“It was just a slow decay.”
“I had a pretty normal family life,” Carl remembers. “Well, my parents were older, and my dad passed away when I was 17. So that was pretty traumatic. But both parents actually stayed together until my dad passed away.”
After his dad’s death, Carl and his mom moved to Seattle to start a new life together. Life took a turn for the worse, though, when his mom passed away. According to Carl, that was when “the alcohol and drugs started to take hardcore negative effects.”
Though “things worked for me for a little while,” Carl recalls, he “started losing control, and drugs and alcohol became more prevalent … It was just a slow decay.”
Carl’s “slow decay” led to homelessness. He says he hit bottom “being homeless and being underneath a bridge during a downpour, torrential rain, soaking wet, ice cold. I had no place to go, no home, nothing left. And I actually remember being underneath that bridge and praying to God going, there's got to be something else.”
An answered prayer
God answered Carl’s prayer quickly, and unexpectedly. “I literally no sooner crawled out from underneath that bridge,” Carl remembers, “... I got stopped by police, and I had a warrant, and I went to jail, and that was the way through.” Carl says that though he didn’t realize it at the time, he now sees God’s hand in rescuing him.
While in jail, Carl met some men from the Mission’s Prison Ministries. “It was a group of men that actually showed me that people actually cared about you as opposed to just wanting to take things from you,” he says. “So, it felt right.”
Upon his release, Carl was taken to the Mission. He says he felt “safe and relieved." God changed his life at the Mission as he found himself surrounded “with counselors and mentors basically that wanted to see me get better and do better for no reason besides, that's what they wanted to see from me. They wanted to help me. And that was a beautiful thing.”
No longer ensnared in his addiction, Carl marvels at his life today. “Just looking back at who that person was, who I was at that time, it's almost unrecognizable … how I view things, how I see things, has changed dramatically,” he says. “I want to actually help people as opposed to what can I take from them, because that's what they're going to do to me.”
Today, Carl’s life is full of hope. “There's nothing stagnant anymore in my life,” he says. “There's always new potentials, new growths, new opportunities. And it's nowadays a life filled with love.”