When the Running Stops

26 Jan 2010

Two People Meet on the Path to Christ

Dave, or Big Dave to his friends, despite his slightly overwhelming outer shell has one of the brightest smiles and the biggest hearts I have ever seen. Michelle, shy as she is in her new church family, absolutely sparkles with the love of Christ in her eyes and is bursting to tell people about him.

Neither of these two has led an easy life. Dave found himself in and out of jail eight times since he was 16 for various offenses including robbery and drug possession. He found addictions controlling his life, leading him toward a path full of violence, crime and heavy drugs. Dave fathered six children with four different women, and when his last relationship broke up, he contemplated suicide.

‘This life ate me,’ says Dave. ‘I knew there was something else, but I just had to keep running and riding it out for myself. There was no way that I wanted to commit myself to anything. What I wanted to do was to keep running.’

Michelle’s mum died when she was just four years old, leaving her to drift from place to place with an alcoholic father who loved partying and women. Michelle recalls being sexually abused by the time she was five years old; and because she felt herself unable to love, she eventually began to use her body as a means to get what she wanted.

Michelle found herself in an abusive relationship and quickly formed an addiction to marijuana. She had two children, moved around the country and eventually found herself in and out of rehab with no lasting effect.

‘Everybody that I had ever loved had left me,’ says Michelle, ‘so I learned from a really early age not to love, not to feel anything for anybody else. Eventually my drug addiction really kicked in and that became my best friend in the whole wide world.’

A bigger man

After Dave’s brush with suicide, he realised he needed help. He went to see a drug counsellor who encouraged him to enrol in rehab, but Dave still thought he could do it alone.

‘I thought to myself, “Naw, I can do this.” So I got off the heroin and needles by myself and cut down my drinking,’ says Dave. ‘But there were still a lot of drugs I couldn’t throw out and a lot of attitudes I couldn’t get rid of, so I knew there was something else I had to do.’

He enrolled in rehab at Springhill Residential Treatment Centre in Napier, hoping to finally fully overcome his addictions. Dave has now been drug and alcohol free since 19 August 2007, a fact that makes him beam with pride.

About three weeks after Dave started rehab, he was invited to attend Sunday church at The Salvation Army Napier Corps. Agreeing to go along changed his life. ‘Instantly I felt that I belonged,’ he says with a smile.

Dave continued going to church at the Army and found a stable job outside of drugs for the first time in his life. During that time he also secured accommodation at a halfway house to protect himself against his former lifestyle, and continued to attend Narcotics Anonymous (NA).

After about a month at The Salvation Army Dave made a full-time commitment to Jesus Christ and eventually became a soldier (member) of Napier Corps.

‘I sometimes feel like I don’t know enough, but God puts it in my heart. I don’t need the motorbikes. I don’t need the parties. I don’t need the drugs. I just walked away,’ says Dave. ‘That’s a part of my life that I am happy to give up. Jesus washed me clean. God’s put something else in my heart and I thank him for that.’

A perfect storm

Michelle’s life continued to spiral into a whirl of drugs, sex and depression. Her relationship with her partner was never stable, and Michelle’s relationship with her children was blurred by a constant stream of marijuana and anti-depressants. It was at this time, Michelle says, that she had her first encounter with God.

‘My mates and I were at the beach and I was so scared I thought I was going to die,’ she says. ‘I remember looking up to the sky at God and saying, “What do you want from me?” All of a sudden I got this warmth through my body and it was like all of the sudden, “Yup, I believe. Okay, I believe.”’

So Michelle began taking her steps toward recovery. After her experience at the beach she told her doctor of her drug use, and was encouraged to go to a 12-step drug recovery programme in Napier. Though she agreed to go, Michelle still continued in her lifestyle, not able to admit she had a drug problem.

‘Everyone in the circle there was saying that they had problems with drugs, and when the circle came to me I said it too. But the only reason I said it was because everyone around me was saying it. I felt that I was fine,’ she says. ‘These people were not people that I would hang around with either. It’s crazy to think that a junkie, someone like me, would lie about their problems and still be able to look down on someone else.’

After over a year in rehab, Michelle got out of the abusive relationship for the last time and moved to Rotorua where she met another man and got pregnant. Within three weeks, when Michelle would have been four months pregnant, she went in for a scan and found that her baby had died.

‘My relationship with God was so strong: I hated him. I just couldn’t get over it,’ she says. ‘I ended up having this weird experience where I got to the core of this disease, of this grief and the thought that things were always my fault. I needed to live like it’s not my fault. So I began to realise that this little baby, the way things worked out, all of these feelings and events were getting me closer to God.’

Michelle moved back to Hastings with her now-teenage children and started attending Narcotics Anonymous again. It was there that she came across Dave.

Something is different

‘I was at this stage where I didn’t trust anybody at all, but I remember going to NA on a Friday night and just wanting a hug,’ Michelle says with a twinkle in her eye. ‘And then Dave was there and I asked him if he would give me a hug. I found that I just didn’t want to let go because I felt that he didn’t want to take advantage of me, and when he shared, he shared from his heart. There was just something about him.’

Dave and Michelle got to know each other over time and had their first date, as Dave recalls with perfect clarity, at McDonalds during the opening ceremony for the Olympics on 8 August 2008. But as Michelle soon discovered, Dave’s recovery was radically different than her own because of one thing: his church.

‘One thing fascinating about Dave was him going to the Sallies and that it was important to him,’ she says. ‘I had grown up in NA and I thought that was the only way. But he was going to church and he didn’t go to NA like I did, yet he seemed well. I couldn’t comprehend how someone could get that same wellness not through NA.’

Earlier this year Dave gave his testimony at Napier Corps and invited Michelle to come along. Though her scepticism of church was strong and she wasn’t even sure at that time what a ‘testimony’ was, she agreed to go along, as she says, not to go to church, but just to support Dave. This was her first real church experience.

After that, Michelle says, she didn’t continue to come along to church, but she would wait in the parking lot to take Dave home after the morning service.

‘I would come here and I would wait outside because there was still something in me that thought that they were going to judge me,’ she says. ‘But they would all come outside and say hello to me! It was really weird; they treated me like I was something special. So then I decided to come to church with Dave.’

A child-like faith

Michelle went to the Sallies with Dave, who held her hand as she sat and listened, and eventually began to pray and ask questions. Michelle recalls her instant love of the preaching with its down-to-earth storytelling style. She also recalls with a smile and a wink at Dave the ‘old girls’ of the church who would come to pray with her most Sundays in those early days. But church was still far out of her comfort zone.

Dave and Michelle were married six months and three days after they met, and it wasn’t until after this that Michelle really started to make church her own.

‘It was only about a year ago that I found that I wanted to cry all the time. I would just start crying at church and I just didn’t know why,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t sad; people were just touching me when they were up front. Even the songs would do it! I started to understand the songs.

‘What would get me would be the simple words, “God loves you”, “God is good” ’, she continues. ‘These simple words would just make me start crying.’

As Michelle begins to tell of her full acceptance of Jesus Christ in her life, Dave smiles back at her with tears running down his cheeks. She speaks of praying at the front of church, not knowing why people went up to the front to pray but yet knowing that the commitment she was making was the start of something huge.

Michelle attended The Salvation Army’s New Zeal conference last year where she says ‘something came together’. She found herself becoming closer to her church family and experienced a moment on the last day where she says God freed her of her past.

‘All of a sudden it was like all of my life and all the pain was whizzing past me,’ she says. ‘And it was like everything that had been taken from me had been given back.

‘I am a baby Christian,’ Michelle continues with a smile. ‘I want to know things, I still challenge things, but I know that I am still childlike and I love that about me. My faith just keeps filling up and filling up.’

Dave recently completed the Leadership Jesus Way course in Napier and plans to help mentor other men with similar backgrounds to his own. Michelle continues to find out more about the Bible and the joy it can bring to her life. And together they are growing into exactly what they believe God created them to be.

‘We are learning about the Word [of God] and carrying a message on,’ says Michelle. ‘We’re educating ourselves—we’re getting to know people in the church and we are getting to know each other as well’.

By Cara Wood (from War Cry magazine)