My name is Ty Rice I am 27 years old married with three children. I am also a former Crack addict. I spent 7 years of my life addicted to women drugs and money, I made them my god’s I did what ever I had to do to get more of them. I stole, I lied, I cheated. I did whatever it took. My addiction to crack was fairly short lived, a little over a year of nearly everyday use. I would leave school early or just skip the day all together in order to go work for a few hours. If we didn’t have a job to do that day we would spend the day going from store to store stealing cartons of cigarettes, so we could sell them down town. Whatever money we made during the day wither by working or by stealing we would use to buy crack.  I was probably 16 or 17 years old when walking home early one morning at like 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning, I was high on crack and had spent every penny I had.  I got in my room, fell down face first on my bed and began to cry out to God, “What has happened to me? Why am I like this? Save me. I'm sorry. Save me.” I woke up the next day completely free from my addiction to crack. Over the next 3 years God removed one addiction after another from my life. I didn’t go to church and I didn’t give God any credit for the things he was doing in my life. I had no idea he was doing it. When I woke up in the morning free from my addiction to crack I guess I just thought I quit because I had finally had enough. I didn’t really think about why I wasn’t doing it I just didn’t do it. As for the other drugs in my life at the time LSD., crystal, mushrooms, ect... I just began to get sick every time I would try them, so I stopped. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I realized God was the one behind all of this.                                       

       Two years after I had said that prayer asking God to save me, my life was still a mess.  I was still smoking pot which had become the most important thing in my life since I had quit all the other drugs I was doing. I still would drink on occasion as well, but pot was definitely number one in my life at the time. This is about the time when I met a young girl who had just moved to the area didn’t no anybody and was lucky enough to meet me. (j/k) She was a beautiful girl who had some issues of her own, but didn’t drink and didn’t do drugs. she was the same age as me 1 month older to be exact, didn’t have a job b/c she had just moved to the area and I also didn’t have a job b/c I had just moved back to the area. We spent days together just hanging out with each other. I wanted to spend all my time with her. She quickly took the spot of number one in my life, though I still got high all the time. She was more important to me than anything else. after only a few months she moved in with me and a few months after that she became pregnant. We decided we wanted to get married.  We went to a church close to her mothers house. We sat through a service, and I don’t have any idea what it was about. I was just watching all the people.  After it was over, we went up to the front to talk to the pastor, to ask him if he would marry us. He was a nice guy, very friendly, looked unlike any pastor I had ever seen. He kept his head shaved, wore an earring and had a Goatee. I thought he was a pretty cool looking guy. We went and asked him and he said “let’s meet and talk about it. Here’s my card, give me a call.”  A couple days later we called him up and set up a time to meet. We went to meet with this pastor, he asked us a few questions about why we wanted to get married and then a couple questions about our relationship with God, before going into all the reasons he wouldn’t just marry us. I was so angry at the time. As he finished talking, he told us we could rent a pastor out of the paper and actually took us in his car, down the street, to a small church. He said we could rent it. When we got back to the church, he said he would like to get to know us and if we went through this Alpha program they were having at their church and took pre-marriage counseling at the church, he would reconsider marring us. When we got back into my car to go home we were both so disappointed. The honesty of this guy and his time that he gave to us just seemed to weigh on my heart, and I decided that we should go to this Alpha program and check it out. We began this Alpha course which I learned was a practical introduction to the Christian faith and had very little to do with couples who wanted to get married, which he had kind of led me to believe. Anyway, through this course my heart for God and his word began to grow like crazy. I couldn’t read enough of the bible or anything that would teach me about God. I would come home at night from the course and sit outside my house smoking cigarettes and thinking about God and different questions I wanted to ask when I went back. We began to attend church every Sunday. Eventually, by the end of the 11 week Alpha course, we both had said prayers, asking God into our hearts. When the time for the next Alpha came around I was asked to help with it, and did. During this time, I was still struggling with an addiction to pot, and about 3 to 4 weeks into the course we were all sitting in a room after the course had ended that night, talking about what all happened, when a man walks in who had been praying throughout the whole night.  He said “I feel God has put this scripture on my heart for someone in this room” and he went on to read Hebrews 12:1 Therefore since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and run with perseverance the race marked out for us.     

         I knew right away, that passage was for me.  I probably read that passage 1,000 times and decided I was going to quit smoking pot. I gave myself a couple days and set a date that would be the last time I ever smoked pot and it was also the same day I was going to get married. On the way to get married at the church, where we just had a private ceremony before our parents and God I told my wife that I was quitting. A few months down the road Sarah told me that she had prayed for a long time that if I were the guy she was to marry then I would quit smoking pot and I did on our wedding day. God from then on has just poured blessing after blessing out on our lives.  We now have two beautiful children and the number one thing in both of our lives is God.