This doesn’t happen to people like me.
People like me don’t take their kids on vacation. They don’t save money, book flights and gather tourist advice from friends. People like me don’t even have friends.
Yet for the past several days I’ve walked around our nation’s capital with my son holding one hand and my daughter holding another.
We’ve galloped through the national mall, strolled down Georgetown side streets in search of cupcake stores, stared at presidential monuments, read countless Smithsonian museum plaques and gazed at art exhibits in awe and wonder. It’s been a trip of a lifetime, one that I hope will stir great patriotism inside my children for decades to come.
But how did it happened?
People like me don’t take their kids on vacations. I’m the guy who instead promises trip after trip after trip only to spend any potential vacation money on drugs I can snort and cars I can’t afford. I should be locked up in a cell alone for the stuff I used to do, not staring at metro maps wondering what museum my kids and I we’ll hit next.
People like me don’t take their kids on vacation, we rarely even get to see our children, especially once addiction truly takes hold. Once this happens the kids are long gone and we’re diving head first into the abyss of the drug underwood. Places and spaces normal people only see in the movies. You see people like me walk away from their families and don’t ever return. People like me do stuff so heinous and illegal we shouldn’t even be allowed to see our kids. People like me don’t take their kids on vacation.
So what happened? How did I get here.
It feels like just two weeks ago I was in court begging a judge for one more chance. Bribing the drug tester to declare a “negative” result, while I forced my eyes to stay open from the previous nights massive hangover.
How does a person like me become a person like this?
God. Straight up, no more, no less.
God pursued a broken, jacked up sinner and saved his life. God saw a man dead in the dark and poured out love so intoxicating that no drug would ever feel the same. God looked upon my life and said enough is enough and rescued me from a life of misery only to set me up on mountain top of hope.
God changed me. He took a man who would have never been able to take his kids on vacation (no matter how bad he really wanted to) to someone who did.
So don’t ever let anyone tell you that miracles don’t happen anymore, because they do. God does miracles every single day and what happened this week was a miracle.
It’s true, people like the old me don’t take their kids on vacation. But in Christ I’m a new creation, the old me is dead and gone and a new man is here. And the new man LOVES taking his kids on vacation.
-Hope is Alive
