Hitting rock bottom to find the Rock (Jesus)

After being discharged from the military in 2018, my life spiraled into three years of addiction. By 2021, I was given an opportunity to rebuild, and I started a fitness coaching company called Limitless Coaching. Within one year, the business generated more than $500,000 in revenue and served over 250 clients. From the outside, it looked like success. Behind the scenes, I was destroying myself to maintain it. I worked 18-hour days for nearly 12 months straight. I barely slept. My identity became wrapped up in performance, success, money, and what I could build. Most importantly, I had no relationship with my Heavenly Father. Then everything changed. On May 1, 2022, I woke up and did not know who I was. I couldn't recognize what was happening to me. I didn't know who my clients were. It felt as though my entire life had disappeared overnight. My business partners walked away. Clients began asking for refunds. The company I had sacrificed everything to build collapsed, and with it went the identity I had built around it. For the next 14 months, I lived through one of the darkest seasons of my life. I fell into a deep depression with no answers and eventually spent five days in a VA psychiatric facility. Then I reached the point where I didn't want to live anymore. I called the suicide hotline while contemplating taking 130 pills to end my life. But God was not finished with my story. Shortly after returning home, a friend asked me if I wanted to go on a road trip. I didn't know it at the time, but that trip would become the turning point of my life. Somewhere along that road, I finally came to the end of myself. I got down on my hands and knees, cried out to the Lord, and surrendered my life to Him. For years, I had tried to build my own life through achievement, performance, money, discipline, and sheer willpower. I had gained success and lost it. I had built an identity and watched it collapse. But when I had nothing left to offer, I finally surrendered. That road trip didn't just give me another chance at life. It led me to Jesus.

Looking back, I can see that what felt like the destruction of my life was actually the destruction of an identity I was never meant to carry. At the time, I thought I had lost everything. My business, my relationships, my confidence, my purpose, and even my understanding of who I was. I couldn't see anything beyond the pain. Later, I began to understand that I had built my identity on performance. I knew how to work, achieve, build, and prove myself, but I did not know how to simply be loved by God. I thought success would give me identity. Instead, losing it exposed how much of my identity had been built on something that could disappear overnight. What I once saw as the end of my life, I now see as the beginning of surrender. God met me when I had nothing left to perform with, nothing left to prove, and nothing left to hide behind. I began learning that my worth was not found in what I could build for God, but in belonging to Him. I lost the life I thought I needed so I could begin discovering the life Christ was calling me to live.

I see God in the fact that I am still here. I can see Him in the moments when I had completely given up on myself, yet He continued placing people in my path. I see Him in the phone call that kept me alive, in the friend who invited me on that road trip, and in the moment I finally found myself on my knees crying out to Him. At the time, I thought God was absent because I could not understand what was happening. Now I can see that He was meeting me in the very place where everything I had trusted in was being stripped away. He was revealing that my identity was never supposed to be found in the military, bodybuilding, business, money, success, or what I could accomplish. Most importantly, I see that God did not wait for me to get my life together before meeting me. He met me in my brokenness and began showing me what grace, surrender, and being loved as His son actually looked like. I cannot explain every part of what happened, but I can say this with confidence: God was present even when I could not perceive Him, and He was writing a story I could not yet see.