Why SYM?

Why do I work at SYM? Well, it’s all I’ve ever wanted since I was born again over 6 years ago.

You see, I struggled greatly as a young person myself. I’ll be honest, I have had some very dark days and I am going to be real in this post. My story may be very similar to that of some of the young people we serve at SYM. Many of their stories are far more horrific than my own. This is just a peek into my experience as a runaway, a criminal, a drug addict, an outcast, a lost kid on the streets. This is my why.

Although I had a relatively normal childhood and had been a pretty happy kid, at the age of 12 genetic mental illness hit me like a freight train. Suddenly I lost all hope and began to feel a deep hatred toward myself. Depression sank in and completely overtook my life. I was admitted to my first psychiatric stay at the age of 12, had my first suicide attempt at only 12… this began a long journey through mental illness and the search for a cure. Medication, therapy, coping skills and diagnoses. In time I was diagnosed with severe depression, rapid cycling bipolar, borderline personality disorder, anxiety, PTSD, and schizoaffective disorder. I was constantly riddled with anxiety and angry at everything around me. I would go through times when I was sky high and awake for days at a time. I couldn’t even enjoy these upswings though because I was morbidly aware of the inevitable crash that would be far lower than any high I reached. I began harming myself, lashing out at my family, acting out in ways I couldn’t control. I was consumed by a violent unrest at the core of my being. I was in a living hell and my family was right there in it with me.

My family is and has always been very supportive and loving(I am very blessed by this; too many kids lack a loving family unit), but there was simply nothing they could do to help. Even after seeking treatment from both outpatient and short-term inpatient therapy and psychiatry, things only got worse. I began to have auditory and visual hallucinations, suicidal and homicidal ideation, and the severe mood swings were unbearable for everyone involved. I was prescribed countless pills and ultimately deemed “medication resistant”. At one point I had such an adverse reaction to a “mood stabilizer” that I recall laughing hysterically until I was also sobbing and begging my mother to make it stop. At a loss, I got on a waitlist for a long-term children’s mental hospital. I spent my entire freshman year of high school in that place- 11 months and 11 days. Alas, they didn’t have the answers either. The routine and structure helped my behavior stabilize some, but I still wanted to die every day. I was still pulling my hair out in response to the anxiety in my veins. I still felt completely out of control.

I eventually wrote a well-worded letter petitioning for my release and it was granted. I just wanted out- this was a year in a no shoe lace, no sharps, fully locked down facility where I regularly saw other patients sedated by force and dragged off to the Quiet Room. But I was far from better. So I returned home to my mom and older brother and went back to school. I began attending the alternative school in town with a 504 plan. This was supposed to offer me more support but in reality I was now just surrounded by the druggies and drop-outs and with less accountability. Naturally, after having no success with any of the prescribed treatments, I began self-medicating.

It began with heavy marijuana use, then I was getting blackout drunk every day and soon experimenting with party drugs and promiscuity. By the time I was 16 I was addicted to IV heroin. The first time I tried it I didn’t bat an eye; nothing mattered so why not? I can’t quite translate the way that I had no aversion to it… so entirely devoid of hope, I dove into anything that might offer some relief to my inner turmoil. I fell in love with opiates. I dropped out of high school although I had been a straight-A student up until my brain caught fire. The drugs gave me a false sense of control- if I wasn’t going to be in my right mind anyway, I thought I’d do it on my terms. I could put a needle in my arm and “nod out” into a state of unconsciousness near enough to death that it fulfilled my fantasies of no longer being, if only for an hour.

I started running away from home for periods of time- from my small town to the big city of Seattle. My affair with heroin became a love triangle with methamphetamine. The weekends turned to week-long stints, and eventually I stopped going home altogether, having accepted my fate as a homeless drug addict at 17. For the following half-decade I spiraled with no end in sight. I shoplifted all my daily needs(and sometimes a little more) and got arrested a couple times. I overdosed more times than I can remember. If you’re wondering about my safety I was more often than not dating a dealer twice my age who usually protected me and loved me the only way they knew how- keeping me very high. But for the innumerable nights I wandered through the city alone at all hours of the night, completely intoxicated, and yet was not kidnapped or murdered- I can only say that heaven above was watching out for me.
I often tried to get clean. I went to rehabs and psych wards; I stopped counting after 17 inpatient stays. Or I would go to my mom’s house to detox, but rarely stayed past sharing the worst of the withdrawals with my family before storming out again, desperate for my fix.

SIDE NOTE: Detoxing is such hell. Your bones feel like glass, your skin is sand paper. Headaches, nausea, vomiting, chills, fevers, all at once. Restless legs, and the restless leg feeling but in your joints and spine!? Dizziness, confusion, anxiety, anger. And your body is depleted of serotonin and the ability to make any more so cue sadness like no other and exhaustion you feel you will never recover from. Plus, the psychological need for your drug. It is no easy feat and I have mad respect for all who have or are currently fighting this beast, either cold turkey or with the help of suboxone/methadone, because you’ve still got to kick that stuff at some point too.

Anyway, I spent 5 years shooting up under a bridge, 10 years of the hell in my mind. But God, right?
Wanna know how I got out? Well, one night diggling around in Eastlake I found a Bible in a dumpster. Yep. And something in me said I want to keep that. I’m gonna read it, if only like a story book, a fairy tale perhaps, I don’t know. And so I did. I kept that dirty black study Bible and began to read it. The thing is, I would shoot up large quantities of meth, smoke a bunch of weed and read the blessed Word of God in these demon-infested trap houses, so as you can imagine things got pretty confused.

It was about an 8 month period of the most intense spiritual warfare where I lost more of my mind than I thought I had left to lose and every day was a different delusion. I thought the man I was dating was Jesus(but sometimes he just forgot). I believed I was a deity myself. I believed that every time it rained[IN SEATTLE] it was judgement day and the earth was being flooded(I hadn’t quite made it to the part about the rainbow). I believed we were all communicating telepathically, but I think I probably just went mute and made funny faces at people. That’s just to name a few.

You see, this was an epic battle for my soul. I was so close to freedom(where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom! 2 Cor 3:17) and the forces of evil were throwing everything at me, twisting every word I read and perverting each interpretation. And although I was reading the Good Book and opening my heart to the possibility of its overwhelming truth, I was still leaving the door wide open for all of hell to have reign in my life through my use of substances and partnership with sin. But in it all THE Lord God revealed Himself to me little by little and I knew that my answer was on those pages and in this man called Jesus.

So I ended up in another mental hospital after breaking into my mom’s house to check on her because the demons behind my friend’s eyes had tipped me off to some evil scheme. I was there for 2 weeks before talking my way out of it(all the experience had really taught me just the words they needed to hear) and was so excited to go tell all my friends about this Jesus that I thought I knew. That led to relapse on meth and I was on the Harborview psych floor within 5 days of leaving the last facility. But this was different. This is where it all changed. Because I was still reading this book, still connecting on some level with the Spirit, still searching for answers. But as I sobered up in the hospital, the depression started sinking in. The first and greatest stronghold that had taken me down at 12 years old. But it just didn’t line up with this God that I was reading about. So I remember looking up to the ceiling of my hospital room, and asking a very honest, completely genuine question. I said aloud, “Jesus, do I have to be depressed?” I was answered with a wave of joy that flooded through my entire body. And its pretty much never left!

From that moment on I knew there was nothing else for me. I had felt the joy of the Lord, the love of the Father, and the power of the Spirit. Everything was different. I was made new. I’m made new daily, even now- that’s the beauty of it. I’ve now embarked on a lifelong journey with the One who created me. From Harborview I ended up going to a year long discipleship program halfway across the state called Ruth’s House of Hope. There I learned how to sleep at night and eat food on a regular basis, but also how to understand the Word of God and to pray and follow Jesus. The hardest part about staying there was not the urge to use(I had none), but I so wanted to return to Seattle to tell everyone I knew about this transformation I’d experienced.

I came to understand that there are steps you have to take before just running back out to the streets to save the world. In fact, after graduating from Ruth’s House, the Lord led me to the Dream Center Leadership School in Los Angeles, California to be trained up in street ministry. I was there for almost 3 years, spending most of my time on skid row and in the projects, just loving people and meeting practical needs. Servant leadership is the DC’s MO. All the while I was crying out for every person who’s name I could remember from the streets. I had a vision for a redeemed Seattle, headed by a revival of the too-far-gones! Because I was one you would have called too far gone. I was the crazy you don’t come back from, one you may see scabbed up, contorted body, talking to themselves in the alley. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is hope for every single person, and I look forward to seeing transformation in this city.

I learned a lot at the Dream Center. After LA, in the midst of the worldwide plague I did a discipleship training school with YWAM, an international missionary organization. While I was in Albania I learned that one of my best friends from back in the day, someone who I’d gone down that dark road with in the beginning but had lost contact with as we’d each chosen our respective paths of addiction, this friend of mine had also found freedom in Christ[HALLELUJAH!] and was working at this place called SYM. When I got back to the states I finally felt the release to put some roots down in Seattle, and quickly joined the team at SYM.

I waited years before the Lord said I was ready to come back and serve my city. To bring hope to people in the same bondage I had been freed from. And now I’m here, doing the blessed thing. And sometimes I’ve got to remind myself of how badly I wanted this and how much I prayed for it, because it doesn’t always look the way I thought it would. Sometimes it just looks like sitting on the couch next to some person in drop-in, saying non-sensical things back and forth, for months before seeing some tiny shade of breakthrough- and then rejoicing over it! It’s loving God and loving people- and I’m dreaming bigger for what we can do with that in the coming future to make more of an impact.

Now I can see the purpose in the pain. I wouldn’t take a day of it back, because now I have a powerful testimony, an overcoming spirit, and I get to represent the Messiah to a dying world with a unique perspective and experience and anointing. I can see the young people who come through our doors at SYM, possibly in the trial of their lifetime and I can see them the way the God of the Universe created them to be, and have bold faith that they will come into this identity; if we just speak it over them hope can spark. And I can see the mob down on 3rd avenue and feel an aching love for their souls because I know that they are lost and hurting. I can go to these people and have compassion on them, empathize with them, and do what I can to meet their needs. Physically/practically, emotionally, and spiritually. Although the latter less often looks like walking up and proselytizing and more often like just forming relationships and walking out the talk. That goes for every Christ follower. You may not be called to street ministry, or to volunteer at SYM’s drop-in, but you know people who need what you have. Whether that’s a coworker who battles anxiety like you used to, or a neighbor who has a hard time loving themself and you know how that feels. Just love God and in turn let His love overflow from you to love the people around you.
And if you are reading this and do not currently follow Jesus, I can tell you that He really is the Way, the Truth, and the Life- a good God who can and will(and wants to!) heal your heart and make you new. He gives beauty for ashes and joy for mourning, He makes all things work together for good to those who love God and are called according to His purposes(that’s YOU! Isaiah 61:3, Romans 8:28). I am living, breathing, joyful proof!

”I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because He considered me faithful, putting me into service, even though I was formerly a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent aggressor. Yet I was shown mercy because I acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord was more than abundant, with the faith and love which are found in Christ Jesus. It is a trustworthy statement, deserving full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, among whom I am foremost of all. Yet for this reason I found mercy, so that in me as the foremost, Jesus Christ might demonstrate His perfect patience as an example for those who would believe in Him for eternal life. Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.”
1 Timothy1:12-17 NASB