Grace in the Trenches
I was thrown out a small side window that day, but three of my brothers weren’t so lucky…they all died in the crash. A few years later when my Dad died, I prayed to a God I did not know to take me too, so that I might be reunited with my family.
I tried everything I could find to ease the pain – drugs, alcohol, more drugs – but things just kept getting worse. My life was spinning out of control. It wasn’t long before me, my wife, Abby and two kids were living out of a single cab pick-up truck by the side of the road in the dead of winter.
No way out you are thinking? That’s what I thought, too but that’s when I discovered Church.
Not so much the building, but God’s children making up the body: ‘so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others’ (Romans 12:5).
I ran into a friend from high school. He asked me how I was doing. Not the casual inquiry; I felt like he really wanted to know and it just broke me down. He invited me to a Grace in the Trenches event. There I heard the stories from others who had been in the pit where I was. I heard how a man named Jesus made it His business to reach out to people just like me and how He could pull me out of my miserable existence and set me back on solid ground.
Finally! I found what I had been looking for. That night the four of us asked Jesus into our hearts and lives and we have all been forever changed.
So now what is one of my favorite things to do? You guessed it! Serve with the rest of the body at Grace in the Trenches events. Whether it is telling my story of redemption through Jesus Christ or helping flip burgers or setting up chairs; it’s all good!