“I didn’t think that I was destined for anything other than a meaningless 9:00 to 5:00 job with a 12 pack after work every night,” David says. In Lompoc, where he grew up, he says the only place to meet or hang out with people was the bar. So that’s where David went. Every night. But he quickly discovered that while other people could put the bottle down and walk away, he couldn’t. “I just had accepted the fact that this was going to be life, nothingness.”
“I had tried to quit on my own, and I had tried everything I could to try to get myself fixed.” David lost his job and his house. He moved back in with his parents, and that’s when God opened up his eyes to another possibility – the possibility of a new life. “I found out through a neighbor about the Rescue Mission,” David says. “I watched him go into the Rescue Mission broken and come out better than he was before . . . I knew that it worked.” Two days later, David was in the recovery program.
“While I was in the program, I lost five or six of my close friends that I was hanging out with on a regular basis, some to drug overdoses, some to suicide,” David says. “I’m fortunate that I was able to get out when I did because it was almost destined to happen that I would have been in their position.”
Today David is alive, healthy, and sober. He completed our recovery program several months ago, and the next day he became our Kitchen Supervisor. He’s doing an incredible job! “I’m content with where I’m at today, which is something that I was always chasing; was that feeling of contentment, being happy, and I was never happy,” he says. “This place changes lives. We are examples of what can happen when lives are repaired. We are examples of what lives are like once God restores them to sanity.”
