About half way through my senior year in high school (in Los Angeles) I ran away from home. I had been drinking and using drugs on a daily basis since my sophomore year. My parents were addicts as well but had both sobered up around the time I started off on my not so glamorous career as a human garbage can. I was so angry. I grew up in an alcoholic household and I'd seen and experienced way too much.

When they sobered up they eventually came to me to do their 9th step of A.A., which is basically taking responsibility for your actions, it's effect on others, and apologizing. I look back and realize that my attitude should have been one of gratitude and joy but I was so angry that they thought they could just come and say "sorry" after years of so much abuse. So from that point on my attitude was that it was payback time. So off I went.

I lived on the streets, on the roof of an antique shop on Wilshire Blvd. in West L.A. I got up every morning and went to school and worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant up the street – but I eventually quit both.

I made my way to Yosemite National Park where I lived and worked for 4 years. I drank and used everyday. I was fired because one day I was drunk, go figure, and set fire to a large pile of debris near some cabins. I was labeled an "insane alcoholic arsonist" and told never to return.

Back to L.A. where I went through periods of working, rehabs, being homeless, and had a new found addiction to heroin. I grew up with the dream of being a professional athlete. I started training at a really young age – I was really good early on and had a bright future. A bad injury ended all that, and I obviously dealt with that in a most unhealthy and self-destructive way. But I remember sitting in an alley in Hollywood, with a needle in my arm thinking, "what the hell happened, I was supposed to be playing college ball right now". It all just spiraled out of complete control so fast.

Well, after a few years of that, I hitchhiked from L.A. to Seattle. New place, same me, same everything. But God's grace, which was so obviously keeping me alive, would soon change things. I ended up in Harborview Hospital. I don't really recall how I got there but the experience led me to Seattle’s Union Gospel Missions (UGM) New Vision Program. I'd been through rehab before but New Visions was different. God was spoken of constantly. Jesus was taught and nurtured into my broken heart and eventually a healing began. I was a real mess, inside and out, and the process was slow. But eventually I began to clear and things started to change. The staff treated me, and all of us, with kindness and respect.

Eventually I became an intern and later a full-time counselor for New Vision. Then down the road I worked a case manager for the Women and Children’s Shelter.

I'd been clean and sober for almost three years. Life was okay, but I had no friends, stopped praying, and sat around my apartment feeling sorry for myself because I felt so lonely. Living like that, the inevitable happened and I started drinking again. I REALLY started drinking again and it wasn't long before I lost my job with the Mission. The worst point in my life. I was not only devastated that I relapsed and lost my job with UGM but I was so ashamed and felt I'd let so many people down – staff, Herb and his wife, and everybody there at UGM that treated me so well.

I locked myself inside and tried to drink myself to death. But Herb, being Herb, made sure that didn't happen and along with director of the Women and Children’s Shelter at the time. They finally got me out of my cave and into a medical equipped treatment program. It turns out that I was almost successful in my suicide by consumption plan. Initial tests revealed that my liver was almost completely shut down, my enzymes completely out of whack, with a cholesterol level of 1220!! My liver was simply not processing anything.

That night I was scared, crying, and laying in the middle of a field at the treatment center. I prayed, pleading for my life, telling God how sorry I was, on and on. God said, "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you". That was the real turning point of my life.

I was accepted back into New Visions, as a client again. I was so ashamed but not once was I treated or even looked at with a hint of ill will. The staff of UGM treated me as they always did, with love and respect. It was (is) like God's grace. I deserved worse, I didn't deserve anything at all, but they loved me anyway.

That was almost ten years ago, hard to believe. I later moved back to California, went back to school, and started working in health care, a field I still enjoy being in. I met a nurse named Monica and we traveled together, working in hospitals from Maui to the U.S. Virgin Islands. A couple of years ago we got married. My mom and dad came. They've been sober for over 20 years now. I love them so much and they are a great example to me. After the wedding we sat together and just cried. What a journey.

God saved me, and continues to every moment of every day. I don't know why He's spared me.

Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission isn't what saves people like me. BUT GOD USES UGM FOR HIS GLORY AND TO MANIFEST HIS GRACE, by saving people like me. Would I be here today had it not been for the Mission in Seattle? Who knows, but I really doubt it. I'm so glad I'm still here. I would have missed so much that I never in a million years would have thought was possible for myself.

To Herb and his wife, and all the others at the Mission, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Landon Merritt