My Testimony

I don't think I've ever shared this on this platform before - I guess when I started this blog it was mostly for me...a place to put my thoughts so to speak. It very much still is that; there's no one telling me what to write (or not write) about and while I do try and keep the focus of this thing pretty narrow, it's up to me. Having said that - the blogger platform does provide me with some visitor statistics and so I can see that there are a good number a people who read this. Also, I occasionally share something I've written with someone else if it's pertinent to a subject we're discussing. So - I thought why not put my story here; if it helps you or inspires you, all praise to God. So here goes:

This isn't a story about my life - this is a story about the past six years of my life, and it involves the rest of my life. The scene is February of 2019. It's a cold night, I'm outside in my backyard (letting the dog out) and yelling at God. I'd done this before, but there was one difference about this night and that was that I was actually yelling out loud, at God, as opposed to just in my head. For many years, since probably 7th grade (?) I had struggled with one particular addiction. It started because I saw a Playboy magazine at some point as a kid, and I grew up, the internet grew up with me. I remember the days of a dial-up modem and AOL CDs. I remember the days before cell phones and remember the first time one of my friends had a phone in their car (I was in high school). So...as I grew up, the internet grew up and access to pornography grew up right along side the internet.

Over the years, I tried to hide it. Tried my best to manage it. Was scared to death of anyone finding out about it. Got married, thought that would change things. It didn't. Had various periods of time where it was less of a temptation and then other times when I felt powerless to resist. It seemed like an endless cycle of falling on my face, feeling guilty, praying, asking God to forgive me, white-knuckling sobriety for some period of time and then repeating the process again. Over and over and over and over and over. So I'm standing there in February 2019, having just fallen on my face, and I've had it. God knows how many times I had prayed for Him to take this away. And this was another one of those times, but I was angry about it and was letting Him know about it.

A couple of weeks went by and I got a text message from an acquaintance of mine. I say 'acquaintance' because this was someone I didn't really know. Us and our wives had been in a couples small group at one point, we rode in a car together to a men's retreat once, and I think I even helped this individual move at some point but this wasn't someone I hung out with on any kind of a regular basis...and he texts me and asks me if I want to be a part of a men's accountability group and we are going to be studying something called Cruciform Apocalypticism (??) and do I want to be a part of it. I'd love to say that I heard God audibly say, in that moment, "this is me answering your prayer" but I didn't. However, I knew in that moment that this was God's answer to my prayer and I think I responded 30 seconds later saying, "I'm in." Didn't know what I was signing up for, just knew that this was an answer to my prayer.

We started meeting together pretty soon after that and one of the aspects of the group was twice daily 'check-ins' - YES for maintaining sobriety and NO for not maintaining sobriety (let your "yes" be yes and "no" be no, Matthew 5:37). So we started doing that and in addition to that, we started digging into the aforementioned "Cruciform Apocalypticism". It's two five-dollar theological terms put together - all it means is "the Day of the Lord in light of (or in the shape of) the cross"...and really, it's not a school-of-thought or anything like that. John Harrigan was one of the teachers that we listening to at first, he had an audio series entitled, "Living in Anticipation of the Kingdom of God" (LAKOG) for short and it was simply an overview of Scripture, but in a different way than I had heard it before. It emphasizes sober discipleship and a 1st century Jewish perspective on scripture, which made a whole lot of sense considering the Bible was mostly written by and to Jews and Jesus and all of his disciples were Jews, etc (all stuff I'm talked about at length here on this platform).

So anyway - there are 4 of us in this group and throughout that late-Spring and summer, we met together weekly, studying this material, and checking in with each other twice a day. The first hallmark that something important was happening was deliverance. Deliverance from years of struggle against something I wanted nothing to do with. And not the white-knuckle freedom either, a real freedom, born through accountability and consistent fellowship and study. One thing in particular that we had been praying for was that God himself would help us separate what was true and false between what we had learned and were learning. To that end, everyone in the group had meaningful dreams that summer. I wasn't someone who put much stock in dreams, ever - but I couldn't deny that these dreams were meaningful to the men that had them. I was praying for a dream, but not for any other reason that it seemed like that was the way God had been speaking. A few months go by and no dreams. I had even opened up a page of notes on my phone so that in case I had a dream in the middle of the night, I wouldn't be fumbling for a place to go to write it down. I wrote something small in there sometime in August, but it didn't mean anything and I forgot about it.

Towards the end of September, I was frustrated (again). I mentioned to a couple of the other guys in the group that "hey, I want to have a dream, but I'm not getting it and dang it, that's frustrating!" We agreed to fast for a day and seek God and then meet before the normal weekly meeting. We sat down and they asked me what I was doing on a daily basis on my own in terms of prayer and time in scripture and I told them that outside of preparing for our group each week, I didn't have a daily habit, but that I was also getting crushed by life (full-time job, three young kids) and how was I going to add to that?? So we sketched out a plan to start a habit of daily scripture reading and prayer. Nothing all that remarkable. The meeting ended and the other guys showed up and while I was waiting, I decided to go and look at that thing I had written down in my "dream journal" from a couple of months earlier. Here is what I read:

"Just snippets, there was a crib and someone was talking about the teaching and they fell out of the crib."

"Someone was preaching/teaching and explaining Isaiah 40 or 41, can't remember exactly - they were explaining that the meaning of a word, towards the end of the chapter, starting with an "s" was referring to the Day of the Lord. Semayah or semanyah or something like that." 

I read this while sitting there and instantly felt my face get hot and the hair on the back of my head stand up. I rushed to look up Isaiah 40 to find out what it said, because I didn't know.

"Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow weary, and his understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint."

I was blown away because in that moment, I knew God saw me. It wasn't necessarily a gentle message either - it was a "stop being a baby and get serious, Adam" type message. Nevertheless - God heard me and answered my prayer...and I didn't even realize it for almost two months.

That word that I heard? My friend said it sounded alot like Shema. It's short for Shema Yisrael which is the holiest prayer in the Jewish prayer book (again, was not familiar with this in any way prior to this point in my life). It's text derives from Deuteronomy 6:4, which reads, "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength."

Do you see the tie between the end of Isaiah 40 and Deuteronomy 6? Shema Yisrael is a call to devotion to God, but Isaiah 40 tells us that it is God who will give us the strength to do it.

I also decided to look that word up just as I had typed it in my phone and was delighted to find that there are two Hebrew words that are close, "Shemaiah" and "Shmaya". The meaning of those words is the same: "God has heard". Wow.

My life changed, relatively effortlessly, the very next day. For 3 months straight, I read the Sermon on the Mount every day. I was getting up early to pray and read my Bible (that part wasn't effortless). I became annoying to those around me because all I wanted to talk about was what I was learning. And I started having a lot more dreams...a bunch that were meaningless, but some that were meaningful. For instance, I had a dream about this person I knew and in that dream, I was supposed to deliver a message. I ended up sending this person a Facebook message (because I didn't have any other way of contacting them) and told them that I had to tell them something that I been given in a dream, which was a REALLY weird way of starting a conversation with someone. We ended up meeting, I told this person about the dream and then they told me that I was third person to come to them with something like this. I said, "I don't know anything, but it seems like God is trying to get your attention." It was stuff like that.

Fast forward to January 2020 - I felt the need to confess to my wife which had always been one of my biggest fears. Don't get me wrong, I was afraid to do it, but felt like it was a necessary step. And so I did. Which was hard, really hard. It was hard to see the person that I love most in this world be crushed by my actions. Here I was, excited about this rekindling of my faith and newfound sobriety, but I didn't really think about how that confession was going to affect her.

I wish I could say that it's been a straight line from then to now. It hasn't. There has been discouragement, a definite maturing process and stumbles along the way. But the fire remains - I understand my faith more now than I ever have. I have a desire to help others who were in the place I was in and have sat in the dirt with many people over the last several years as they've pulled themselves out of various things. My faith, at this point, is forward-looking - to the return of Jesus and the coming Kingdom of God. I want to be part of that Kingdom and I want you to be part of that Kingdom and I want for us all to understand what and why we believe what we believe, so that we can have an answer to the world. I praise God for what He has done in my life!