I was saved at the age of 12

I was saved at the age of 12 when my grandmother led me to Christ. But it wasn't until almost 20 years later that my faith in Jesus really took root after years of aimless wandering.

By the age of 14, my obsession with playing guitar had taken first place in my life, and I immersed myself in the world of secular rock music. At the time, I didn't really realize that I was backsliding. I really thought that playing rock music would bring me genuine fulfillment and was drawn in by the rock and roll fantasy to the point where I became fixated on it as a potential career path. Instead of worshipping God I had chosen to worship rock stars. As time went on, I eventually sought to emulate those rock stars & tried to live the same kind of hedonistic lifestyle that they glamorized.

I eventually began to smoke weed & drink alcohol on a daily basis. In my misguided mind, I thought of that as the path to enlightenment, and the smoking & drinking became inseparable from my music making experience. My behavior became more reckless. My problems with depression worsened. Jobs became harder & harder to hold down, and my relationships with family and friends began to suffer under the weight of my selfish, hedonistic lifestyle. Both depression & alcoholism run in my family, so I sort of thought that my lifestyle was inevitable. Without God in my life I was making bad decisions and was too stubborn to change, in spite of the good advice that family and friends would offer me.

I do believe that when we turn away from God He allows us to be deceived & there's no doubt that I was deceived. At the age of 24, I got into a DUI car crash while blacked out drunk & crashed into the back of a truck. By God's grace no one was seriously hurt, but I was eventually put on probation. While on probation I was unable to smoke or drink, so I ended up getting hooked on cough syrup because I figured I could get high without failing a drug test.

From there things went downhill. I was tripping every day, which led me to become irritable, angry and severely paranoid. My bizarre and unpredictable behavior led to me getting fired from my job & the band I was in at the time broke up. After months of paranoid delusions, I eventually had a psychotic breakdown, lashed out violently and got locked up in jail. Eventually, I was found to be Not Guilty by reason of Insanity (NGI) by the court and spent the next 2 years incarcerated in a state hospital.

It was during that first incarceration that I began to feel a desire to reconnect with God & my Christian faith. Being locked up gave me time to reflect on where I had gone wrong in my life, and I began going to Bible studies and also started reading God's Word on my own time, as well. When I eventually got hold of a radio I began to listen to Christian radio every day for comfort. I felt that God was bringing me closer to Him. But in spite of all He had delivered me from I backslid once I was transferred to a group home as part of a step-down program. I began to neglect my study of God's Word and even went so far as to study Buddhism. And when I was eventually allowed home to return to my hometown and live with my dad again I pretty much turned my back on God once again. I stopped praying. I put my Bible away to collect dust. And I stopped listening to Christian radio completely. I went back to my old way of life & put my sole focus back on playing in a rock band.

And when I was soon no longer under the supervision of the court, I relapsed within a month and went back to my hedonistic lifestyle of smoking & drinking, in spite of a full three and a half years of total sobriety. I was a fool to ever think that I could succeed without God in my life. I tried to pick up where I left off and basically just tried to forget all that I had learned in my spiritual walk of the previous 3 years.

It should come as no surprise that within less than 2 years I had another psychotic breakdown after I stopped taking my medication for 3 months; lashed out again while in a state of severe paranoia &and ended up back in jail. From there I was sent to another state hospital where I spent 5 months. It was during that second incarceration that I finally woke up to how real God is and how much he loves me in spite of my flaws. I began to notice the way God was working thru others around me to help me learn amd grow. I realized that I had caused so much damage in my life and the lives of those I love by turning my back on God. I had to learn the hard way that backsliding can have heavy repercussions and that I can only succeed when I have God 

Thru heartache and suffering my faith finally took root. But I realized that my own suffering is nothing compared to the suffering that Jesus endured on the cross for my sins. Over time I finally entered into a more intimate relationship with my Heavenly Father as I made more efforts to be obedient to Him.

Over the past two years I've been greatly comforted by listening to the Bible Broadcasting Network and its inspirational sermons. Also, I've learned a lot from committing time to reading the Bible daily and my prayer life has helped me make progress in my spiritual walk with Jesus. I've even made a conscious effort to listen to more faith-based music and less secular rock music in order to strengthen my devotion to my faith & filter out the negative, dysfunctional mentality that had led me astray for so many years. I still struggle with depression at times, but I'm learning to rely on God to renew my strength daily.