A man shares his recovery from hepatitis C, IV drug addiction, and depression, arguing that hitting bottom is God's wake-up call. Real change comes from building character and a new identity, not external fixes. When you transform yourself, opportunities and relationships follow naturally.
Your brokenness is your way out. See, you don't recognize it right now, but this place, this place that you perceive to be rock bottom, is the place where God could finally speak to you and get your attention. See, you wouldn't have listened any other way. You're like me, you're hard-headed, and God had to get your attention through the pain and through the adversity in order for you to get a wake-up call, to finally awaken to what has been undealt with. To what you haven't faced, right? And they say time heals all wounds. I can tell you from experience, time won't heal what you won't face. And a lot of times we feel like, is it even worth it in my brokenness? That would the world be better off if I wasn't even here? Why do you think so many men every year take their life? Because men can't see purpose in the pain. They can't see a way out of the brokenness. My brother, don't be held down by what's happened to you. Be moved by what you can do with it, because it's guys like you that make a difference in this world. Once you've overcome this, the character virtues, the knowledge, the experience, the tools, the insight, the wisdom, the relationships that you gain from this experience of this breakthrough inside your life, if you choose to experience it, becomes the gift for somebody else, becomes the gift for your children, becomes the gift for your loved ones. Because a better relationship with them, right, a greater version of you is your gift to humanity, man. But you gotta see in your brokenness. And I could tell you, hepatitis C, addicted to IV drugs, depression, anxiety, pain, loneliness, loss— God healed me from all of it. But you know how he did it? With a system, with a program, with an implementation pathway of putting the right people in the right process, right? And the and giving me a heart where I finally said enough is enough. So bro, your brokenness is your way out, because that's the place in your life where you, where you finally open your eyes to what God is trying to do in you and through you. And sometimes, right, we have— everything has to be taken down to the ground, it has to be demolished in order for something new to be built. And we think it's the end. You think it's the end. My brother, it's not the end. This is the beginning of something new. This is a new season in your life. Don't allow your circumstances to define you and define your emotional state. You got to create an emotional state internally that exceeds the situation that you're in. If it's a divorce, if it's grief and loss of a dead relationship, if it's the rebirth of who you are as a man, you've had to reinvent yourself time and time and time again, and it's your time again to do that. And God is calling you to something so much greater than this. And sometimes we think, well, I shouldn't have had to learn the lesson this way. But bro, like I said, you're hard-headed like me, and you probably wouldn't have learned any other way. Nothing else would have got your attention. And you think that you have to go into the external for control to fix it, when every solution comes from within you. That you are the path. The fixing your marriage isn't the path, if you take all of your focus away from your external goals and you become the goal— personal development becomes the goal, becoming a, a better man becomes the goal, developing a skill set, a mindset, my emotional intelligence, right? Refining how I look and perceive the world around me, how I interact, how I look at me, doing some archaeology on my life— if that becomes the goal, bro, everything in your life becomes inevitable because you bring that into your life. You attract it into your life because you are that guy. Opportunities can only present themselves to you when you become the guy that the opportunity can present itself to. Opportunities will never present themselves to you until you become the guy that the opportunity can present itself to. We gotta shift our identity and step out of our brokenness to recognize that in our brokenness is the way out. It's not the end, man. It's just the beginning.
