I was angry at God and my father when I was younger. I tried to kill myself with alcohol during my teenage years. I tried to keep my Mom and my grandparents from discovering what I was doing but they eventually found out.

I felt that my parent’s divorce was because of me or that I had something to do with it. But the reason was not because of me, although I didn’t find this out until I was almost thirty years old.

When you are a child, you believe that everything revolves around you and in some cases it does. But the reasons for the divorce and the break-up of their marriage and other things had nothing to do with me. Nevertheless, I drank alcohol when I was a teenager. Enough that I had at least one wreck that totaled my mother’s car and put me in the hospital for about a week. Even when I wasn’t driving and drinking, I had alcohol stashed in the air-conditioning ducts in our home, so I had access to it even when I was “at home watching TV”.

My Mom tried to give me as much “freedom” as possible which can be a good thing but not exactly in my case. I had the alcohol stashed and I had some marijuana hidden in my dresser. When I was a junior in high school, she lived with my grandparents and let me live on my own in the trailer across the yard. So that could’ve been much worse than it turned out to be but I think my grandparents were praying for me at this time. I didn’t care about going to church or God or a relationship with Jesus.

To cut down the length of this story…I wrecked my Mom’s car one night. I was coming home from a Friday night football game although I hadn’t gone there to play or even watch the game. I went there to get drunk…period. I achieved my goal because I don’t remember much about the drive home except when the car went airborne. I went off the road and hit a culvert and a driveway which tore the transmission from the back of the engine. The car came down on a fence and flipped over, smashing all of the windows in the car. After a time I came to my senses and crawled from the car and then stumbled to a house nearby and called my Mom. In a way, the fact that I was drunk probably kept me from being killed.

All of this happened over forty years ago. I reconciled with my father. My mother passed away in 1995. So much of my youth had been wasted by being angry about my family being broken apart when I was about five years old. I didn’t have anything to do with their break-up but I was angry with them for depriving me of a “normal” life. Who has a normal life these days? It seems that few people have ever really had a “normal” life really. So many have problems that plague their family’s past and present and many of us today try our best to fix our family’s past by committing to having a real relationship today. Some of us try to model our family relationship on our parents or our grandparent’s relationship but if theirs wasn’t based on a relationship with Jesus it won’t work.

Today’s family needs to have a relationship with Jesus Christ as the foundation of their family at the beginning of their relationship. Because if He isn’t the foundation and the anchor of your relationship with each other, how is that relationship going to be interpreted by your children? While I went a bit overboard with alcohol when I was younger, God finally brought me around after about twenty-five years or so. I pray that my story might give some of you a little inspiration of what NOT to do and Who you need to have in your life in order to HAVE a Life.

Seek Jesus as your Savior. Believe in Him and learn about Him through reading the Word and growing in your faith.