A Conversion Story

I never intended to become a Mormon. It sounds crazy to say that it "just kind of happened," but it's true.

My conversion story starts many years ago. Even though I didn't become acquainted with the Church until just over a year ago, as I wrote here, the preparatory work was being done far in advance. It's not a nice story, and there are things that I did that I now regret, but that are integral to whee I ended up.

All through my public school years, I really didn't have to work all that hard. Most of what was necessary came easy to me, and the rest, well, I guess it just wasn't that necessary. I spent the last six years of my childhood in Scouting, which I enjoyed and in which I had a lot of great experiences.

What time I didn't spend with Scouts I mostly spent with the high school choir and performing arts department. This is the most important time of my youth: It set the stage for so much of what came later, as I continued with choir and theater into college, leaving me no time to continue with Scouts. It was in the spring of my freshman year at Marietta College that I met the woman with whom I had my first child.

I had been pretty much a loser with "romance" up to this point (and beyond). I had had a few dates, but no serious girlfriend, and I fell kind of hard, though, frankly, she didn't. We became friends and more or less inseparable for a few years. Everybody thought we were a couple, but, despite my fervent desires, we were not.

Anyway, I took a year off between my sophomore and junior years and that was when I met the woman I ended up marrying, getting quickly engaged. I had sworn to myself that I would never be one of those guys that treated his girlfriend like dirt, but I failed to keep that promise. My friend, who had never shown any real romantic interest before, was now all about trying to win me over. I was torn and conflicted and absolutely loving having two women fighting for me.

I behaved poorly. I ended up cheating on the woman I was engaged to, something I had sworn I would never do. In the end, we broke up, but continued seeing each other off and on. My former friend, now girlfriend got pregnant and we ended up moving in together.

Which lasted about two months. We were great friends, but a horrible couple. I was working at McDonald's, having dropped out after my junior year, and she was finishing up her degree. It seemed that every chance we had to argue, we did. So, I was 23, a college dropout, in a disastrous relationship, expecting a child and living in a town where McDonald's was about the best job I legitimately had a shot at. No future.

One day in April, we had a huge fight and that lack of a future hit me square between the eyes. I knew I had to do something, and though I had considered enlisting in the Army a few times over the years, by the end of the day I was in a Navy recruiters office and by the end of the week I was enlisted. It was a spur of the moment thing, not something I had planned by any means. I ended up enlisting as a Hospital Corpsman, which is a group that does everything from field medic for the Marines to EMT to nursing and all sorts of medical technician positions.It was six moths before I could ship out, though. But I knew that it would be the end of my relationship.

I look back at the way I acted and the way I treated the women in  my life at that time, and I am ashamed. What I did wasn't good for me: I didn't live up to the values I had learned and should have adopted as my own. I treated people poorly. In words I have learned since, I would term my relationships and behavior as Not Pleasing to God.

When my now ex moved out, I got a new roommate: alcohol. I had been something of a binge drinker before, but now I started drinking on a daily basis, a habit that would continue for nearly a decade and a half. I didn't speak with my ex for months, only once or twice before she gave birth to our son. I got to hold him the day after he was born, and once more before I shipped out for the Navy.

Just before I left, I found out that I had not been acknowledged in the birth certificate as the father of my son. It was important to me that I take responsibility and do as much as I could to support him. I ended up having to sue for paternity, with the full knowledge that I would then be legally obligated to pay support. She told me that if I did, she would take me for every penny she could get. I did it anyway.

Boot camp was tough in the winter. I found out about halfway through that I had a court date in Marietta the Wednesday after graduation, which sort of motivated me to work as hard as possible to actually graduate on time. Soon after I found out about the court date, I found out that my Corps school schedule had been altered and I wasn't going to spend three months wintry months on the north side of Chicago, but in San Diego instead.

After I graduated, I made my court date and got things moving. At the time, they did paternity tests on blood, not cheek swabs, and they waited six months after birth to perform the tests. I suppose I could have backed out at any time up to that point and she would have let me go, but I didn't believe it was the right thing to do. They took the blood in April, and within a week or two, we got to choose our next assignment. I got exactly what I wanted, which was lab school and another year in San Diego.

I know this seems like it has nothing to do with the topic, but I'll get there. You'll see.

I spent my four years in the Navy. I was not perfect. A lot of times I wasn't even good. My drinking got heavier and heavier. It was hard to see my son, being across the country, and with the adversarial relationship with his mother, there was a lot of tension. While I was in the Navy, she had gotten married and had a daughter and a life into which my attempts at visitation simply weren't welcome. Eventually, she asked me to let his stepfather adopt him. It was the hardest decision I had ever made, but I had to agree: It was best for him.

Within two weeks, I had my first conversation with the mother who had given me up for adoption as an infant. She's a good woman who made a hard decision at a stressful time and I thank and praise her for it.

After giving up my son, I felt guilty. Even when we do the right thing, sometimes our doubts and fears can eat at us until we are consumed. I fell deeper and deeper into depression and further and further into the bottle.
There's a quality to alcoholics that I find darkly amusing: They say that you have to hit "bottom" before you can really make a true recovery, and when you get a bunch of us together and talking about our addictions, we all want our "bottom" to be deeper and darker than any other.

I hit bottom during the summer of 2005. I would say I was drinking on a daily basis, but it was more frequent than that. We had had our daughter in September of 2003. I was sober for that only because the buzz wore off before she was born.  Over the next two years, I tried to drink after I put her to bed for the night, then I started drinking before, figuring the effects wouldn't hit until after she was asleep.

I'm not proud of my actions, but neither will I shrink from admitting them.

I started taking lots of unplanned one-day vacations from work, trying to use days when there were enough people working that my absence would cause less difficulty. I was drinking two liters of vodka every three days. Not the 42 proof grocery store stuff, but the 110 proof stuff that they sell from the bottom shelf. It tasted like paint thinner, but it was cheap (relatively) and got the job done. I estimated I was spending between 200 and 250 dollars a month on alcohol alone.

I n the late summer of 2005, I was drunk, as usual, when I found an Al-Anon pamphlet on a table in the living room. It was a wake up call: My wife thought I was a lost cause, enough that SHE needed support to deal with MY drinking. From what I hear, she and my mom and our friend Sally had tried to have an intervention, and I had gotten hostile and yelled. I don't remember that. I was drunk at the time.

In Late September of 2005, I got up the courage and went to an AA meeting in Kent, hungover, (but still buzzing somewhat: I was NEVER truly sober in those years) and not really sure I needed to be there. We have a saying that what happens at the meetings STAYS at the meetings, so I won't go into detail, but I do feel free to say that I was amazed at how diverse the people there were: People from all walks of life, rich, poor, successful, unsuccessful, in all stages of recovery from denial to many years sober. There were a few that I knew and respected from the outside world, which was a shock to me, but a comfort as well: If they could have problems and seek help, then I needn't be ashamed.

I went to three meetings and on the 16th of October, I finished the last of my last bottle of vodka. I felt like I was losing my best friend. I couldn't picture a day without it. But, after one day, I figured if I'd made it through one, I could make it through one more. And then it was two, and if I made it through two, I could make it through two more. And then it was four, and so on. I continued to go to meetings for several months, but I was done. I won't say it was easy: When I was detoxing, I shook SO hard, and I still have a tremor as a reminder of the damage I did. I was sick hard for a week.

But, eventually the desire to drink went away. And it's never come back.

And the most amazing thing is: Within two weeks after I drank the last drop of  my last bottle of vodka, my wife was pregnant with my son.

So, we're nearly back to the point in time at which I had my stroke. It was late - three in the morning on December 29, 2009. I went to play video games and suddenly felt as though the back of my head had been hit with an aluminum baseball bat. That's a story in and of itself, for another time and place. When I woke up three weeks later, I had very little memory of anything other than a great deal of pain, and what I have come to believe is my vision, my time in Paradise with my earthly father.

Most of the rest of the story is written in my prior post, but what I didn't say then is this: As I began attending Sacrament meetings regularly, The Holy Spirit began do speak to me. I heard the Voice of God, loud and clear. He pointed to each of these low points recounted in this essay, where I had made a tough decision to sacrifice something that meant a great deal to me, from my alcohol, which was truly valueless, to my son (figuratively), whose value is infinite, and He showed me that it was at His prompting that I made those difficult, but ultimately correct choices, and that for my obedience, I was rewarded in short order with something else of great value.

I realized that, through obedience to Him, my life can become richer and more rewarding. The rewards are not always instantaneous. They can be delayed by days, weeks, months or even years. We may not even realize them in this lifetime, but He WILL provide them to us, IF we listen to Him.

It's not easy to be obedient: Being human means we will fail and fail again. But we MUST keep trying, keep striving toward the perfection that He asks of us, that we might receive the gifts that He truly wants to give to us.

Amazingly, many converts have stories almost identical to mine, and we share almost nothing else in common but the knowledge that God has chosen to speak to us and to invite us into membership in His True Church. Most of us feel that we are not converting to the church, but are in fact returning home.
Which, in truth, we are.

And I write these things to you in the Holy and Sacred Name of Jesus Christ. Amen.