I Was Looking for Freedom in All the Wrong Places

I was standing in a park in Cavan, a small town in the north of Ireland, soaked through, out of breath, in clothes I had been wearing for days. The grass was wet. The sky was going from black to grey. Somewhere behind me a bird had started singing, as if this were an ordinary morning and I were an ordinary man.

I had been running most of the night. Not from the police. Not from anyone you could point at. I had been running from voices — voices that had been inside my head for two days and would not stop.

And then, standing there in the wet grass, I heard them say something new:

You're finished. We're taking you out.

I was thousands of kilometres from the country where I was born, and I had spent almost eighteen years looking for freedom — in bottles, in powders, on screens, in every place a man is told he might find it. That morning I understood that I had found the exact opposite.

And then one word came back to me. Not a thought. Not an idea.

A name.

Before I tell you what happened when I said that name out loud, I have to take you somewhere else entirely. To a small kitchen with green tiles, in Vilnius, a long time before any of this began.

I was born in Lithuania in 1977, in Vilnius, when the country was still part of the Soviet Union. For much of my childhood I lived with my grandmother.

Her kitchen is one of the clearest pictures I carry from that time. It was small — a little square room, the kind they built into every apartment block back then. The walls were covered in green tiles, square and shiny, cold to the touch. I can still see the light in it. I can still smell it.

That kitchen is where I first heard about Jesus.

My grandmother had no money and no influence. She never travelled anywhere important. But she had something that turned out to be worth more than any of it: she actually knew the One she was talking about.

Almost every day she told me something about Him. Not as a lesson. Not as a rule. She talked about Jesus the way you talk about someone you love, someone who might walk in the door at any moment. And I was a little boy, so I listened, and I believed every word.

I did not know then what was happening in that kitchen. I thought I was listening to stories.

She was planting seeds.

Some seeds go into the ground and come up in a season. Others go into a human heart and lie there for twenty years, buried under everything a person piles on top of them — and they still do not die.

I know this, because mine didn't.

I did not lose my faith in one dramatic moment. Nobody talked me out of it. There was no argument, no crisis, no tragedy.

I simply grew up, and I wanted something else.

By the time I was a teenager I had decided to walk my own road. I could not hold on to the values my grandmother had put in me — they felt like someone else's coat, a size too small. What I wanted was adventure. Excitement. Pleasure. I wanted to taste everything.

The strange thing — and I still think about this — is that I never stopped praying. Not really. Somewhere underneath everything, I kept talking to God. I did not read the Bible. I did not go to church. I did not obey Him in any way at all. But every so often, alone, I would say something to Him.

Around my twentieth birthday, the door opened wide.

Alcohol first, then drugs, then pornography. Money that should have gone toward a life went into a weekend and vanished. Later, computer games took whatever hours the rest of it left behind.

I want to be honest with you, because I think honesty is the only thing that makes a story like this worth reading: at the beginning, it was fun. If I tell you it was miserable from the first drink, you will know I am lying, and you will stop listening. It was not miserable. It felt like living. It felt like I had finally found the door out of a small grey world.

That is exactly how it works. Sin does not introduce itself as a prison. It introduces itself as freedom, and it builds the walls behind your back, quietly, while you are still enjoying yourself.

I did not notice the walls for years.

What I did notice, first, was the fear.

Fear arrived quietly, and then it moved in permanently.

Anxiety followed me everywhere. It got to the point where I could not simply be around people — could not have a normal conversation, could not sit at a table and talk — unless I had drunk something first. The alcohol did not make me happy anymore. It made me possible.

So I drank more. And more.

At some point the weekends stopped being weekends. They started on Friday and ended somewhere in the middle of the next week. When the alcohol stopped working, I put drugs on top of it. When that stopped working, I looked for the next thing. We called those stretches marathons, and that is exactly what they were — days and days of running with no finish line.

Then came the part almost nobody talks about. The stopping.

When a marathon finally ended, I would lie there and wait for the colours of life to come back. That is the only way I can describe it. Everything had gone grey — food, music, weather, faces. I was waiting to feel like a human being again, to feel that simple ordinary thing: I am alive, and today is a day.

It cost enormous pain to get back to that. Days of it. And almost every time, before I reached it, I would dive back into the same swamp — because the pain of climbing out was worse than the darkness underneath.

That is the chain. It is invisible, and it tightens with every year.

Life kept offering me chances. I kept selling them.

And so I hid. I told people I was mentally ill, because that was easier than telling them the truth. I went looking for diseases inside myself. Several times a year I went to doctors and asked to be tested for things, and every single time the results came back normal. There was nothing physically wrong with me.

There was something else wrong with me, and no clinic in the world had a test for it.

For about eighteen years, I did not live the life I wanted. Not one day of it. What I actually wanted was almost embarrassingly small: to build a family. To be a normal man. To live an ordinary life with no addictions in it.

I could not do it. I could not even get close.

For part of those years I lived and worked in Ireland.

One night there was a party, the same as a hundred others. By early morning everyone had collapsed wherever they landed, and there was nowhere left for me to lie down. So I went upstairs. My friend Aurelijus was asleep in the bed up there, and I did something I am not proud of: I simply threw him out of it, took the bed, and stretched out.

Now, I thought, I'm going to sleep like a king.

I had barely put my head down when my conscience started talking. Not gently. Loudly, clearly, right in the middle of my chest.

Look at what you're doing. Look at what you've become.

I lay there for a moment. Then I got up, picked my friend up off the floor, put him back into his own bed, and walked out of the house.

Outside it was grey and cold and the road was already busy — the Claregalway road, cars going past toward Galway, headlights in the half-dark. I walked along it with my hands in my pockets, and I have rarely been sadder in my life. Not dramatic sadness. The heavy, flat kind, the kind that tells you nothing will ever be different.

And then I looked up, and I saw a pole by the side of the road, and on the pole there was a poster, and on the poster there were eight words:

Jesus came into the world to save sinners.

I stopped walking.

I want to explain what happened next, but I am not sure I can. The moment I read those words, the sadness was gone. Not eased. Gone — as if someone had reached in and lifted it out of me. In its place came joy, and something I had not felt in years:

Hope. Actual hope, lit up inside me like a light switched on in a room that had been dark for a long time.

I knew what a sinner was. I did not need anyone to define the word for me, and I did not need to compare myself to anybody. I knew exactly who I had become. And here, on a pole on a road in Ireland at six in the morning, was a message saying that Someone had come specifically for people like me.

That was Jesus speaking to me. I have no doubt about it now.

And do you know what I did?

I walked home. I did not tell anyone. I did not look for a Bible or a church or a person who could explain it to me. Within a few days, I had gone back to exactly the life I had been living.

He had spoken. I heard Him perfectly. And I ignored Him.

Some time after that, I had a dream I have never been able to forget.

In the dream, the Lord was leading me through a room. It was dark — not night-dark, but a heavy blackness, as if the walls themselves were made of it. We walked for a while and then we stopped.

He handed me a rag.

He asked me to clean the walls white. Then He stepped away and left me to it.

So I started scrubbing. And a white patch appeared — I could see it clearly, clean and bright against all that black. And in the same second, before I could even take my hand away, the blackness ran back over it and swallowed it.

I tried again. Harder. Another white patch, there for a moment, alive for a moment —

Gone. Black again.

Then, above me, the ceiling turned transparent, and an enormous hand came down out of heaven and struck it. Like a clap of thunder against glass.

And I woke up.

That dream explains more about those eighteen years than anything else I could tell you. I was not lazy. I was not indifferent. I tried, over and over, with everything I had, to scrub my own life clean.

I could not do it. Not because I did not want it badly enough — I wanted it desperately — but because it was never something a man could do with a rag.

I needed Someone bigger than the room.

That is the room I have been talking about. The dark room. And if you are honest with yourself, you may know exactly where it is, because you may be standing in it right now.

After that, God did not go quiet. That is the part that still amazes me.

At another party, deep into another night, I picked up a calendar that was lying around — the kind with a saying printed on each page. I do not know why I opened it. On the page were words of Jesus:

Seek Me while you still have time.

I read them. I felt them land. I put the calendar down and kept drinking.

Not long after, still in Ireland, I was living under one roof with a group of men who cared nothing at all about God. Nothing. And out of the mouth of one of them, one ordinary day, came this:

Hell is waiting for you.

He was not preaching. He was not trying to save my soul. He said it because of what he had seen me do, and honestly, he had a point. I had crossed every line there was to cross.

And underneath all of it, year after year, there was still that one prayer of mine. Never eloquent. Never long. Just the same sentence, over and over, from a man who did not know how to pray:

God — please set me free.

Here is what I have come to believe about that period of my life. God speaks in whatever language you are capable of hearing. To a boy, He spoke through a grandmother in a green kitchen. To a young man on a bad road, He spoke through a poster on a pole. To a man with a bottle in his hand, He spoke through a page in a calendar and through the mouth of someone who did not even believe in Him.

He was not distant. He was not silent. He was knocking.

And I heard every knock, and I kept walking.

The end of it came in a way I never saw coming.

After one long marathon, I stopped. Just like that. I remember thinking, almost cheerfully: right, that's enough, now I'll sober up for a while.

Nothing about it went the way it had gone the hundred times before.

I could not sleep. Not that night, and not the next. Not the third night. Not the fourth. Not the fifth. Five days and five nights with no sleep at all, my body running on nothing, my mind getting thinner and stranger by the hour.

Then I started to suffocate. That is the honest word for it. My chest would close, and I would fight for air, and in between gasps I prayed. That was all I had left. Gasping and praying. Gasping and praying.

God, save me. God, please, save me.

I had said the words set me free for almost two decades without ever meaning them the way I meant them that week.

And on about the fifth day, in the middle of all that, I began to hear voices.

At first I thought it was the drink. Hallucinations, after-effects, the price of the last few months. That was the reasonable explanation and I reached for it immediately.

Then I thought someone was playing a joke on me — that there were hidden speakers somewhere, that people were talking about me quietly where I could not see them.

But it was not like hallucination. It was not like anything.

What was happening was this: I could hear my own mind. Every thought I had was being spoken back to me, out loud, the moment I thought it. I had somehow ended up on the listening side of my own soul, and there was no way off.

And it got worse. My thoughts were being recorded — I could tell — and played back to me like evidence. Everything was in there. Every hidden thing I had watched. Every place I had gone. Every secret I had promised myself I would take to the grave. All of it out in the open, read aloud by voices that accused, and condemned, and threatened, and did not stop.

Nothing can be hidden there. I want you to understand that. Not one thought.

Every negative thought came down on me like a whip.

For two days I lived in hell on earth. I do not use that phrase for effect. I use it because I have nothing more accurate. I ran the whole night across Cavan, every street in that town, end to end. It came with me every step. I begged forgiveness — nothing. I shouted — nothing. I prayed the only way I knew how — nothing.

I have thought about those two days for years since. I am not a scholar. I only know what I was shown. Everything we think, everything we watch, everything we quietly feed ourselves when nobody is looking — none of it disappears. It is written down somewhere. And I believe a man who dies without making peace with God meets all of it again, with nothing standing between it and him.

I met a moment of that. Only a moment. And a moment was very nearly the end of me.

Which brings me back to that park at dawn.

You're finished. We're taking you out.

I was on the grass. There was nothing left in me — no strength, no plan, no argument, no pride. I had reached the end of myself, and the end of myself turned out to be a smaller place than I had imagined.

And somehow, out of a green kitchen thirty years earlier, out of a poster on a pole, out of everything my grandmother had buried in me when I was too young to understand any of it —

I remembered the name of Jesus.

I cried out to heaven. Not a beautiful prayer. Four words:

Jesus — save me.

I don't remember deciding to kneel. I remember the wet ground, the cold coming up through my knees, and how small my own voice sounded out there with nobody left to hear it.

About two minutes later, a police car pulled up beside the park.

I have thought about the timing of that many times. Two minutes.

There were three young officers in the car. I got in. I expected to be treated like what I was — a wreck, a nuisance, a man who had done this to himself. Instead they spoke to me gently, calmly, quietly, the way you speak to someone who is hurt. To this day I think of them as angels in uniforms.

I asked them to protect me from evil. Those were the words I used. I could not have explained what I meant if they had asked.

They did not laugh. One of them said, Don't worry. We're going to help you.

They drove me to the hospital in Cavan. There they gave me medical care, and medicine, and a bed, and permission to stop fighting. The voices were still there when I lay down — they came into the hospital with me — but something had changed. For the first time in days, I felt safe.

And I slept.

I woke the next morning and there was silence.

Complete, ordinary, unremarkable silence. A room, a window, a morning. I lay there and listened to nothing and I could have wept.

I stayed a few more days, and then I went home.

I want to be careful here, because this part matters. The police did not save me. The hospital did not save me. Medicine did not save me. All of those things were real and I am grateful for every one of them.

But I know who sent them. I had cried out to Jesus two minutes before that car appeared, and I had cried out to no one else.

You might expect the story to end there, with everything fixed.

It did not.

What I did next was ask God a question — and it turned out to be the most useful question of my life:

Show me how I am supposed to believe in You.

I did not know how. That sounds strange to people who grew up in church, but it is true. I had spent eighteen years asking God for things and no time at all learning who He was. I was like a man who had been shouting at a door for years without ever trying the handle.

That question was the beginning of my healing.

It was not instant. I still slipped. I still went back to old things. But something fundamental was different now — I was slipping toward God instead of away from Him. There was faith in my heart, and it was burning. I was hungry for Him in a way I had never been hungry for anything.

And around that hunger, a new life quietly began to assemble itself. God gave me the chance to change. He gave me work. He gave me a reason to get hold of my own life again.

He was not finished with me yet, either. He had one more thing to show me, and it came from an unlikely place: a video on the internet.

In January 2015 I watched a testimony on YouTube.

A young man named Aleksandras was telling his story. He had experienced clinical death. He described where he had gone during it: hell — the real thing, not a metaphor, not a preacher's illustration. And then he described meeting Jesus, and being sent back, and spending his life since then warning other people.

I had felt one moment of that place. He had been inside it.

I stopped the video and sat there, and for the first time in my life I thought about my situation all the way to the end instead of stopping halfway.

If I keep going, I am going there. Not because God is cruel, but because I have spent my whole life saying no to Him and He will finally take me at my word.

I did not need to feel better. I did not need a system, or a plan, or another attempt at self-improvement.

I needed forgiveness. I needed Jesus.

That same evening I repented for the first time in my life.

I opened my heart to Him and I laid everything out. Not a summary — everything. Every thought. Every secret memory. The worst things I had ever done, the things I had never said out loud to a living person. I wept, and I asked forgiveness for all of it, one thing at a time, until there was nothing left in me to confess.

And that night, everything I had been doing up to that moment, I left behind. Not gradually. That night.

In prayer, from my heart, I stood at the cross where Jesus died for the whole world and I gave Him my addictions — all of them. I said: I hand these over. I turn away from these choices. I choose to trust You.

That was the night my life actually turned. Not the poster. Not the dream. Not even the park.

The night I stopped negotiating.

The next morning I woke up free.

I want to be careful with that sentence, because it is the one people find hardest to believe. I do not mean I woke up feeling wonderful. I mean the thing itself was gone. I had left my addictions at the cross the night before, and when I opened my eyes they were no longer mine.

What was still there was the pain.

My body wanted them back. Not politely. It screamed at me — come back, come back, come back — for days, and then for more days after that. Everything in me was pulling in one direction.

And I did the one thing I had never once managed in eighteen years. I ignored it.

Not because I had suddenly become strong. Because my attention was somewhere else entirely. From that first morning, all of it was on Jesus — all my heart, all my strength, everything I had. I was looking for Him. I thought about Him all day long, with the tiny amount of information I actually had about Him.

I talked to Him out loud. Out into the air, like a man speaking to nothing at all.

But I knew He heard me.

The only picture I have for those first weeks is not a religious one. People watch fighters in a ring — the kind of fight with almost no rules — and what they are really watching is whether a man will stay on his feet. He is hurt. Everything in him wants to go down. He stays up anyway.

That was it exactly. Except the man across from me was myself, and the fight was against my own pain.

You just stand there. And you do not give up.

I do not remember how long it went on. Three weeks. Maybe four.

And then the presence of God came down on me.

I have never found a better way to say it than the way I said it at the time: a hug from heaven. An enormous love, settling over a man who had done nothing whatsoever to earn it.

And then I started seeing hearts.

Everywhere. On people. On cars. On the road, in the grass, in the trees, on the walls of buildings. Wherever I looked, there they were — and I knew exactly what they were saying, because it was the same thing every time.

I love you. I love you, son. I love you.

Thank you for coming back.

For eighteen years I had believed that if God ever looked at me directly, it would be with disappointment. That was the lie I had lived under my whole adult life. And what actually came, when He finally showed Himself, was a Father who was glad.

After that I went looking for other believers. I found a church. I joined a community. I started studying the Bible properly instead of guessing at it.

And slowly I began to grow into the man I had never been able to become — a father to my daughter, a believer who actually knew what he believed, an ordinary man building an ordinary life in Minnesota.

That is where the new life began. Not with willpower.

With a hug.

I want to tell you what came after that carefully, because I am not interested in selling anybody a fairy tale.

I did not become perfect. I am not perfect now. I need God's grace every single day, and I know exactly what I would go back to without Him.

But the addictions are gone. Not for a season. Gone.

Life came back piece by piece. Work. Ordinary good days. I started dreaming again — actually dreaming, making things, building something. Real joy. A smile that was no longer put on for other people.

And hope — the kind that does not lie to you.

Every day now I trust Him. I gave Him my life and I have not asked for it back. I talk to Him from my heart, believing He hears me. He said that if we look for Him with our whole heart, we will find Him. That is His promise, and He keeps it.

This is not a one-time apology followed by living however you like. It is a walk, every day, with a real Person.

For a long time I was blind. I lived from one temporary moment to the next and thought about nothing but temporary things. The results were exactly what you would expect: depression, pain, loss, years I will never get back.

Now my heart wants different things. To know Him better. To be a better husband, a better father, a better brother, a better man.

There is one person I have left out of all of this.

In 2013 I met the woman who is now my wife. Then she went back to Lithuania, and for two years we loved each other across an ocean — phone calls, a screen, a few weeks at a time.

She did not know. I made sure of it. Distance is very good at hiding a man. I could hold myself together for the length of a phone call, say the right things, sound like somebody with an ordinary life — and then hang up and go straight back to what I actually was.

She thought she was talking to a man who was fine. I let her think it. For two years.

That is its own kind of loneliness. Being loved by somebody who is being shown a stranger.

Then came that night in January 2015, and there was nothing left to hide.

For the first time, the man she was talking to on the phone was the same man who hung it up.

Today I live in Minnesota. I have a wonderful wife and a beautiful daughter. When I look at them, I am not looking at things I earned. I am looking at gifts given to a man who had nothing to offer in return.

The greatest miracle was never that my circumstances changed.

The greatest miracle is that what I want changed.

And I will tell you something else, which is harder to say. All that pain — eighteen years of it — I could have avoided. The way out was offered to me again and again. In a green kitchen. On a road in Ireland. In a dream about a room I could not clean. I did not need to lose those years.

I just wasn't listening.

So let me say this plainly, to you.

Do not wait for the bomb to go off under your nose before you hear Him.

I waited. I waited until five days without sleep and two days of voices and a park at dawn, and I was fortunate — because some people never get that moment at all. There is no rule that says the crisis will arrive in time to save you.

Run to Him now. Today. This second.

You do not need perfect words. I did not have any. You do not need to clean yourself up first — I promise you that is not possible, and it is not what He asked for. Ask Him honestly:

Show me how to believe. Point me in the right direction. Give me wisdom.

Then stay open. Watch what happens.

Maybe you are where I was — hiding in the dark room, in the black of it, wanting out with your whole heart and having no idea how. Maybe you can feel that a better life exists somewhere, and you want it back: your family, your strength, your health, your good dreams, your work, your faith, your confidence, your purpose.

There is one more dream, and I will only touch it here, because it deserves a book of its own.

I dreamed I was caught in a spider's web. Not a small one — a web the size of my whole life. Every thread of it was something I had done, or something I had believed. I fought it. I threw everything I had against it, and it held me. It was stronger than I was.

Then God gave me one moment, and in that moment I tore it open.

And through the hole I saw another world. People at peace. People who were kind, and unhurried, and smiling — the way people look when nothing is chasing them.

And I understood what the web was made of. Not only sins. Lies. Things a person is told, and hears again, and eventually believes, and never once checks. Darkness spins them one thread at a time across a whole lifetime, and the man inside does not feel trapped at all.

He feels normal.

Mine was made of addictions. Bottles, powders, screens — and underneath all of it, every wrong thing I had come to believe about myself, about my life, about God. That was my war. It was invisible. It was fought entirely inside one man, and from the outside I looked like somebody enjoying himself.

Yours may be made of something else completely. It does not have to look like mine. Position. Money. Women. Reputation. Crime. Being admired. Being needed. Being right. Anything at all that a man can wrap around himself and call a life.

And every single one of those threads is temporary. Not one of them will still be holding when you need something to hold. But they fasten themselves to the soul, and they start early — in childhood, before you are old enough to know you are choosing anything — and they keep spinning for as long as you let them.

That is the hardest thing I have to say to you, so I will say it plainly: if the web is made of what you have always believed, you cannot see it. You will defend it.

Nobody tears that web open on his own. I could not. You need a Saviour, and there is no second way out.

But there is one thing that is still yours, every single day, and no web can take it: you choose what you attach yourself to.

So choose God. Not once, in a moment of fear. All the time. Today, and then again tomorrow, and then again the day after that.

I know that room. I lived in it for eighteen years.

There is a door in it, and there is Someone on the other side who has been knocking the entire time.

There is one more thing, and it happened before any of the rest of it — while I was still living far from God, still deep in everything I have described.

I had a dream.

In it, Jesus was holding my hand. Not the way you take an adult's hand. The way a father holds the hand of a small child who cannot cross the road alone.

He walked me toward a crowd of people. Some of them I recognised — friends of mine. Others were strangers.

I looked up at Him and asked:

What do You want me to tell them about You?

And He answered, in words I could understand at the time:

Tell them I'm the Big Daddy. The Big Boss.

For years I thought that was about power. Now I think it was about His heart.

The greatest Father. The King above every king. The One who loved me before I had the faintest idea who He was.

Because here is the thing I keep coming back to, the thing that still stops me in the middle of an ordinary day:

Long before I ever started looking for Jesus —

He was already looking for me.