Mac's Testimony

I am a believer in Jesus Christ and it was my struggles with drugs and alcohol that brought me to Celebrate Recovery. My name is Mac. I have the privilege of serving as the global director for Celebrate Recovery and this is my story of hope, how God changed my life. My childhood was pretty uneventful in terms of abuse. My parents loved me. They set good standards for me to live by even though they were very strict. So try as I might, I really can't look back and blame others for my actions, actions that now looking back brought great shame and guilt to me and to my family. Fortunately today, because of Jesus Christ, I don't have to live in the past anymore. I am indeed free. Ironically though, I spent a lifetime searching for freedom in all the wrong people, places, and things. I was 15 when my dad retired from the military and by that time we had moved from California to Germany, to Washington, back to Germany, to Georgia, back to California, to Virginia, only to end up in Louisiana. From moving so often I had become a person who could blend in. I learned to make friends quickly. I had to in order to survive. My dad preached wherever he was stationed so I knew about God, I knew about heaven, and I knew about hell. And I was taught that unless you were a Christian you would certainly go to hell and that scared me. I really remember then fear being the motivating factor for being baptized when I was 12 years old. I was at a church summer camp when this took place and the fact that there were a couple good-looking girls being baptized made my decision easy. I appeared to enter into a relationship with God but it was for all the wrong reasons. Two weeks later at that same summer camp, after I'd given my life supposedly to Jesus, I was introduced to marijuana by one of the Christian counselors. I found a group of people who looked like to me. They were having lots of fun. That's when I decided, who needs to live in fear? These people don't worry about anything. So I jumped in headfirst. It was the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s. All kinds of drugs were available and I was on a mission to try them all and that's what I did. I was on a path that would lead to my eventual destruction and I didn't even know it. When my dad retired from the military, he decided to go to seminary so we moved to West Monroe, Louisiana. I was 15 and I

really didn't want to move this time because of all the friends that I had made. How would I ever find people who like to do what I like to do now? Well, amazingly enough, within the first week after moving to Louisiana, I found that the same people lived there, they just had different names. I never ran out of drugs and acceptance, it was immediate. Once we arrived in Louisiana, my parents decided to send me to church summer camp because they thought that would straighten me out and that's where I met Mary. At the end of that week of camp, I was so courageous, courageous enough to ask Mary out through somebody else. We became inseparable after that day. It was a new school year and Mary was a senior, I was a junior. Life was great. We started dating and after a few months of close fellowship, we skipped school one day and went to Mary's house. Mary's mother was in the hospital and her dad was out of town so I talked her into having sex, the first time for both of us, with that manipulative line, if you love me, you would. Well, two weeks later, she didn't start her period and we thought, no way, surely you can't get pregnant after just one time. Well, four months later, she finally consulted a doctor and yes, she was pregnant. No one had been pregnant outside of marriage in our church so we now had a secret. We felt all alone and were convinced that I could not support the three of us. I was only 16 at the time. By the time Mary was five months pregnant, she decided it was confession time to her dad. During Mary's childhood, her mother had a mental illness so needless to say, her sweet, sweet mother, who loved her the best she knew how, did not notice that Mary had a growing belly. She had always been able to talk to her dad though and now she knew she couldn't keep it from him any longer so she knelt down beside him and eye to eye said softly, daddy, we need to talk. She was prepared for him to point his finger and say all kinds of harsh words but the exact opposite transpired. Tears began streaming down his cheeks as he said he would support and love Mary always. She told him of her plans of moving out of town and giving up our baby for adoption. So Mary left home for her secret summer trip. Three months later, it was August 17th, 1975. That's a date to remember because it's significant.

later in our story. The doctor left her in a tiny room all by herself. Her labor lasted 12 hours. No anesthesia, no family, all alone. As they rushed her back into the delivery room, a nurse shoved a gas mask over her face. Mary thought they were suffocating her to punish her for what she had done, but they just wanted her to put her out so she would have the baby and they would be done with her. We later asked the lawyer if we could see our baby just one time. He said no. Mary came back home and two weeks later moved to a Christian college out of state. Her dad was hoping to get her away from me, but I followed because my parents thought now if they just sent me to the right Christian college, that would fix me. But guess what? I found the people that loved to party on my first day of campus. As a matter of fact, the guy who introduced me to marijuana six years earlier at that Christian summer camp, I found him. He was there. So I started off a freshman rooming with seniors. That was not a good place for me to be. Halfway through the semester, I got kicked out of college after sneaking out of the dorm room past curfew to smoke a joint with a friend. So I got busted, kicked out of school, and sent home. Mary and I both came back home and we were married three weeks later. Married life was great. We partied all the time. Later I would come to understand that this helped us to mask the guilt of giving up our baby all those years earlier. When we'd been married for three years, we started trying to have another baby. Mary told me I'm gonna quit the partying scene. I said go ahead, but I'm not. This is how you married me. This is how I'll be to the day I die. But even in the midst of my addiction, I'd set myself a boundary and I decided to quit everything except smoking pot because I convinced myself that smoking pot's just not that bad. Well, I continued to run down the road to drug addiction and as I did, the conflict between Mary and I grew. Our daughters were born during this time. We lived under the same roof. However, we lived two very different lives growing further and further apart. I stayed away from the house as much as possible, working overtime so I could pay for my drug habit. By this time, methamphetamine had become my drug of choice. Mary, at this same time in our life, came to the

realization that our marriage was totally unmanageable. So she started seeking pathway, the pathway to peace, while I continued down a pathway to destruction. This pattern lasted for seven more years. Mary's feeble prayer for me at the time was that I would just come to church, that I would stay awake, that I would hear the message. Never in her wildest dreams did she think of better things like me becoming an elder in our church or would one day start a Celebrate Recovery ministry at our church or become the Celebrate Recovery global director. And the only reason I share those things with you is not to tell you how great I am, but it's to confirm this, that God takes very, very broken lives and does exceedingly more than we can ever ask or imagine. Amazingly enough, even as a drug addict, there was a line I said I would never cross. The last two years of my addiction, I was shooting up numerous times a day. One thing I said I would never do was use needles, so I wore long-sleeve shirts all the time so no one would notice the marks on my arms. I slept only 16 hours total a week. One Sunday morning, after being awake a week, God gave me the greatest gift of my life, and at that time I didn't even realize it. It was a moment of clarity, a moment of clear, right, sane thinking. I was crashed out into my bed and Callie, our four-year-old daughter, came and stood beside the bed and said to her mother, why doesn't daddy go to church with us anymore? Why doesn't daddy do anything with us anymore? Well, Mary and her codependency said, sweetie, he's been working hard. He needs to sleep. Callie replied, well, if he's not going, then I'm not going either. I pretended to be asleep and not hear what she said, but I heard every word she said. As Mary got her out of the room and got her to the car, they left for church and I felt like I'd run into a brick wall. God used that little girl that morning to break my heart. I realized in her words that I was killing everybody that I claimed to love. It was as if my eyes were open for the first time, seeing all the insanity of my decisions. So I went inside and I collected all my drug paraphernalia. drugs, scales, needles, everything, and I went outside and I burned them all. Then I started writing down all that I wanted to tell Mary.

For some reason, I knew that I wouldn't be able to say all the things out loud that I needed to tell her. Mary that morning at church was crushed, realizing that our children were being affected. That Sunday, the sermon was on confession and how good it is for the soul. Upon Mary arriving back home, she found me sitting in my recliner. She had never seen me shed a tear and was very disturbed to see my eyes red and swollen from crying. She had no idea what I was about to say. I had been raised, who's a man? And real men don't cry, and real men never show weakness. And I never did either until that morning. Because what I found in those tears that morning was relief like I'd never known in my life. I told Mary all the things that I'd done, and I wanted to start a new life. Then something very different happened. Mary, for the first time, stepped out of her codependency and said, well, I'm tired of keeping secrets. I told you I'm through with this life. I know you did, but I wanna know who we're gonna call. I said, what do you mean who we're gonna call? What more do you want? I'm gonna change. She goes, no, we need to talk to somebody. Would you please talk to Ray? Ray Melton was our pastor at the time. And he'd been coming to my cabinet shop for years, getting me to build things for him, only to find out later they were things he really didn't even need. He just saw something in me that nobody else did. He saw somebody that was worthwhile, not worthless.

He was reaching out to me, and it worked. I said, yeah, I'll talk to Ray. So he came over to pray with us that day. And from that day forward, he became one of my greatest mentors. Ray said, you don't have to confess this before the whole church, but it may help someone else if you did. Someone else who's struggling with some of the same things you're struggling with. Well, I knew in that moment of clarity, I had to be held accountable or I would use again. So Mary and I went down front that Sunday night for an altar call, totally expecting to be banned or shunned by the whole church. But the exact opposite happened. The whole church, about 400 of them at that time, came down front afterwards and they hugged us and they cried with us. And they said, we don't quite know what to do with you. You're our first drug addict, but we love you and we want you to keep coming back. Well, I heard that loud and clear. They wanted me to keep coming back. Now, there was a little old lady there that came up to me afterwards and said, Mac, I think you need to go to AA. And I said, is that like some kind of car club? She goes, no, that's AAA, you need AA, Alcoholics Anonymous. She then told Mary that she knew a man at a rehab that might be able to get me in. So Mary asked if I would be willing to talk to the man at the rehab the next day. I said, Mary, I'm not crazy, I don't need a rehab. Well, I finally agreed to talk with him because I knew what he was gonna say. He was gonna say, yeah, you don't need to stay here, but that's not what he said. He said, yeah, I think you need to stay. So I said, well, I will, but I gotta go home and I gotta get my stuff. And Mary looked at me and looked at him and said, that's okay,

your stuff's in the trunk. No more codependent, Mary was ready to change. Well, our life became a whirlwind with rehab, 90 meetings in 90 days. I am an overachiever, so I made about 140 meetings in 90 days. Bible studies, making new friends, a whole new life had opened up for us. We started Overcomers Outreach two years later to help other addicts who were struggling like I did. We led that group for 14 years. Over the years, we had approximately 20 to 30 that showed up every week. They came on a regular basis, but more importantly than that, over the years, many, many people came to know Jesus Christ because of the hope we had. Back to our son that we gave up for adoption. The only other people that knew about our son were Mary's dad, her brother John, and his wife Chris. The lawyer who handled our adoption would never tell us our son's name for many years. It was, after all, a closed adoption. Then he, the lawyer, found out that he had terminal cancer. And he felt like, you know what, before I die, I'm gonna tell them who their son is. And he told us our son was Heath Arthur. Fast forward 1988, one month after I had yielded my life to God, God gave us a surprise gift. Our church youth group was going to a youth five hours away, and Chris, my sister-in-law, was one of the chaperones. They were assigning groups to stay in homes, but by the time it got to Chris and her group, they had run out of homes, so they asked if they would mind staying in a home in a town close by. As the suitcases were being loaded in the car of a very friendly couple, she asked, do you guys have any children? The woman said, we have one son. His name is Heath. A funny feeling came over her, and

she asked his age. Heath's mother said, he's 12. So she went one step further and said, when's his birthday? Heath's mother said, August 17th, the date our son Heath was born, August 17th, 1975. At two o'clock in the morning, our phone rang. There was no such thing as cell phones back then, so she called us from Arthur's kitchen phone, collect, in the middle of the night, and she whispered, you'll never imagine where I'm at right now. Mary, who had answered the phone, said half-asleep, where? She replied, Heath's bed. Well, we have a family at our church with a last name Heath, so Mary said to her, what are you doing amidst a Heath's bed? She said, no, your son Heath. Mary and I laughed and cried, and thank God, all night long. They never knew who she was, so we feel God gave us that gift, at that time in our lives, to reassure us that our son was loved and cared for by a Christian family. After waiting seven more years, we got the phone call we always hoped we would get. When Heath was about to turn 19, his parents contacted us and said that he'd like to meet us on his 19th birthday. Mary's dad was in charge of videotaping the momentous occasion, but later, as we sat down to watch the video, the whole first part of the reunion was just showing the ground. Mary's dad was so excited, just like the rest of us, he forgot he was holding the camera. Well, it's been over 25 years now since we met Heath. We didn't get to see his natural birth, but we were blessed by witnessing his spiritual birth as I baptized him into the Lord in the pond behind our house. You know, after leading Overcomers Outreach for 13 years, Mary's brother Johnny happened, I don't think it was a coincidence, but he happened to be out at Saddleback Church in California, and he saw this little ministry they had called Celebrate Recovery, and he said, you know, Mike, you really ought to go check it out, but in my mind, I knew everything about recovery. We've been doing it for a while now. What else was there to know? Well, because I have a good godly sponsor, I learned that this type of thinking was contempt prior to investigation. Johnny would not stop asking us to go see about CR and see what it was all about. Finally, just to get him to stop, I said, okay, we'll go to California, and thinking we'd have a little vacation and attend some of this summit thing that they have every year.

Well, the first day we got there at 8 o'clock, because we knew if we got there at 8 early, we could leave early and get about what was really important, check out Southern California. Well, we ended up staying till 9 o'clock that night. It was so good. Well, the next day, I'm a little hard-headed. We got there at 8 o'clock again, because I was leaving early. We left at 10 o'clock that night. I looked at Mary at the end of that day, and I said, we're stopping what we're doing. A ministry that was working, we're stopping what we're doing, and we're starting this. Look at how many more people we can help, more than just drug and extra alcoholics. So, after 120 days of prayer and preparation, we started celebrating recovery at our church in Louisiana on December 31st, 2004. You know, I love watching God's plan for our life unfold. I love seeing the lives of the people that he sends us, their lives changing as well. God has truly taken the ashes of our lives and turned them into something beautiful. I believe when God said in Joel 2, I will, God says, repay you for the years the locusts have eaten, and he has. You see, 20 years ago, Mary just prayed I would stay awake in church. We've learned that nothing is impossible for God. We are so grateful for celebrating recovery as it continues to grow and affect more and more people, enriching our lives continually. That was so obvious when we got resources like Life-Healing Choices and the CR Bible. We love doing the character studies in those Bibles on Friday night. There's so many people in recovery in the Bible. God only uses broken people. We've been working the 12 steps for over 34 years, and we've never found another program or ministry that moves people through the steps or, more importantly, through the Beatitudes like Celebrate Recovery does. So, we believe we are on the frontline ministry of what outreach does. should look like in the church, and we are able to bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim freedom for the captives of sin in Jesus' name, and release the prisoners of hurts, hangups, and habits. Celebrate Recovery has helped us reach more hurting people than we could ever imagine.

How can we repay the Lord for his goodness? By sharing with everybody the hope we've found, and that it's available to them too. Today, we are making life-sealing choices, and that's Celebrate Recovery. Thanks for letting me share.