. I spent my childhood going through the church motions and
saw a lot of lukewarm Christians claim the role but not act the part. There was
never a strong spirituality in my life so I learned to believe in what I wanted
to believe.
I decided at a young age that I am given one life on this
earth and my time here should be filled with every experience this world has to
offer. I was everything worldly. Eighth grade was the first time I smoked pot. I
squared up with a few kids and dropped them bare knuckle boxing. I wanted to be
a bad boy. By this time I was hanging out with the wrong crowd. We were doing
all the things that would make us feel like we weren't just middle school kids.
This is also when the stealing began. I was the biggest daredevil when it came
to stealing. We would go into the 7-11 down the street and see who could steal
the most stuff. We mainly did it to show off to friends and for the adrenaline
rush. I was eventually busted for smoking pot because my friends were caught. I
lied until I couldn’t lie anymore. My parents eventually got everything out of
me. It took my dad spanking me and throwing me around to do it though. It was
the first time he made me bleed. I hated him for it but it was in good
intentions. I never got anything I didn't deserve, but I know there were better
ways to handle things like that; I was 14-15 years old. I remember going into
my room that night and laying in bed and crying to myself. I remember thinking to myself "no one
loves me" and I believed it. Immediately, I felt something come over me that
I can't quite explain. It felt like a cold breeze had passed my body causing me
to feel tingly and I knew it was God. I knew he was saying "I love
you". That is one of the earliest times I knew God was real. But I was so
wrapped up in my ways that I didn't give him a chance. I was chasing the bad
boy image and I didn't have room for God.
My parents found the stash of gum I had stolen and made me
return it to the man I stole from and he chewed me out. That was justice. Right
before the stealing and the drugs blew up, I burned down a city trashcan with
my best friend and we got 6 months probation for it. So I was on probation and
grounded for what seemed like forever. I entered high school with no real
friends since I couldn't hang out with my old ones.
Ninth grade was a lost year. I didn't really do anything in
my life. My grades sucked and that was about it. I did get in another fight
that year. I fought a kid because he thought he could beat me up. So I
challenged him to a fight and he came to school the next day with 22 stitches
and a fat upper lip. I loved it. On top of that the recession hit when I was in
high school and my dad lost his job. Long story short, things were tense
throughout high school. When I was in ninth grade my dad made me get a job. The
first job didn’t give me 40 hours so I had to get a second. The next thing I
knew I was working 55 hour weeks and none of my friends had jobs. I got jealous
of their time off and did the whole "why me God" gig. I was also
really lonely. I had terrible relationships with my parents and my brother. I
felt as if I had nowhere to go for a safe haven. I was so focused on this world
that instead of searching God out to comfort me, I blamed him for my position.
In tenth grade the fighter reputation started to take hold
and I welcomed it. I had no fear because I thought I was invincible. I felt
like there was nothing else I could lose. I beat up two more kids that year and
it elevated my popularity. I used the beating of other human beings to elevate
my own status. I started to get into drugs and partying again and it was fun
for awhile. I felt like I was making new friends but eventually it all came
crashing down again. My parents found out and I was put on lockdown again. My
dad and I got into it again and it was rough. I can't remember any good
conversations in my high school years with my dad. I am sure there were some
good conversations, but the bad always outweighs the good. I was also a very
angry individual my whole life. Satan definitely chooses to use anger to cause
me to sin. So whenever I did get in these fights with my dad, I would always
blow up and make everything ten times worse.
In tenth grade, I met a girl and began to like her. She and
I acted like boyfriend and girlfriend but we weren't official and it was
because I had commitment issues. She "cheated" on me with another guy
and it hurt, but it didn’t hurt as much as my jealousy of the other guy. I
actually got mad at him instead. It also made me have even worse commitment
issues. And I could see it in my future relationships. So I ended tenth grade
just like eighth grade. No friend real friends and being grounded.
This is the period of my life where I made some more
decisions. I was working at a Taco Bueno, the economy was in the gutter, I felt
like I had no friends, and I believed in my heart God was not there for me. I
made a decision that I would fix all of these problems by getting good grades,
going to college and landing a good job and make a lot of money. Then I would
be happy. So that's what I did. I turned my C's into A's and I started
grinding. I changed the group of friends I had and started hanging out with
good kids (in part because I was tired of getting ripped off by the bad kids).
Neither group of friends knew Christ. This was my junior year. A step in the
positive.
Senior year started out same old same old. I was on the
football team but I never played. Boy is that humbling, not being a starter on
the high school football team. Conveniently, the starters are also the coolest
kids in school. Jealousy was rampant and I asked God why he made nothing about
me stand out to others. Besides blaming God for my problems, I was making good
grades and was accepted to Texas Tech; I had bigger things I was focused on. I
got a girlfriend and at this point in my life I was still feeling really
lonely. I used to lay in bed begging God to give me a girl, just because I
wanted to be loved by somebody. So when I got this girl, I felt blessed.
Now I am usually a very stubborn man. And when I have my
mind set on something, I don't change it. But when you are with a woman, your
mind can be changed very easily. I remember we were laying on my couch and I
asked her if she wanted to remain a virgin until she was married. And she told
me no, she didn’t plan on it. And it hit me hard. I don't consider myself to
have ever walked with God at this point in my life, but for some reason I
wanted to wait until I was married to have sex. In these types of situations I
would always consider two options. What the world told me and what I believed
in my heart. I chose to do what the world told me to do most of the time. I was
trying to be the bad boy.
I ended up losing my virginity to her. I tried justifying
it. I argued with myself that I was going to college and would be sleeping with
many girls because that's what you do in college! Well, that's what I believed.
I broke up with her before college just like we agreed to when we started going
out. I acted as if I had no soul.
I joined a fraternity when I went to Texas Tech. I was in
Delta Tau Delta, a top fraternity that was not mild in any category. Everything
you could imagine happened there. I remember during pledgeship, as I was
getting hazed, I was so thankful for being there. I felt like my pledge
trainers were my father. I don't know why, I guess it's because I wanted their
approval and to get in the fraternity. So when they held me accountable and
tried to teach me how to be a man, I listened. In college I was a super
outgoing guy and the reason I became so outgoing is because I worked at it. I
forced myself to look people in the eye, I practiced speaking and presenting
myself. I talked to myself in the mirror. I was still searching for acceptance.
I still wanted to be a part of something bigger than myself. I was still
lonely.
College was no better than high school. I switched from
breaking all the rules and fighting to partying and sinning sexually. I had
girlfriends but I had so much baggage from my past that it always came to the
surface and was a large part in the failure of those relationships. I only
sought God out during the hard times and was never thankful when he blessed me.
I still believed I was going to make myself happy by chasing what I wanted.
In the summer after my sophomore year I was hired to work
for Halliburton, an oil and gas service company, in the oil field. That meant
long hours in the middle of nowhere on frac jobs. I had a girlfriend but it was
only being held together because we were afraid to be alone. I picked up a
book, "The Man in the Mirror" and read it that summer. And the verses
used in the book really helped slip the thought of God into my life. When I got
back to college, My girlfriend and I broke up and I was partly devastated and
partly relieved. So it did not affect me too much, but I did one thing to get
over it. I got drunk every weekend. Between partying on the weekends and
studying during the week, I knew there was "something" missing and I
knew what I was doing would not fulfill it. I remember coming home from a
finance exam and just breaking down. I realized how amazing grace was and was
so joyful. All I could do was just sit in my room and cry. I knew what that
"something" was.
The hardest thing about changing your ways is the changes
you have to make and the fear that changing your ways means you'll be missing
out on something. My life, my friends, and what my friends did on the weekends
was surrounded by sin and I couldn't get away from it. So time and time again I
felt myself getting sucked back into the same sin natures. Chasing what my
flesh desired.
In the last two months of my junior year I got a new
girlfriend. We acted like we were married the night we met. Nothing in me
changed. We became a couple and I left a month later to work for an energy
company in Houston. Before I left, she revealed to me that she didn't believe
in God. I was ashamed of myself, was I that far from a Christian that I make a
girl my girlfriend and not even check to see if she is a Christian?!? I
immediately knew I would not be marrying her and broke up with her a month
later when I couldn't handle the huge difference in our lives. I happened to be
living with another intern that summer whom I did not know and was also working
at the same company. His name is Jarrod.
Jarrod is a believer and was a very cool guy to hang out
with. He was not influenced by my desire to go out and party and I did not go
out that summer very much because of that. Some of that was due to us working
on the weekends and I was afraid something might happen that jeopardized my
internship. Instead we would go fishing and do things of that nature. He also
convinced me to start going to church. I was growing closer to God here in Houston
and I was enjoying it. Jarrod also gave me a book, "Wild at Heart"
which I read and responded very well to. It got me pumped up for Jesus because
I strive to be a manly man and in his book he identifies how men of the faith
should act. As a side note I wish I could be a man like John Wayne or William
Wallace from Braveheart. Those are the types of men I pretended to be as a
child. The book was very eye opening to a guy who only heard of Jesus as the
guy that loved everyone and liked holding little kids.
When the summer ended I returned to Texas Tech for my senior
year. I moved back into the same house with the same roommates and hung out
with the same guys. Guess what happened, I fell right back into the same road I
was traveling down before. I felt like that was all that I could do! It's what
everyone else I knew was doing. But I knew it was wrong and I decided I would
do both. I'll party but I'll also worship the Lord. So that's what I did. I
went to a men and women's Bible study on Wednesdays and on Thursday I
worshipped with Cru. I took the M:29 class with Cru and also had the
opportunity to meet with an older guy as a mentor type figure for my last year
at Tech. But the weekends didn't change. I did the same things that I had done
the previous 3 years and I thought it was okay. I was hedging my fear of
missing out by trying everything.
I ended up graduating from Texas Tech in May of 2014 not
being very much different from the person I was when I started at Tech. My
heart was still chasing my own desires but I knew there was something more. I
moved in with Jarrod as we started our jobs in Houston. We started to go to
church together at a nondenominational church. It was called Bayou City
Fellowship. It was a smaller, new and
young church that I really liked. It had worship services but did not have
Sunday school classes and Jarrod and I made a habit of just going to service
and then going home each week. What I wanted was a community in Houston and I
wanted that community to be a fellowship of believers. I decided to start
searching for other churches and began attending St. Luke's United Methodist
church. They were the same denomination as the church I grew up in and the same
format. I was able to go to Sunday school and then worship. I attended that
church for a few reasons. None of which seemed to be the right ones. The
teachers of the class, who were my age, would read lessons they probably got
off the internet and read 15 minutes before class. I wasn't learning. During my
attendance at St. Luke's I knew some other people that lived in Houston and on
two separate occasions I was told I should check out Houston's First Baptist
church.
Now let's backtrack a little bit. During the time I was
attending Bayou City Fellowship and St. Luke's I was also hanging out with the
only people I knew in Houston, my party friends from Texas Tech. So Friday and
Saturday I would go out and then go to church on Sunday mornings. It worked for
the time. This is what happened from June of 2014 to June of 2015.
In June of 2015, I had another moment in my life where I
made a decision. I had many things going on that just broke me down. I was
working long hours at my job and placed my security in the time I spent at
work. I was in a sexually immoral relationship with a girl that was only held
together by our physical connection. And the only friends I had were the ones I
partied with on the weekends. I was living a life that did not truly satisfy
the void in my heart and I finally acknowledged it to God. I was tired of pursuing
things that didn’t matter. I knew the only way something would change would be
for me to stand up in my passiveness. I knew God was reaching out to me.
I asked Jesus to come into my life and I finally grasped the courage I needed to
stop choosing a life that had no meaning. I made a decision in that summer of
2015 that I was not going to let the world influence my choices. Instead I was
going to rely on God to watch over me. Every time I made a life altering
decision, I had chosen what my flesh wanted. Time and time again I was giving
into what the world wanted me to be. I was done with the old me and I decided
to give my heart to Christ and pursue him. I stopped the partying and the other
sin natures that I was once so eager to chase and I replaced it with prayer,
reading my bible, and begin the search again for a Godly community.
I decided to try out Houston's First and showed up one
Sunday in June to the men's Bible study "Just for Men" because it
would be a good place to begin a search for community. I was the first one
there and different men began to come in. The average age was 40-50 until a
younger man walked in, it was one of the friends who recommended Houston's
First! After the Life Bible Study ended he told me that next week I should try
a class called "1:14" which was short for John 1:14. I attended the
next week and have not stopped attending since.
There is another way to live life and it will make all the
difference.
