Finding Jesus and Sobriety in Las Vegas - Matthew's Story

Matthew Smith is from Chicago originally, born and raised.  He moved to the West Coast when he was a young man because he wanted to take care of his aging grandparents.  He had every intention of moving back “home” when he got older,  but he met a woman he thought was his true love and was married for 22 years.  When I asked him how he got to the streets, he said, “Simple version? I drank.”

Matthew started drinking when he was seven years old.  When he was a little boy, his grandfather took him to Wrigley Field to watch a baseball game.  He was crying because they were by a brick wall and he couldn’t see, so his grandfather stuck a beer under his seat and told him “just don’t tell your grandmother.”  Years later he realized that drinking and his terrible addiction was in his genes.  Sometimes it’s haunting that he remembers so clearly the very first day that he drank and got drunk, at the age of seven.

When Matthew was in high school, he drank socially, though he said that was a bizarre term for drinking.  His “social” drinking didn’t have an off switch.  He drank all the time.  Soon, his addictive behavior began to manifest itself in overeating, and he gained a lot of weight.  Though he still drank every day, he didn’t drink as much because he’d found comfort in food.  By 2004, and well into his adult life, he weighed over 300 pounds.  Matthew was very fortunate to be able to have gastric bypass surgery, allowing him to lose over 100 pounds in just 30 days.

And while that might seem like a silver lining story, it isn’t.  Matthew’s overeating caused his health problem, but remember, his overeating was just another form of addiction.  And now that he couldn’t eat much at each meal, he started drinking again.  He justified it by having a glass of wine so his food could “digest better.”  But he knew it was just an excuse.  Soon he was drinking  a gallon to a gallon and a half of vodka every day.   He wanted so desperately to stop, but he couldn’t.

Matthew’s wife and family stuck with him for 5 years, took him to AA, counseling and whatever else he needed to get him help.  They lived in Ventura County, had a beautiful home, cars, and he even owned his own business.  His slope from surgery to complete and utter destruction was just over 6 years.  But as he tells the story, he held it together pretty well for a long time, claiming that it didn’t take him years to lose everything (like most of the other guys at the mission), but that he lost it all in just 6 months.  Of course, that is what most alcoholics think.  That their life just “suddenly” spiraled out of control.  But for those living with the addict, they know that’s not the case.

Soon Matthew reached a place where he just couldn’t function any more.  He stopped going to work and was fired by all his clients.  Eventually he wound up in a mission in Ventura County telling them he just couldn’t do this anymore.  He’d had a glimpse of what sobriety would look like and what it was going to take for him to do it and what it was going to mean for him to have that change in his life, and that’s where he found Jesus Christ.

Matthew was raised Polish Catholic.  He thought he was a Christian, but the only God he knew was an angry and punishing God, the God of the Old Testament, full of fire and brimstone. His father, an abusive man, didn’t “spoil the rod” as Matthew said.  So Matthew often found respite at the Catholic Church and with the priests there.  At one point in his life, he even thought he might become a priest.  But then he fell in love and got married, outside the Catholic Church because his new wife had been divorced.  He gained a wife, but lost the one connection he had to God.

Matthew’s relationship with God was off and on for so many years, as was his relationship with alcohol.  He told me a story of once when he had drank so much he was in a mental institution but they kicked him out.  He said he’s the only person he knows of that’s ever gotten evicted out of a mental hospital! That’s how Matthew found the mission, and how he discovered a different God than the one he knew as a boy in the Catholic Church.  This God was a God of love.  Someone quoted Romans 10:13 to him, which says, “For whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”  And he knew at that moment, they were talking to him. 

Matthew stayed at the mission for 6 months, got sober, and his life was miraculously restored to him.  His wife, his family, his grandchildren.  Everything.  He was walking baby steps with God.  He got baptized, was attending Saddleback Church, tithing, the whole works, but he knew deep in his heart he was just going through the motions like he’d done as a boy in the Catholic Church. Once outside the protected environment of the mission, Matthew realized that the outside world hadn’t stopped.  His family didn’t have a chance to be in neutral for a while and get reset.  It was thrust into drive at lightening speed, and he was in the driver’s seat.  He wasn’t prepared for the responsibility yet, but he felt like he could do it on his own, that he didn’t need help, including help from Christ.

For 6 months, he held it together, but soon he started drinking again, and before long, he had lost everything. Again.  In desperation, he cried out to God to let him die.  But he lived, a fact that probably made him even more angry at God.  He knew that God loved him, but he just couldn’t see how this God could love him and forgive him for all that he had done in his years of drinking.  So he just kept running from God and toward alcohol.

When asked “What happened to make you do your total surrender to God?”  He smiled and said, “Sometimes, God puts us on our back so we can look up.”  He’d been drunk for almost three weeks, just existing; him, his alcohol, nothing more.  Even when he went out to buy his alcohol, the woman at the store knew what he wanted, would set it on the counter, and he’d pay for it and leave.  No words exchanged.

He was very drunk one night and could hardly stand and get his clothes on, but he got dressed and went out to get more booze.  He hit the top stair and fell down 12 stairs, broke out all his teeth and woke up in a pool of his own blood.  First thing he did was look up.  Lying there in his own blood he said “Lord, help. Please help me, tell me what to do, guide me, I’m done with my own will. I’m done trying, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me, and I need your help.” 

The rest of that is pretty much a blur. That was the 20^th of September, 2012.  He went back upstairs and got the first decent sleep he’d had in months.  Eventually he checked into a hospital, suffered through the “DT’s”, every day asking God to help him and show him where to go.  Matthew said, “When you’re really looking for the Holy Spirit to lead you, He will. It is very clear what you need to do.”  He remembered the mission when he’d been in California, so he went to the Las Vegas Rescue Mission, trying to let the Word lead him instead of him leading his own life.  “Only after I’d ruined everything in my own life, was I finally able to see what He wanted me to do in my life.”  (Such a common story among the homeless who are addicts.) Being homeless and being a drunk was the result of a lifetime of poor choices, a lifetime of addiction. But  with his last $5 he put everything he owned in a trash bag, got a bus pass, and made it to Las Vegas Rescue Mission. 

He doesn’t remember much about the trip to the mission, but when he got there, they told him to stand in line and they’d see if they could get him a bed.  He was the 4^th person in line that night, and there were 4 open beds.  He knew God wanted him to be there.  He trusted that.  And even though he couldn’t get into the program right away (he was begging; but honestly, they hear that all the time there and they have to be so careful to give those spots to people who are truly ready to change their lives!), he was accepted into the program.  September 23, 2012.  The day he says that God performed a miracle in his life.  He said, “I am sober, and it’s all because of Jesus Christ.  He saved me from the wreckage of my life.”

I couldn’t help but smile as I talked to him and said, “But God wasn’t finished with you yet, was he?”

Matthew smiled and said, “Sammie, I wanted to serve others, so I volunteered to serve in the kitchen.  I had some restaurant experience, and I knew I needed to be busy.  I didn’t plan on leading anything, BUT GOD had other plans.  First I was the cook, then the shift coordinator, and now I am the kitchen supervisor for the swing shift. Every day I get to serve and talk to the very same guys I was on the street with.  I get to ask them, ‘Are you tired yet?  Are you tired of living in the middle of your mess?  Are you really tired yet?’”

“It’s a miracle that God is giving me this chance to serve the people who are like I used to be.  He’s going to use me to help those people.  That’s why he brought me here.  That’s why He saved me; to offer others hope that they can change too.”

That’s what is so incredible about missions like Las Vegas Rescue Mission.  They are lighthouse of hope.  A place where God works in the lives of forgotten people, people like Matthew Smith.

Here is a picture of Matthew.  I intentionally did not put it at the top of this post, because I wanted you to formulate in your mind's eye, a picture of what you thought Matthew would look like.  Does this picture match the one in your mind?  If you are like most people, it's nowhere close.  For each of us, we have this picture of a what a homeless, skid row, drunken, broke down man looks like, and this isn't it.  It should prove to you that you cannot judge the face of homelessness.

Matthew, we pray God's richest blessing over you and pray for your continued sobriety.

Sammie