_{*Quick Summary: The author discusses some of his life events and how those factor into his belief in Jesus Christ.*}

All through this blog are, and will be, mentions of my Christianity. It is not something I take lightly; I have worked to make it the core of who I am. I try to follow Jesus Christ, and sometimes I accomplish that goal. I try to live it every minute of the day, but I fail as much as I succeed. I am closer to God than I’ve been in a long, long time, but I also have so much to learn, so far to go, and so much left to give. There is no attainable perfection here; I will always be lacking. I am not always the person I should be, but I have matured as a Christian, and hope to continue to do so. For the sake of this post, I’ll try to elaborate a bit in hopes it will be a testimony of what I’ve lived through/what I believe, and that my story may be a source of knowledge or even inspiration for someone else. If nothing else, I can always serve as a bad example!

I was born into a loving Christian home with three other siblings. I was raised Catholic, and for so many reasons it did not ever feel right for me. It took a while to fully understand those reasons, but I was never comfortable as a Catholic. We may agree on some of the core beliefs of Christianity, but we differ on things like how to pray, the role of Mary, and the path to God. I believe Catholics are well-meaning, and often show more discipline in their beliefs than I do. They definitely display more structure than I do. This isn’t Catholic bashing, I’m just laying the groundwork for my personal journey and beliefs, and part of that is that I am an ex-Catholic.

Growing up, we were taught the Ten Commandments and all the basics of Christian/Catholic life. My parents always made sure I had a Bible, even as a young boy. They also provided an excellent example of love, trust, sacrifice, obedience, and a powerful sense of right and wrong based on Biblical principles. Their example showed me more than they will ever know, and it directly applies to my walk as a Christian today – be an example, be an example, be an example!

My Grandfather Raleigh James Myrick was a traveling Baptist evangelist. Sometimes he would stop by our house in route to his next revival, and would always quiz me on the Bible. It bothered me when I didn’t know the answers to those questions. That planted a seed of desire to study God’s Word. He would also let me tag along occasionally as he preached at revivals, or even regular Sunday morning or Wednesday night services at various churches around the country. More times than not, we would visit predominantly multi-cultural or African-American churches. My grandfather took great pride in the churches he visited, and in the message that the salvation of Jesus is for all people. God is not a racist, and we shouldn’t be either if our goal is to be more like Jesus. These sermons had a lasting impact on me, and in fact, I first asked Jesus Christ to come into my life – “got saved”, during one of my Grandfather’s sermons at an African-American church. I realized I most closely aligned with being a Baptist like him, and began to think as a Baptist even as I attended Catholic masses and schools. While I did not study the Bible regularly, I did occasionally pick up a bit of Biblical wisdom or facts that increased my knowledge somewhat. I can’t say I made a lot of progress on being a Christian as a child, I just sort of existed spiritually – somewhat ignorant and untried.

Somewhere around this point, you need to read a post I made about how badly I hated school. It will help fill in the gap between my salvation and my mid-teen years. To make a long story short, I was drugged and taken advantage of on multiple occasions by my female fourth grade teacher, among other things that made this a sour point in my young life. If you want, read that and come back to finish the rest of this, you can find it here: https://michaelmyrick.org/i-hated-school/

In my mid-teens, I had strong bouts of depression and anxiety. I had OCD and other issues as a child, but the teen years were on another level. I expected perfection from a very imperfect world. I expected justice from a very unjust world. I didn’t understand why we couldn’t all just love one another and get along. Unfairness, cruelty, hatred, racism, and so many other issues that I didn’t understand in the world, all led to a very full mind of confusing and bad thoughts. My disappointment in the world around me turned into disappointment in myself and my ability to understand and cope with it. I made the world’s problems my problems. The absolute turmoil in my mind was incredible and I began to feel something evil inside of me. The self-loathing and confusion in my brain would not stop. I could not concentrate on any one thing, as my mind was constantly inundated with a barrage of dread, bad thoughts, feelings, and emotions. I was in my own private mental and emotional hell. These things were tearing me apart from the inside. The thoughts surging through my brain were terrible and unending. I could not shut them off no matter how hard I tried. The only relief I could get was when I prayed or read the Bible. Praying usually seemed impossible, but when I powered through, I would ask God to help me and He would, but those thoughts would always come back as soon as I pulled further away from Him. While not yet a permanent fix, I learned Jesus would provide a refuge from evil if I earnestly prayed. I find the turmoil I lived through then has helped me to connect in a positive way with teens, pre-teens, and even adults who experience similar feelings and situations today. The value this time provided for my ability to comfort and counsel others has been tremendous, despite what I had to do to persevere through it.

In an attempt to correct my increasing anxiety problems, I was taken to a therapist in my mid-teens. He was a manipulative sort who created more problems than he solved. During his first “examination” he molested me. It was brief. When I told him to stop and got upset, he made me pay for not allowing him to touch me. Even though I tested negative for everything in blood tests, and never so much as thought about using drugs, he wrote in my chart “Possible Drug Abuse” and promptly decided I should spend a minimum of two weeks under his “care” in a local hospital, presumably to “detox”. That was the last place I needed to be, but in a weird way it helped me. It certainly convinced me I was NOT in the right place. The other folks there were very much in need of help, and I simply didn’t belong. I had anxiety and depression, but my problems were quite different and less destructive than the other patients there. In reality, my whole reason for being there was turning down the sexual advances of my doctor. Yes, I had issues, perhaps serious issues, but that hospital is not where I needed to be. Especially as he never came back to interact with me at all. He basically just put me away and left. He made a decision to try to silence me, and he couldn’t do that if I was able to immediately go home with my parents. I had ruined his twisted plan by resisting. Somehow, I was able to partially overcome this situation and found myself counseling other patients even as I was confused and hurting so badly myself. I told no one about the molestation, but finally convinced my parents I was “fine” and needed to leave that terrible place. Thank goodness they listened. The two weeks spent there were horrible, but I now own that part of my story, along with all the rest.

During this period of turmoil, and due to the confusion, angst, depression, anxiety, and shame I was feeling, I attempted to take my life playing a modified game of Russian roulette with my Mom’s revolver. I got the gun, sat in the floor of my parents bedroom, emptied all the bullets, reloaded one, spun the cylinder, placed the barrel in my mouth and proceeded to pull the trigger one, two, three, four, five times in succession, never spinning the cylinder in between. In a six shot revolver, this meant only one thing; the next pull of the trigger was death. I lowered the gun to the floor, loaded the rest of the rounds back in, wiped it off, and put it back where I got it. I literally fell on my face in prayer, and at that moment, I felt what I know was the Holy Spirit descend upon me. I felt incredibly peaceful and safe. For the moment, I found peace and knew I didn’t die for a reason. Everything had to be perfect for me to still be alive, and for that to happen I knew it was God telling me my work was not over yet. I had more left to do. For whatever reason, I was supposed to be in this world, but I was still battling some big demons. 

At one point in all of this, I tried to talk to a priest about it and he offered me alcohol while trying to sit in the same small chair with me and rub my upper thigh. Clearly a predatory move. That made me realize my only refuge was the Holy Spirit, as not even God’s supposed “messengers” could be trusted. Another sign the Catholic church was not right for me. While I don’t blame the church for the individual actions of the one priest, the fact remains the Vatican as well as the Catholic Church have done an absolutely horrible job turning in, prosecuting, and otherwise stopping the monsters in their midst. The fact I was almost prey for one of them solidified my resolve to remove myself from their warped, outdated, and failed system as soon as I could. They have conducted themselves miserably in this regard, and it is indefensible. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it.

I had some real-life, heavy-duty spiritual confrontations with myself during this period. Scary spiritual encounters. Things that would shape and sharpen my abilities to deal with evil moving forward. I was being ripped apart from the inside, and was only able to survive this time purely by the grace of God and love of my parents. I felt I could not trust anyone besides God and them – not even myself at the time. By this point, I’d been drugged and had sex with my fourth grade teacher, been molested by a doctor, thwarted an attempted molestation or worse by a priest, and tried to commit suicide. There seemed to be nowhere to turn, and no authority figures to trust. I had zero support system beyond my house, and felt truly lost and alone. While I knew Jesus Christ, my ability to commune with Him wasn’t great, and I wasn’t focused on improving it. For me at the time, God was a vending machine – I’d put a prayer in, and hope a little peace and quiet would come out.

Eventually, I outlived many of my issues with depression and anxiety, as I realized I needed to focus more on Jesus, the Bible, and prayer, and less on the world and myself. I have a different look on life and its problems due to my teenage years, and I am thankful I left that time behind me. I sincerely believe God used this time to teach me about myself and show me who and what I did NOT want to be. It caused me to both question and doubt God, and through that process, I proved to myself He is real. I also believe the battle for my soul was solidified at that point and because of that, I found the inner strength and resolve to keep going even in the toughest of times later in life. It strengthened me. I survived a battle with the most powerful supernatural evil in the universe, solely because I eventually started to wear some of the armor of God. Love always wins!

People have asked me how I can prove God exists. I tell them because I have felt Him in my life. Just like you can’t see the breeze, but you can feel it. I know God exists because I feel Him. I have interacted with and tested Him. He’s very real to me, and I know if people earnestly search, and open their hearts and minds, they’ll know He exists as well. We’re all born with a God-shaped hole in our hearts. Until you find that piece to your individual puzzle, you’ll try to fit all sorts of things in that hole. I wasn’t mentally ill and dreaming of a god to solve my problems. God solved my problems, including my mental state, as I drew closer to Him. He wasn’t an imagination; for me, He was a cure that my doubt couldn’t provide.

Through my mid-late twenties, I started building some momentum in a positive direction. I began to become more involved in spiritual matters. God became much more of a focus. I found a real direction in life and started to pursue it. Everything in life was improving for me. My sister Wendy was a major factor at this time as she too was undergoing a spiritual journey of sorts. Together with her husband and brother-in-law, they started a little church in Georgia.

I could tell my role was to make people think and always challenge what they believed, but my true gift was to counsel those who were going through tough spiritual battles. It seems God always directed people to me, and He gave me the greatest things to say to counsel those people. People I didn’t know would come to me for answers in their life, and although I never experienced the things they were going through, God gave me the right words to speak to them. Words of truth that resonated with them and changed their lives. I can honestly say every person God sent to me during that period was helped before they left. Every single one. God did that, I assure you it was not me. I would literally hear things come out of my mouth in the midst of counseling others that helped me in my own life. Thoughts that had never occurred to me, and that’s how I know it was God’s wisdom, not my own. The time I spent with that church will always live in my mind as one of the best feelings I’ve ever had. As my grandfather Raleigh once told me – “You can only run from your calling for so long.”, and it felt amazing to answer that call for a change. This period came to a hard stop with the death of my sister Michelle, when I would not only fail to make progress spiritually, I became a much worse person than I was before. 

As I progressed into my thirties, consensual sex began to enter into my life. See, despite the awful encounters I had as a child, I was still inexperienced when it came to a mutual, loving, intimate relationship until I was 29 years old. The inner push for me to “do it” before I turned 30 was very real. I was so driven by my desire to not just have sex, but to find a woman of my own to love and start a life with, that I worked my way into a relationship with a married woman I’d fallen in love with over the Internet. Her and her husband/family lived 500 miles away. Yes, a virgin in a first-time, long-distance relationship with a married woman from the Internet. Not my best decision. God was not involved in that relationship, so it ended predictably with failure, and sadly for them, they eventually divorced some time after she and I stopped seeing each other. My selfish desire for “normalcy” helped to destroy a marriage, and resulted in something that caused me great shame. A truly despicable act on my part, even though I felt what I recognized as a genuine love for the woman. I think it could’ve worked out eventually, but this definitely wasn’t the right time for either of us. I had pushed too hard, was far too desperate and insecure, and failed miserably, all without God. Insert wonderful words of wisdom about blooming flowers here.

I would have a few other relationships before I got married, and while none of them were as sinful as that first adulterous relationship, none were truly equally loving either. I was either the giver, or the taker. Never feeling satisfied, and/or never truly being enough for my partner. Never on equal ground. Never feeling positive about things. Never based on Godly principles, so therefore never fulfilling. Despite resistance from the women involved, I was the deciding party in the breakup of each of these relationships. I knew they weren’t right in my heart, and I genuinely wanted more for each of the women than I was able to provide. They deserved an equal exchange of love, and so did I. After that first relationship failed, I vowed I would never destroy someone’s life out of my own selfishness again. It was better to let each of these women find their life partner than to pretend things were working with us when I could feel they weren’t. Still, no matter how self-righteous I thought I was, dumping someone I loved sure didn’t feel good.

Into my forties, and for much of which is documented on this site, I continued to run from God’s calling on my life as I tried to replace it with work. Between that, everything surrounding losing Papa Joe Hendrick, and the devastation of the plane crash, work was the only thing I felt I could control. You can read the other posts in this blog and see how important my job was to me. I did everything I could to busy myself with anything other than what God called me to do. That resulted in being quite miserable, even in an eventual “Dream Job” situation. Eventually, I left that job in 2015, and to an extent, am still searching for more meaning in my life to this day. Recently, I had a real moment where I spoke to God, and turned over my past, my present, and even my future, allowing God to show me the next step, with the promise I’ll do whatever He sets forth. I have set my sights on repairing my relationship with Him, and have made great strides in that. 

I believe nothing can be as bad as what I’ve already lived through. I came to realize oftentimes we create our own problems, therefore we only need to look inside (with God’s help) to solve them. There is no problem you have that someone else can solve for you. The most anyone can do is point out a solution you haven’t seen, but the hardest part of changing your perception of the problem is still up to you. It does not matter what anyone does, did, or will do to you; what matters is how you handle it. The bad incidents that happened to me could have easily changed who I was, but they didn’t. Instead, I changed me because of those incidents. I took back ownership of my life and past. Ultimately, you alone are in control of yourself. This is your journey, and yours alone. You are not a victim unless you choose to be. I am not a victim. I am a student of life. Life taught me some hard lessons that with the help of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, I adapted to and eventually overcame.

My faith in Jesus Christ became, and still is, the cornerstone of who I am. I have battled with and questioned my faith in the years since I first believed, but I know my foundation in Christ is strong thanks in part to my early exposure to Him thanks to my parents and Grandfather. My maturity in Jesus is thanks to a renewed desire to increase my connection to the Holy Spirit that dwells within me as a Christian. My current focus as of this writing, is to work on not grieving the Holy Spirit with my actions, and through that journey, I have increased my knowledge of my own spirit. 

The Future – Who knows what the future holds? I know this much: If I die tomorrow, I’ve had a very good life with many loving friends and relatively few regrets. I have given a lot of love, but I have received even more. I am where I am today for a reason. I may not totally know why, but God brought me to this point in time and through everything I have been through so far. One of my friends, James, drew the following scenario for me. He gave it to me with an explanation. He said God told him to draw these things and to tell me that I wasn’t of the world, but I also wasn’t ready for the Tabernacle. Instead, I was holding fast to the doorway between the two, not going in, not coming out, just frozen, waiting to move. As much as I don’t like that analogy, it was true when James handed me his drawing, and it has been true for much of my life. My hope for the future is to fully let go of that doorway and step into what God wants for me.

Without Jesus, I am nothing. You can read through my whole blog and realize I had brushes with death, opportunities to give up and go a different way, and even motivation to just stop living. God alone is why I am here today. He alone is my strength. In only Him do I place my trust. He has never forsaken me and never will, no matter how worthless I am or feel. I have first-hand knowledge that the most powerful supernatural evil in existence wants me dead, has tried to take my life and make me give up multiple times, yet I am still here through the incredible grace of Jesus Christ and guidance of the Holy Spirit! I am not perfect. FAR from it! I sin daily. The OCD and depression I had as a child are long gone, but I still battle bouts of anxiety occasionally. I still have periodic times of self-doubt. I still fight hard some days to stay positive. Overall though, things are good and God has given me the tools to handle anything life throws at me, but I will always need God as my friend and psychologist. I’m extremely thankful for everything God has given me, most of all His son Jesus Christ, and I’m committed to being a better person than I have been in the past, while knowing none of us are truly “good”.

So those are some moments of my life and why I am a Christian – because I have nothing else. I have experienced the lowest of lows, but God has been my refuge in the hardest of times. The healing and calming nature of the Holy Spirit has kept me going. I am a sinner and far from perfect, but in Him I am made whole. Jesus Christ has made the biggest sacrifice to make sure that through our brokenness, we can be made right if we believe in Him. He is the only reason I’m still alive to write this, so why shouldn’t I dedicate my life to Him? If life is a court of law, I hope to die with a full body of evidence to my beliefs, and enough to convict me of being a Christian.