Drinking Away: A Short Story

I came home expecting my dad to be drinking again. I was ready. Ready for the verbal warfare and whipping of tongues; ready to defend myself. Again, not physically, verbally. What was at home was definitely not what I was expecting. My dad finally made the decision to go to rehab. I was reluctant to believe him at the time, because before he had gone at least two weeks sober. I refused to believe that just a week of rehab could do the trick. The only difference between the other times he was “sober” was Jesus Christ. For once in my life I could finally breathe. Exhale. A week flies by and he is home, sober. I was thrilled. By the grace of God, his addiction was gone, he was saved. At the time, I wasn’t exactly thrilled about the “God part.

I look around and find Ashley. Let me tell you something about this big bag of crabapples. I can’t explain the love I feel toward this girl. I am an only child, she is the closest thing I have had to a sister. We have gone from being in love to completely hating each other's guts; from being inseparable to not be as close. That brings us to now. I’ve never had that much history with anyone in my life. I hated her at one point in my life. How is it that we now are inseparable? By the grace of Jesus! I sit by Ashley for eighteen hours and we get along swimmingly. I don’t think I have ever gotten along with somebody like that. It was a different feeling. Where was I saved? San Juan Bible Camp. The things they had said that week will be with me for probably the rest of my life. “Your brain has ruts. Ruts made by your habits. Like when you walk into your bedroom, you turn on your light without even thinking. You just do it. Why? Because you have trained yourself to. You do it so often that it becomes like a second nature. Like our sin. If we continue the same sin, we will do it without even thinking. We need to break that chain, and do the right things. Make your brain ruts righteous.” After our cabin leader gives us the mini-lesson we travel to the bank of a lake and the pastor gives a short sermon. When the sermon is finished, we are

At San Juan we worshiped and had most of our lessons under a large tent. Worshiping outside had felt very different than in a large sanctuary.
My cabin group filed into our seats and we started to worship. We listed our hands and for the first time in my life I truly worshiped. I lifted my hands, I cried, I broke down to my knees. Yet, the thing that I still have no explanation to is what happened next. We started to sing a song called “Rain Down” and just as we started to sing it, it started to pour. We were under a tent so we heard the sizzle of the rain pour onto it. That, I could easily say, is the closest I have ever been to God. I have never had an experience to where I could “feel” the holy spirit “rain down”.
I get home and tell everyone about the experience I had that week and I immediately get baptized. The school year starts and I go back into my normal life. I lose that joy I had at camp and search for it in other things. 1 John tells us that we should “live in the light”. I was definitely living in the light because I knew that what I was doing was wrong, yet refused to stop doing it. I continued to make the same mistakes, yet what made it different from before was that I learned from