Eli was a middle child raised by a single mother. He didn’t know his dad early on, except what his mom shared about some of the stories of fear and abuse. He was angry as a child and didn’t know why. “I don’t know where it came from, but as a young man, I had a lot of rage” He spent much of his youth in different types of treatment and detention.

As a child Eli was out of control, this led to diagnosis like Bipolar, ADHA, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder… “I was conditioned/ trained to believe that if there is something wrong with me that I could just take something and fix it.” At 11 Eli smoked pot and drank alcohol for the first time. This just escalated until, in the middle of a multiple day drug bender, Eli overdosed at age 13.

By age 15, Eli was selling and using drugs. A semester before he graduated High School, he dropped out. His plan was to spend the rest of his life selling and smoking dope. Two weeks later he was arrested for class 3 felony burglary. This pattern continued. Eli now believed drugs were the problem. “I believed that if I could just stop using the drugs, everything else in my life would be ok.”

But Eli couldn’t and didn’t stop. Repeated interactions with authorities and the Law led Eli to being sentenced and incarcerated for 5-10 years. Even in prison, Eli found a way to get high and stay high. But that meant a lot of time in solitary confinement. It wasn’t until towards the end of Eli’s incarceration, that he finally did something he had never done before. That was when the trajectory of his life changed.

Through all this story, Eli looks back and can see how God was using key people in his life to continue to work on Eli.

“I used to go to any length to stay high, now I go to any lengths to stay clean.” - Eli