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This is my testimony of how my life instantly changed one night in a hotel room and how I hovered on the edge of death as my whole life flashed before my eyes, a phenomenon that would surpass anything and everything that I had ever imagined and would ultimately lead me to the truth of our lord and savior Jesus Christ.

This glorious occurrence, though breathtakingly frightening, happened during a time in my life when I was convinced that God did not exist, my atheistic views fed the notion that He was nothing more than a theory; a figment in the imaginations of weak minded people who were starving for meaning and purpose in this dull and bleak world. Little did I know, this notion would turn out to be only half truth.

Life to me at best held very little meaning and I figured it was too short to worry or be concerned about such nonsense. Instead, I should be seeking to have as much fun and excitement as I possibly could, before my clock stopped ticking. So, at the age of seventeen I set out on an adventure that left me wandering the United States for nearly eighteen years.

In the latter part of those years my past began to catch up with me in a major way and I found myself not able to bear the painful memories of my childhood, the details of which are not important at the moment, and as a result I turned to drugs and alcohol as a means of blanketing those unhappy times. For many years they became my new God.

As time went on, I found myself in a state of depression and loneliness and eventually slithered into a recluse condition. I was a mess; haunted by an unfortunate past and left to deal with it all on my own. Although, in all my travels, I met many different types of people, it was obviously impossible for me to maintain any kind of relationship, mainly because I was on the move most of the time but mostly because of my mental situation. People came in and out of my life like a bee to a beehive and I grew more and more inhibited.

I didn’t realize at the time but the depression I was suffering was more than just a subtle blip of normal everyday life, it was a chronic disease fueled by the thoughts abandonment and neglect and any small problem I encountered quickly escalated to nuclear size proportion. I was a walking barrage of mental desolation waiting to implode at any minute, drugs and alcohol mixed with promiscuity seemed to be the only relief in sight.

Some time later, I ended up in Miami Florida where I met a beautiful girl from Dublin Ireland. She had touched my heart like no one else had ever done and I quickly fell in love with her. She was a student back in the UK and had taken a year away from her studies to travel and was only to be here in the states for the summer. Although I knew this, I still allowed myself to fall head over heals for her. I guess I was desperate for love and companionship.

When it was time for her to move on my heart couldn’t take it. I had already convinced her to stay longer than she had planned on a couple of occasions but this time she had to go, she had no other choice, her visa was expiring. At that point I lost control and overdosed on a bottle of extra strength pain pills, about 30 or so.

After the ER, I spent three days in the intensive care unit and another three days in the Psych unit. I finally signed myself out against the recommendations of the doctors and the Hospital Psychiatrist. I told them that my trying to commit suicide was a big mistake and that it would never happen again. I convinced them that I could handle this situation on my own and didn’t need any help. I was in total denial of my depressive state and I wanted to get back to spend as much time with Emma as I could before she left.

This entire episode sparked the beginning of a rapid spiral down hill and I soon found myself accelerating on the road of self destruction and as time grew, so did my depression, loneliness and substance abuse until I ended up in a hotel room in Phoenix, Arizona.

While in Phoenix I found myself not wanting to live any longer again, but this time in the worst way. I spent countless amounts of hours sitting along, drinking, drugging and contemplating the best way to go and this time there would be no coming back. I was no longer afraid of death, unlike before, and had completely stopped looking for reasons to live.

The more I thought of my life, the wearier I became, the day to day routine became a struggle, I was bogged down in my own despair and had no energy left to carry on.

I was a walking dead man on a path of hopelessness and helplessness with no way out in sight, except for that one sign that kept popping up at he end of the road, it read Dead End.

June 14th, 2002 Phoenix, Arizona
It was about 10:30pm and I was in my hotel room alone as usual, drinking, smoking Marijuana and Crack Cocaine, I had started around 4 pm and was extremely high and paranoid at this point.

I turned on the television and noticed that it was on a religious channel, this was odd to me because I never watched that kind of stuff. Religion to me was nonexistent and was just another way of brainwashing and controlling people’s lives, not to mention their hard earned money and I wanted no part in it. I didn’t really put too much emphasis on to why it was on; I just assumed that housekeeping had been watching while cleaning my room.

Besides, I wasn’t really interested in watching TV anyway; I was just a form of distraction while getting high. I thought by turning on the TV it would somehow keep people from knowing that I was smoking crack, I was in a total state of paranoid delusion.

After getting back to what I was doing, the TV caught my attention once again, this time I heard a preacher talking about the world and of the bad things that were happening, I believe she mentioned something about the fallen Twin Towers/911, I guess that is what really drew my attention initially. She then went on to speak about things like Heaven and Hell, and about sin and the more I listened to her, the angrier I became and finally leaped up, and turned the set off and sat back down.

I later realized the preacher was Joyce Meyers the famous television evangelist.

Moments later after sitting down, I caught myself daydreaming about what she had been saying and briefly considered the possibility that there might be some truth to it and that maybe God really was real after all. However, it did not take me long before I shook off the notion and laughed at myself for even thinking of such foolishness.

As I sat on the edge of the bed, I began thinking about my life and the way it had ended up and the more I thought about it, the more saddened I became. It all seemed so unfairly divergent to anyone else’s life I had ever known. I asked myself, “Why…why is it that my life is the way it is, and what did I do wrong that I am not able to change it”

As I began to feel sorry for my life and for the way it turned out, I admitted to myself that I was an outcast and a failure and thought this to be the reason why my biological mother gave me up for adoption. I honestly began thinking that there could be no other reason than this.

I thought more of how hard it was growing up as an adoptee, not feeling loved or part of my new family, about all the trouble I used to get into and no one caring enough to find out the reason why. I thought of the loneliness that I had no choice but to live with and the sadness that I suffered my whole life and of all that weight that I had to carry around and how tired I was of carrying it.

I hated myself because I was a mixed breed, a mutt, worse off than a dog. I was no better than the slop that a swine feeds on, or the waste that he trots underfoot. I thought of how hard it was growing up in a town that hated interracial relationships and they hated me because I was a product of one. Why was I ever born, I would often ask and why was I born like this, but there was no one there to answer me. I just wanted to crawl-up under a rock and hide from it all. Then it finally hit me, on top of everything else, I realized I was an addict, addicted to crack cocaine and had truly hit rock bottom.

As I sat there, realizing that this was where I was supposed to be and that it was my destiny and would never change, I started to imagine that I had been born to be an example of someone else’s mistakes and to suffer for it the rest of my pathetic life, and there was no way out of it.

As I hid my face in my hands, I felt that it was unfair that I did not have a chance from the moment I was born and I couldn’t understand why. I was innocent and didn’t ask for any of it, why me, what had I done? I just kept asking myself that same question, “Why…why…why.”

I thought more of the times I tried to make a change in my life but every time it seemed I was making progress, something was holding me back not letting me go forward. No matter how hard I tried it was like I was beating against the wind. I stood up at that point and began wandering around in the room and my attention fell on the Holy Bible. It had been sitting on the night stand next to the bed collecting dust for as long as I had been there, but until then I had never gave any consideration to reading it.

Strangely enough, I remember at least one occasion when I threw it in the trash only to come back later that evening to find that the housekeeper had picked it out and put it back on the table. I also remember wanting to get rid of it on several occasions but for some reason I either forgot or just never did. The only time I ever gave it any real thought was when I ran out of rolling papers.

As I sat on the edge of the bed staring at the bible, I felt a strong desire to pick it up. This was quit an unusually feeling because like I said, I never gave it much thought, but I finally I gave in and picked it up.

I took it into my hands and randomly opened it to the book of 1Thessalonians. As I tried to read it, I realized that I was way too high to understand anything it was saying and as I stumbled through a couple of paragraphs trying to recall what I had read, I thought to myself, I am just wasting my time, but the urge kept me trying.

Then all of a sudden, one part of a page jumped out to me and was as clear as day. It talked about sin and the consequences of them. It went on to explain how detrimental this one particular sin was to the soul and how much God hated it and that those who committed this awful transgression would be condemned to eternity in Hell. It was talking about sexual immorality. If you have ever done drugs for any length of time, you understand exactly what I mean.

As I continued reading, it all became uncomfortably clear, I was understanding exactly what it was saying and it was as deep of an understanding, deeper than anything thing else I ever understood before. It was as if the highness had been stripped away and my mind had been opened up to this unnatural understanding. I can’t put it into words what had happened to me other than; it was an understanding that could have only come from God.

As I read, it went on to talk about many different types of sin and I realized that every one of them mentioned played a major role in my life, it felt like God was talking directly to me, pointing His finger down at me. When I realized this, I suddenly became filled with sorrow and shame, it was the most uncomfortable feeling I had ever experienced because at that point I realized, for the first time in my life, I was an unclean person filled with sin, and without even thinking about it, I pleaded, “God if you are real then help me.”

As soon as those words left my lips my heart opened up deeper than it ever had before and for the first time in nearly five years and I poured tears like a baby.

I can’t explain it but I have never cried like that in my entire life, it was as if the flood gates to my heart had exploded uncontrollably inside of me and the water poured through my eyes as if rushing back into the sea. I became weak and lightheaded and had to lie back on the bed, I tried to stop the tears from flowing, but the more I resisted, the heavier they flowed, until I just gave up.

A long time past and the tears continued and suddenly I began to have flash backs of my past. These visions were vivid images in my mind of things that I had done to myself and to others, bad things; they went back as far as my childhood. Some things I had even forgotten about. It was as if I had a projector in my mind projecting recorded images of every evil thing that I had ever done in my life. My whole life was flashing in front of my eyes, one image after another; they just kept coming and coming. First the image would come, and then the memory of it followed. They just kept coming and coming for what seemed like for ever.

At first I was at awe but then it freaked me out and after a while my heart began to beat rapidly and I became short of breath and at this point I became afraid. I then realized in the deepest part of my soul that this was an act of God. He suddenly became very real to me and that I was about to die and these visions were my judgment; they were the reasons I was on my way to Hell.

A dreadful and inexpressible feeling of fear overwhelmed me at that moment, my heart, my mind and my entire body became drenched with anxiety like nothing I have ever experienced before in my life. No words can express the level of fear I was feeling, I don’t even think it was natural. It came from somewhere far more terrifying than any place here on earth, and wherever that place was, this fear was defiantly the source of it.

I sat up and reached for the bible again trembling, I picked it up and began to read more but this time I was focused on the next page and it was no longer condemning sin but talked about a way out of it through Jesus Christ and as quickly as all that fear came into me it left and was replaced with an inexpressible amount of hope and promise.

This feeling enveloped my entire body also as if I were submerged in a pool of happiness. I can’t express the joy I felt right then but it was amazing, truly amazing. I then fell down to my knees beside the bed and began to pray but all I could say was “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please forgive me” and the more I pleaded the heaver the tears flowed

I must stop now and explain something and this is very important because later I realized its significance. God did something else amazing.

I grew in a southern Baptist Church, the name of this Church is not important. But it taught that all white people were devils among other false doctrines. Please do not get me wrong, not all Southern Baptist believe this way, just this church, and the pastor at the time. It was false teachings and false doctrine. All the same, I remember as a child thinking how it would be possible for half of me to go to heaven and the other half to hell, it was quit confusing to me and I quickly lost interest.

My point is this, no one ever taught me the correct ways of God or His word and no one ever taught me how to pray for forgiveness or ask Christ to come into my heart, I didn’t even know what it meant to ask Christ into my heart. But that night while I was on my knees, I suddenly knew exactly what I should pray for and what I should say. It was like God had planted the words in my heart.

The words came to my mind exactly like in the book of Romans 10:9- “if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved” and that was it… and exactly what I did.

After I prayed that prayer, I immediately felt a warm sensation enter my body. Once again I cannot explain exactly how it felt but that it was like a gentle electrical sensation and it filled my entire body and it changed something inside side me, deep inside of me, and I knew it, I knew that God had just entered my body and my life and that He was there to stay. I knew that from that point my life would never be the same and that everything, and I mean everything! was going to be all right. I knew it without doubt.

Glory be to God!

When I stood up I felt as if I were floating, as if my feet were not touching the floor. The heaviness; all that weight that I had been carrying around with me my whole life was gone, it had vanished, I was a hundred pounds lighter and a completely different person-a new person…I cannot explain it any better than this.
Needless to say, those visions faded away.

I started crying all over again but this time they were tears of joy and of thankfulness and everything about me was filled with happiness and a knowing that I now was a child of God and that he loves me and my life was heading in a new direction, and most importantly that ALL my sins had been forgiven.

As I paced back and forth in that room crying out to God and thanking him for entering into my life and washing away my sins, I realized that I was completely sober, the effects from the drugs were completely gone, and I also knew without a shadow of a doubt that the addiction was too.

It was an amazing night; God miraculously changed my life in a blink of an eye. I realize now that He took me to the brink of death, let me feel what hell is like, and showed me all the reasons why I deserved to go there but He brought me back again.

I can’t express to you how much this all means to me. I was an atheist; even that very night, I was an atheist. I used to curse God, I was a thief and a liar and was filled with thoughts of lust, anger, hate, depression, and hopelessness and was suicidal but God loved me just the way I was and waited for the right moment so that He could offer to take it all away.

Remember when I mentioned the Church, well the next day He lead me to a Baptist Church where the pastor helped me to get back on track.

Please feel free to share my Testimony with whom ever you are lead that it may Glorify the Lord.

-Shawn D. Long

www.myspace.com/slong56