Shame doesn't have to define us

I met George* at church, just randomly saying hi one week. We quickly became Sunday friends, and it is a joy to see him and his brother on Sunday's. One week, he called me Sandra and I don't usually correct people when they say my name wrong- unless we are going to be friends. So that Sunday I corrected him, knowing that George was the first person from my church that God laid on my heart to hear his story. A week or two later, I asked him if we could meet, and he said yes! So thankful, as I know his story will really touch your heart. I love the way God moved in George's life and brought him into new life.

Before we started our audio recording, we were just talking, and it became known to me that George had shared his testimony at a church, with people that knew him. It didn't go over so well with all of the people. I told him I hoped this would be a platform for him to share his story and hopefully redeem that situation. The following part of George's story picks up with his reponse- and you'll see from the very beginning of his story, how he leaned into God's tender spirit and gave grace forgiveness even to the people who hurt him.

I hope you enjoy this part of his story, and I look forward to sitting down with George again to dive deeper into some of the other parts.

G: 

Well, I mean people are gonna be people and I don't think people that knew me for years, really knew me. And when they heard my testimony, where I came from, I think people that didn't know me so well- because I shared with many people in the church before- a lot of people knew where I came from and so I didn't think it would be an issue. But on the other hand, people can't help but be human and they can't help but have fears and doubts of things they don't know. 

I got proud because I'd served in the church to the best of my ability, everything I could do. And after I had my heart surgery, I wasn't able to do the physical things that I used to do to serve the church that I felt really happy with. And I tried to serve in other ways and when I wasn't able to serve in other ways, it just hurt. But I let my pride get in the way at that point and I left the church and went to another church because I just felt like I got let down by my church. 

S:

Well, I think that’s valid. If you don't mind me asking, how old are you?

G:

I'm old. I'm 65.

S:

You're 65? I would not guess that. Okay, so I'm curious about everything.

(And then we got to talking and this is where the story picked up)

G:

My grandma and grandpa were migrant farm workers. So they moved around the country working and they ended up in Washington working the orchards in Eastern Washington. And then at that point, my grandpa went to work for the railroad, so he was never around. So my dad kind of took on the male role of that family. So at a very early age, he was contributing to the family, you know, working. And so that was kind of his background. And then when he got old enough, he went to war in Korea and came back from Korea.

My mom, she grew up right here in Washington in the Everett area, and they lived on a little farm. And my grandfather worked his little plot of ground, and he worked for a cement factory in Everett. I really didn't get to know my grandfather very well on my mom's side. My mom's mom suffered with mental illness; again, my mom had to take on the female role in the house because my grandmother was also institutionalized. And so she grew up with that. So that's kind of their story.

I have two brothers and two sisters. And family dynamic is, dad was very abusive. Mom was very loving and had kindness about her. So we had a very chaotic life where I had a father that literally was, you know, stay out of my way and we got regular spankings. Sometimes there was a reason, sometimes just cuz we were in his way. Never had anything good to say about us. Never hugged us. Never told us he loved us. Just very kind of aloof and he was kind of that way with my mom as well. The fact she stayed with him for 55 years still amazes me to this day.

My mom was a very strong Jesus believing woman. She was our best friend when we were growing up, all of us kids. She was very young, she was like 17 when she married my dad. She was very young and had us five kids by the time she was like 22. So she was like one of the kids. Like I said, I remember when we were kids, that she would be out playing with us, you know, water fights, skateboarding, and, you know, like I said, she was just one of the kids. And she was in her early 30s when she hurt her back. And that kind of changed the whole trajectory of her life because she couldn't do the things anymore that she loved. And at that time, they didn't have all the ways to fix your back like these days. She spent a lot of her life suffering with degenerative back disease. 

Moving onto the school years, I was kind of an introvert. You know, school was never good for me, because as I was growing up, I was a fat kid. By the time I was in fifth grade, I weighed 210 pounds, which is 30 pounds more my weight right now. I was 11 years old and always picked on, always bullied, always made fun of. And that was reinforced at home, you know, because dad was always telling me how worthless I was, and he'd never had anything encouraging to say. 

But mom was just the opposite. Mom would tell us how special we were, and that God had a plan for us and that we were special. And after my mom hurt her back, she didn't have any control over us at all. So we would get regular spankings because of that, because you know, we were out of control kids. 

Junior high is when things got worse for me. Cause when you're the fat kid, you are a target. Just like if you have any differences- just like the girl with pimples or the guy with dandruff or whatever, if you're different in any way, you know what school does. Junior high school is when I discovered how embarrassing it could be to walk into a locker room and have to shower with 40 other people. And then you really become a target. I discovered… I discovered shame at that point. If I didn't have it enough by then, school really reinforced it. 

Junior high was bad and then and I didn't have a lot of friends so I started hanging around with the people that were like me, the people that were different, the people that you know, seemed to be the other people that were picked on and stuff. And of course, we were kind of the outsiders and that's where I first got introduced to marijuana. Then in high school I started drinking, partying, and all that. But that was my crowd that I was accepted with, it was the stoners and so that's the crowd I went with. They were my peeps. But, being the fat guy, I had zero self -esteem. Did you know, I always dreamed about having a girlfriend but never had one just because I just didn't think I was worthy of having one to be honest with you. That was my high school experience. 

I dropped out of high school when I was 16 because, well, my dad threw me out of the house when I was 16, the day I stood up to him and told him if he hit me again, I was gonna put him in the hospital. He asked me to leave, and I left. So I've been kind of on my own since I was 16. It was not an easy life, but I always had a place to stay and I went to work. I guess that's one thing, one ethic that my dad put in and instilled in me- you got to work. You got to work eight hours a day to get eight hours pay and so I worked and I was able, obviously, to survive. 

That gets me to about 16 years old, right? I spent like the next decade just wondering how life was going to be. I mean, I was always working and I would party on the weekends. Worked all week and partied on the weekend. But you know, I always dreamed about having a wife and family but it just didn't seem to be in the cards for me. 

Then I got to be, I think I was 22 years old, and I was working at the same place my dad worked, ironically, which was, it was wonderful. It was a steel factory and I was a painter there and I was making really good money. We went on strike and here I am, nothing to do, and I decided that I was going to lose weight, like I said, I'm this big fat guy. At that point I was about 320 pounds, if you can picture that. I was about 320 pounds,  and I had horrible nicknames at work too, because I was the fat guy still. I dealt with that issue my whole life and so I decided if I was ever going to have a wife and kids and all the things that I wanted, that I had to change who I was. So I started to diet and I lost some weight and started to do some working out.

But it just was a very slow process. Then I started running, and at first I couldn't run six blocks without just being so winded, but I kept at it and I kept at it. And within a year's time, I was running 10 miles a day. I had lost 125 pounds. When we went back to work from the strike, people didn't even know who I was. But that was the physical transformation. Inside, I was still the fat kid. I still had zero self -confidence. It's kind of weird how you can change the look on the outside, but that doesn't change the pain on the inside. 

S:

Can I ask a question?

G:

Sure. 

S:

So your mom shared Jesus with you. What was your relationship with Jesus like? Like from 16 on? 

G:

My early relationship with Jesus when we were kids, we went to church. We got on the bus and we went to church and that was all fine when we were kids, you know, getting the candy- that was what church was all about, right? For a few years we did that every week. The bus would come, we'd hop on the bus, but my parents weren't attending, just the kids were. When you got to a certain age, you had to move in with the adults. You were in the kids ministry till you were about 10. Then you got to move in with the big people. And it wasn't the same, especially at a baptist church, a very conservative baptist church. And again, I got proud when one day I had to go to the bathroom and the usher wouldn't let me out to go to the bathroom. He said you can go after church. So, I didn't go back. By the time I was in about seventh grade, I was done. From 16 on, we went to church occasionally. I always believed in God from the time I was very little, but I just didn't think that he had anything for me. Because when I prayed, nothing changed. 

I grew up around Christian people. My uncle was a pastor, and his kids, they were good Christian kids, and they were very, very, very loving people. I didn't realize this until after I turned my life to the Lord, but my uncle and aunt ended up being amazing people in my life. I wish I would have seen that earlier. But even though I believed in God, I never talked about God. I never talked about my belief, I just kept it to myself. I kind of felt ashamed when it came up, and then I would see the believers, the people that I could have chosen to hang with, the other weird people were the believers, right? In school, I could have chosen to go that direction as well. But I didn't. I chose to stick to myself, and keep whatever I believed in to myself, because I was embarrassed to talk about it around other people.

So, my early relationship with God was just me and God. But I always believed. Like I said, I figured I was just not on God's radar. 

S:

So you were talking about how you lost weight. My one question is, how in the world did you have the determination to keep at that? Did you have support from anybody? 

G:

For years, like I said, from about the time I was 22, for about three years, I ran every day. And sometimes ten or more miles a day. And when I got to a certain point, I didn't feel right if I didn't run. So it became a compulsive behavior. Just like in the past, it was eating. But it was what I went to to feel different. When you're the outcast, or when you see yourself as the outcast, maybe I wasn't the outcast, but when you see yourself as the outcast, you do anything you can to change the way you feel.

When I was a kid, the way I changed the way I felt, was I ate. I went to food for comfort. And later on, I went to alcohol for comfort, then I went to drugs for comfort, you know? And it wasn't necessarily comfort, it was just to change the way I felt, change the way I thought. You feel like garbage all the time. And I'd been depressed from an early age. I'm still clinically depressed, but I don't let that stop me from doing life. 

I got to the point where even though I'd lost all that weight, I still didn't feel good about myself. I still didn't think I was worthy to have a wife or anything. And this girl I knew, who was my best friend's girlfriend for years, but he had cheated on her, and she left him, and I didn't see her for five years. She met me when I was this big guy. One day, a friend of mine comes up and says, “Hey, Stacy* wants to see you.” And I said, “Oh, I haven't seen Stacy in years.” I said, we should get together. So, we got together and ironically enough, it was on April Fool's Day of 1983. And we've been together ever since. She's the only woman I've ever been with. We've been together 40 years. We got married in 1984. It's been a roller coaster ride, of course.

But still, we weren't following the Lord. We were partiers, but we had two amazing boys. My kids are my blessing, they kind of kept me sane in the early years of my marriage, even though, like I said, we’d party on the weekends and stuff, but the kids were our focus.

Let's just fast forward to when the kids are out of school now. And then it was like a lightning bolt hit my wife. She started having some really bad emotional problems that I didn't understand, and we weren't intimate anymore for a long, long time, and I didn't know what was going on, and she was telling me that it wasn't my fault, and you know how those things can go. 

But I started getting jealous because she was spending all her time at work, and well, years went by, and this was going on, and one day she came to me and she says, my therapist wants to see you. And I said, what therapist? She had been going to a therapist for two years and I had no clue that she was going to a therapist. And I said, okay, um, what therapist? And she goes, well, I've been going to this therapist for a couple of years. I go, what? Okay, let's go see the therapist. And the whole time I'd been blaming myself and thought the reason we're not intimate is, it’s got to be something to do with me. She kept telling me it's not your fault and I kept saying, well, then whose fault was it? But she couldn't open up to me. But her therapist said that it was time that she did. So we got together and started going together as a couple.

Eventually with the therapist's help, we were able to get onto medication again. Which was okay for a while, but then I started using drugs and alcohol again, so she started struggling again. We were living separate lives at that point. She poured herself into her work and I was pouring myself into things like golf and bowling and drugs and alcohol.

I call it my lost decade because we literally lost a decade. Both of us did. It became real apparent one day when I was looking at our photo albums and I could see our lives going up to a certain point, then there was 10 years missing in our photo albums. And I got to the point where I was gonna die. And I tried to stop on my own, but I couldn't really even say the words that I was an addict.

I could see it, and I was spending a lot of time praying, but not a lot of time trusting that God was going to do anything about it. And then I hurt my back, and I was off work for quite a long period of time. And when I came back to work, the place that I'd been working for for almost 30 years, the owner had died and they were going to sell the property. And so I had to think about getting another job. Well, here I am, fresh off of a back injury. I wasn't even really able to go back to work, let alone go look for a new place to work. 

Believe me, we're leaving a lot of big holes, but otherwise we'll be here a long time.

I was desperate, you know and this gentleman offered us a place to start a business, so what else am I gonna do? You start a business. So, I'm with my best friend who used to be my wife's boyfriend, if you can imagine this, but he's still my good friend. Anyway, we went into business together and he was a crack addict and I was a coke addict, what a marriage that was. We promised each other when we were going to do this venture that we had to sober up. This was a big lie. When we started this business we were both just stupid, but you know, we tried it, we made a go of it and we were doing reasonably well to be honest with you, for a couple of drug addicts. We weren't doing all that bad business wise, but nothing had changed at home for me.

My wife and I both said we loved each other, but it was kind of like a roommate situation. I knew something had to change in my life and the crazy thing was how God worked.

I know this is how God works. My friend who was an alcoholic, was a crack addict, but he went out on this mission with a friend of his from the tavern, of all things, at this little church that was starting up in North City. It was just a brand new church, the doors were only open for like six months, and they were doing an outreach where they went and they cleaned up this little coffee house in Shoreline for a mission. When he came back he was telling me all about it, and his eyes were bright, and I wanted some of that. I told him “Well, next time you go on an outreach just let me know. I'd love to go and see what this is all about.” It wasn't even a month later, he said they're gonna do another outreach, they're gonna go clean up a young single mom's yard so her daughter can play in the backyard. So, we went over and there was like 20 or 30 people there from the church and we worked all day, and these people loved on me all day. They just loved on me all day and then they invited me to go to church.

I went- and the day that I went, I had been drinking all the night before and partying all the night before. I was probably hungover and when I walked in that door, this little Filipino lady met me with a big hug and she says, “Welcome brother.” And I went to that church and for the first few months I was sitting in the back row. When I came home that day, I don't know why, but I said to my wife, “Do you mind if your husband becomes a holy man?” She said, “no, I don't mind at all.” Was she still doing drugs at this point? Yeah, but not like I was. For me, it was a lifestyle. For her, she was still a partier. For me, it was existing. 

Anyway, after going to that church a few months- and I went every week, no matter how much I partied the night before, I was at church- I probably would have got a DUI on the way to church some mornings, but I was still making it to church every week. The pastor, who I still love, I reach out to him every week- he challenged the church to fast. He said he wanted everybody to fast for two weeks. And then after the whole church fasted for two weeks, he got everybody to tell stories of what had happened when they fasted and prayed. So people started getting up and giving their testimonies- all the good things that happened as they fasted and prayed. I didn't fast of course, but I got convicted because I'd convinced myself the reason I didn't fast is I'm diabetic.

So I convinced myself that I can't fast, I have to eat, my blood sugar would go crazy if I tried to fast for two weeks. But after I heard all these stories, I got convicted even more. After church that day I went home and I sat on the edge of my bed and I said “Lord, what can I give you as a fast?” And you know, it was like he was speaking right in my head, standing right next to me said “George, give me the drugs and the alcohol.” And I said yes, and I've been sober since that second, I've never been tempted since that second. Instantly I was clear, my mind was clear. It's a miracle, and it's my miracle. I don't know if God's voice was audible but it was audible to me. 

Since then I've just been living my life for the Lord. That's how I came to the Lord. Literally, I hadn't given my life to the Lord yet- this is the crazy thing, I hadn't given my life to the Lord yet, and he healed me. I hadn’t confessed to him yet.

I'm just bumping a little farther down the road… I've been going to the church for like a couple years now and the second year I was there we went to a men's retreat. It was wonderful, all these men worshiping the Lord and having a lesson and praying for each other- man it was just powerful. After we had this worship service, everybody sat around and they could all recall the day that they'd given their life to the Lord. I didn't have that story, you know, when I was a kid, the Baptist church saved us every week. So I didn't have that story and I was determined to have that story the next time.

Anyway, I was sitting at home one Saturday after work and there was a Billy Graham special, one of his classic specials. At the end of it, it was like he put his finger right in my face. He goes, are you sure? Are you sure? And the very next day was my anniversary, so I knew I'd remember the day. So I got up in front of my church that day and I said I want to confess that the Lord Jesus is my Lord and Savior and that I believe that he died for me. And that was the day. That was April 29th and that was in 2011. Even though I was in church before that, God rescued me before that. He rescued me before I turned my life to him.

I just believe that God knows. He knew what was going to happen before it happened. He knew that I was going to choose him because he'd chosen me. That's what I believe. 

I serve the Lord as much as I can. I've been in Celebrate Recovery Ministry for almost the whole time since I was sober. I started going to celebrate recovery because I needed fellowship. I didn't go there because I had an addiction. I went there for fellowship. And then I found out about things like codependency and dealing with lust and other things, just dealing with your sin nature that all people deal with. Every person has something that they can work on. And that's why I was at celebrate recovery last night. I do it Mondays or Fridays almost every week. And I used to do it three days a week. It keeps me in fellowship. Which, I think, is how the church was meant to be. When you talk about the early church, they met every day. They didn't just meet on Sundays. They met every day and they broke bread and they prayed with each other and they talked about the Lord.

____________________________________________

I'll be honest, my fellow readers, I wasn't quite sure how to end this part of George's story. We actually sat and talked for awhile more, but I am going to save that and dive in deeper with him next time.

I loved listening to how God so tangibly and unmistakenly worked in George's life- for his WHOLE life. Even when he wasn't serving the Lord. I also really love that the thread woven through this story is that shame could not keep George from turning to Jesus. Shame does not define us- there is immense freedom when we turn to Jesus!

I hope you feel encouraged by this story, and be on the lookout for another segment from him!

Until next time,

Sondra

*Names were changed, as he wanted to be kept anonymous.

Link to video to go along with this blog: https://youtu.be/2kDey8zRlhc?si=DQ8iphySMhjkpM01