Brad's letter continues,
“When I was about twenty-seven years old, I married a young
and beautiful girl named Amber. I
remember thinking that since I’ve tried everything else, maybe marriage would
fix me. But our marriage only lasted one
short year. To be honest with you, I
really didn’t love her; I was just trying to fill this void in my heart. Before we got married, Brother David Troxell
of Hilltop Baptist church pulled me outside the church and asked me, “Are you
sure you’re supposed to marry this girl?” I looked him right in the eye and
lied. I said, “Yes,” when I knew in my
heart I wasn’t supposed to.
Anyway, back to God convicting me of being with Misty
without being married. (This wasn’t the
first time I was convicted by God.) Once
when I was with Amanda R, God woke me up in the middle of the night with this
same guilt of being in bed with someone I wasn’t married to. So I got up to go to the couch to sleep, and
had this sudden strange urge to read the Bible.
(My mother had left a Bible there when she started going to Hilltop
church with the Douglas family and I told her
I had gotten saved.)
I grabbed the Bible and started reading but not
understanding anything. Suddenly I heard
the sound of someone coming into the room, so I quickly hid the Bible because I
didn’t want anyone to see me reading it.
But no one showed up. Then I had
to use the bathroom, and on the way there, I heard a Man’s voice ask, ‘Why are
you hiding Me?’ That really freaked me
out. I went to check on my brother who
was in the back bedroom, but he was sound asleep, so I just shook it off and
went on to the bathroom.
When I came out of the bathroom and headed back to the
couch, I got to the same spot in the kitchen where I’d heard the voice befpre, and
again a Man said, louder this time, ‘Why are you hiding Me?’ I don’t really have the words to describe the
feelings of this experience; I felt an overwhelming love and joy not of this
world. I stopped in my tracks and all I
could do was cry tears of utter joy! I
stood there and wept for I don’t know how long in the presence of the Lord. I went to the couch and turned on the radio to a
Christian station, which soothed my soul.
When Misty awoke, I told her we were quitting drugs and going to church. To my surprise, she said, “Okay,” so we went
a few times. I remember going to this
one church with her and outside I saw some men smoking cigars and thought,
‘Really? Right on the church steps?’ We went in anyway, but the place was as dead
as a grave yard. So we quit going to
church after that. You guessed it—I went
right back to drugs and drinking.
One night, I was sitting there at Misty’s house drinking
liquor. I was pill-sick. You get flu-like symptoms when your body
doesn’t have the drugs it’s used to.
Actually, you can get very sick and this is one of the reasons it’s so
hard for addicts to quit. You have to
get sick to get better! Anyway, I made
her give me the keys to her car and I was off to find a pain pill. I stopped at a BP gas station/store where
they had fruit machines and poker machines in the back where you could win
money if you got enough points. I had
fifteen dollars to my name, and tried my luck with the poker machine, because I
didn’t have money to get my fix. Of course,
I lost all my money and now I was drunk and
mad. So I devised a plan that I would
tell the cashier I hit on the machine, and when the cashier walked back to the
machines, I would grab the cash register and flee the scene.
Well, I did all that and after I got down the road a ways, I
discovered the cash register had seven hundred dollars in it, so now I could
get my Oxycontin drug. I found a pill
and was feeling better, but I knew I was in for it if the law caught up to
me. By now the sun was coming up, so I
figured I better call Misty and tell her I was at a friend’s house and tell her
to come over.
While she was on her way, my friend wanted to trade me a
sawed-off shot gun for a pill. I didn’t really want the shot gun, but told him
I would do it if he waited on Misty and snorted the pill with her. When she got there, I put the gun under the
back seat of the car, and we left to do God only knows what, but we got pulled
over at the end of the road. The cops
found the gun, and I said it was mine.
The reason I’m sitting here in Federal prison is that possessing a
sawed-off shot gun is a Federal offense.
I’ve been in custody about seven years now.
Photo by seraphicpress.com
What I want you to see is how Satan got me when I was young
and raped me of my life. Sin will cost
you more than you want to pay, and keep you longer than you want to stay. God is a Gentleman: He never makes us serve
Him. He’s looking for sons and daughters.
I kept choosing to go the opposite way every time He dealt with me, and
my life got worse and worse because I wouldn’t do what was right.
The year was 2005, and there I was in jail at the age of twenty-seven. I started having these dreams of being in
hell, and I would wake up in cold sweats and shaking. I said to God, “What do you want me to
do?” I felt He wanted me to go to church
there in jail, so I did.”
To be continued…
Copyright © 2015
Elaine Beachy
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