The thing Sam remembers most about the day he came to Hope Ministries over a decade ago is the feeling that he’d reached the end of his life.
He was only a young adult at the time, and he was dropped off in a cop car. “I was defeated walking through those doors,” he says. “I didn’t have hope. I had pretty much given up on life.”
Sam’s earlier years had included drug use and teenage gang activity. Then came a bad batch of drugs that sent him into a two-year psychosis.
“It’s called toxic encephalopathy. I lost touch with everything. I lost relationships with family, with all my friends,” he recalls. “It was years in and out of mental institutions. No medication, no therapy touched it.”
Sam’s turning point came during an evening chapel service at our Bethel Mission men’s shelter as a traveling missionary shared his testimony.
“He hammered one point,” Sam recalls. “He said, ‘If you feel like you’ve tried every other avenue and nothing in your life has fallen into place, I’m telling you, Jesus can change your life.’ I lifted up a silent prayer and said, ‘Jesus, my life is yours.’ And my life started to change the very next day.”
“Over the coming years,” Sam continues, “God restored my mind. He restored relationships with my family. He started to undo every lie I’ve ever believed about myself.”
Sam
“I was told I was a monster, an addict, going nowhere. But God flips everything on its head when he reconciles you back to Himself.”
Sam’s stay with Hope Ministries lasted several months as he saved up to rent his own place. He later earned a degree in business administration. The following years weren’t without their challenges, but through church and participation in Alpha, a course that helps Christians explore their beliefs, Sam continued to grow in his faith . . . and eventually he felt called to go into global missions.
Sam has spent the past few years as a missionary in Romania and war-torn Ukraine. His work is filled with variety: street ministry, humanitarian aid, homebuilding in de-occupied villages, discipleship training, English club— all in partnership with local churches and ministries.
It hasn’t been easy, especially with the war in Ukraine. “There’s not a single person there that hasn’t been affected by it,” he notes. But through it all, he’s had opportunities to share how Jesus transformed his life.
“Everything we do is to get the Gospel out and model the love of Christ,” he says. “When we can release to others what God has done in our lives, then they can think, ‘Maybe He can do that for me, too.’”
And looking back, Sam can see how God has been working all along, using the pain in his past to prepare him for a new purpose. “Talk about God redeeming all things!” he says. “When God gets ahold of your heart, the doors open up. He doesn’t promise us easy. But He promises He’ll be with us.”
