Peter shares how your support gives him hope.

“If I hadn’t come to the Mission, I don’t know if I would still be alive. What’s scarier is I don’t know what other bad decisions I would have made, or how much more pain I would have caused. I’m grateful that I’m here.”

As a child, Peter went through some traumatic experiences that came to define his sense of self-worth. “It influenced a lot of my decisions and the way I saw things, and I was stuck in not knowing exactly who I was,” he reflects.

As a teenager, he began drinking with friends, and he noticed that alcohol distracted him from his painful thoughts. “It was a release,” he says. “For a while, it helped me forget the things that happened, where I’d come from, and the choices I’d made.”

But the relief was short-lived, and a vicious cycle of addiction set in that took over his life for decades: drinking led to bad decisions, which led to guilt, which led to even more drinking.

He experienced a glimmer of hope when he went to treatment and sustained a couple of years of sobriety. But before long, he started isolating himself and fell back into drinking again.

“I went to the hospital, and they told me half of my pancreas was dead. They said if I ever drank again, I would die. I had lost my job at that point, and home alone in my dark apartment, I thought, ‘This is it. I’m not sure how I can go back from here.’ I didn’t see things getting any better, so I drank again,” he says.

His body began shutting down, and his will to live waned. “When I saw myself in the mirror, I thought I didn’t want to be here anymore. But then all of a sudden, I thought, ‘No, I do want to be here. I don’t want to die.’”

That same day, he saw his neighbor, who was a graduate of the Market Street Mission’s Life Change Addiction Recovery Program. His neighbor noticed that Peter was in desperate need of help – and he explained how the Mission could change his life.

“That was the turning point,” Peter says. Help showed up the moment he needed it most.

However, he was still feeling hesitant, so he called our front desk to learn more before committing to our program. On the phone, the man at the desk called him “beloved” – and something inside him shifted.

“No one had ever said that to me before, but this person who never met me said I was beloved,” he remembers. “That’s what I’d been searching for my whole life – for someone to see past who I thought I was and really see me.”

Though he was nervous, Peter joined our addiction recovery program, and he felt welcome as soon as he walked through the door. “It didn’t feel like people were talking about me, like it had felt for most of my life. People wanted to get to know who I was,” he says.

In the past, Peter struggled to trust people. But as he surrounded himself with other men who had recovered from their addictions and been changed by God’s grace, he learned that he wasn’t alone in his struggles, and he started to build a network of support.

Over time, counseling helped him heal from the pain of his past and removed its power to define him. Instead, through Bible studies and guidance from mentors, he learned to find his worth in Jesus. “My biggest challenge was believing I had any kind of value, but in my relationship with Christ, I realize I’m not a mistake.”

Thanks to your prayers and support, Peter successfully completed our addiction recovery program, and he is celebrating new life through God’s grace. He looks forward to going back to school and using his life to point other people to the life-changing love of God.

“Since coming to the Mission, I have hope – and I get to see the sign of that hope, the cross, every day in the chapel. This is the most fulfilling life I can imagine. The Mission is teaching me to love like I have nothing to lose.”

To read the rest of this issue of Market Street Mission Messenger, click here.

Learn more about our Addiction Recovery Program

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