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Day 5: A New Father

Many HopeDealers, and just people in general, have lost something or someone very dear to them, and so they turned to something to fill the void. But that only leaves them emptier.

Have you lost someone important to you? Or maybe it wasn't a person but rather something else: money, or a home, or a career, or a marriage. Have you held the piercing pain of loss in the palm of your hand and tried to ignore it by sawing off your arm?

We've had a couple of guys come live in the Hope is Alive Mentoring Home who had experienced loss, and I want to tell you one of their stories now. Check it out in today’s video.

Tyler's Story

"My real father left when I was born, and I carried that around for a long time." The infant Tyler Barnes didn't yet know the Beatitude that said he's blessed when he feels he's lost what is most dear to him. How could he? And yet, that loss propelled him down a dark and lonely road.

"I didn't think I was wanted by the one person you want to want you. And because of that, I started to get into drug addiction as I went forward into high school. I didn't feel like I was wanted by my peers, like I was wanted by anybody except for my mom."

Tyler's drug addiction took hold in adolescence and led him to link up with plenty of so-called friends who were absolutely not the kind of people that anyone would actually call a friend.

"I tried to get clean several times, and before I finally got clean, I relapsed. I overdosed and died. One minute I was alive, trying to get high. And the next minute, I was just waking up. I just came back. Nobody knows why. It was like God just woke me up and said, 'All right, here’s one more chance.'"

But it was faith that would eventually lead him to turn his life around. Not his own faith: his mom's.

"I attribute my desire to get clean to two things. One is mom's prayers. The other thing is that she always had hope. She never gave up on me, to the point where she knew God was going to do something. There were nights where she cried. I think it's probably her prayers that got me through some of those really dark moments. Moments where maybe I shouldn't have been breathing, moments where I should've been arrested and wasn't, moments where people had guns out and I didn't get shot. Things like that."

Tyler graduated from the Hope is Alive Program and continues to grow both in his life and in his walk with the Lord. Tyler is now married and on staff at a local church, where he never misses a chance to share his hope with people.

"I tell them there are second chances. We've all been wounded by something in life. But the great thing is: I'm not wounded anymore. I've been healed. There's a scar. That's what my drug addiction is—it's a scar on my life, but the thing about scars is that people get to see them and they want to hear the story behind them."

Today, take a step to begin to tell someone about your scars...