The Story of Us. Part One.
I’ll take you back a few years.
I had been up all night with a friend. I had been tweaking out, and hadn’t slept in about 4 days. It got to be about 8:30 or 9:00. My friend said, “Oh man, I gotta go to church!” Wow. What should I do? I guess I could go with, I mean.. I don’t want her to have to drive me all the way back to my house.
“Ok, I can tag along.”
She went to get ready for church… I paced back and forth in the kitchen for a while, and then busted out my stash. I did enough to ‘get me through the morning.’ As we approached the church, I got a little nervous, but comforted myself that I could blend in without being noticed. When we got there, she was pretty talkative, and introduced me to several people. They were all pretty nice, but I could tell they didn’t quite know what to make of me. (At that time, I was 100 pounds or so.)
Once the gathering slowed down a bit, she grabbed me and said, “Come on, we’re going to see my friend.” Of coarse I followed. I sure as hell didn’t want to be left alone. We walked through some hall ways into an office area. Around the corner, there she was. A young lady, whom I had seen before, at the bar. Black hair, a smile that made me hurt, a style of clothing that made me happy and a slightly weird look… something like, “Why the hell did you bring this dope fiend here?”
She was nice enough to me. We didn’t talk long. We never had before either, just the friendly cordials as I was pouring her a drink, or knocking a few drinks off her bill. We went back out to where service was about to start. I’ll be honest. I don’t remember much about the sermon. But I remember that painful smile, and that black hair like it was yesterday. It was the first time I had seen a person from the bar in ‘the wild’.
That day, I realized there were some people who could live life normally. That day, I began to starve for a ‘normal life’ out side of the bar fights, alcohol, and drugs. That day, an angel was introduced to me. I didn’t even realize it.
Had I known, at that moment, that the woman sitting in that office, with the smile that made me hurt, would one day be my wife and the mother of my child, I would have stopped getting messed up right then. I would have laid it all down. But, that’s the day it started. The hunger. The drive. The want. The tiredness of my life hit me, the moment I saw that beautiful smile, outside of the bar. I realized life was bigger than karaoke night and Jager bombs.
I didn’t return to that church for close to a year. But when I did, it was a home coming. I am so glad God brought me to where I am today.
