Marc

"I walked into a bank and robbed it. I got caught later on in the night. That was the last time I took a drink. My case was all over the local news, and I thought my life was over. I was incarcerated for eight and a half years. Alcohol was only a symptom of the problem. The problem started off with the abandonment. My mom drove three plus hours to a babysitter and didn't pick us up. In 1967 nobody called the police or family services. My mom was what we'd call the old school bipolar. She struggled for many years.  She would smoke marijuana and take Xanax to manage the mood swings. Almost four years later, our grandparents picked us up. They would try to call us on the phone and were never be able to talk to us. They suspected something was wrong so they hired a private detective. That private detective found us. So many of us in recovery suffer from that abandonment issue.

There was nothing about my skin that made me feel comfortable.  Every relationship I got into I was so scared that the person was going to leave.  I took my very first drink at 19 years old and my last drink at 38 years old. It was the only way I could find ease and comfort. I had problems with anger, fear, not having an education, and dwelling on the past.  Alcoholism is a disease for the entire family, everybody's affected by it. Drinking and drugging are what I did.

I started to realize that there was something out there that was greater than myself, more powerful than me. I developed a relationship with God. It took staying sober and a period of time with different events that happened in my life. The first thing we have to do is to stop drinking. I walked into my cell and cried like a baby. For the first time in my life, I felt safety and security. I felt safety and security in a maximum-security prison. I knew I was going to be okay. God was going to take care of me. I knew that my responsibility was to not drink and drug. I trust in the process and trust in God. That was my awakening.

I learned that I was listening with my eyes. The people that told me about how they were living this Christian life, were the ones doing something they shouldn't have been doing when the lights were off.  I would encourage people to read the Bible. You find Him in studying the Bible. I would encourage you to get involved in some sort of aspect of church life and meet people that say they believe in Jesus and that they have given their life over to Him. We generally don't come to Jesus when we just went six for six in a baseball game. We don't give our life to God when things are good because we think we're running the show.  I had that awakening over time. My name is Marc, I’m human, and I surrender."

Watch Marc's full audio testimony on YouTube: