theblackdostoyevsky

My name is Bryan. I have a new life in Christ. I am in recovery for arrogance, adultery, and control. 

“Who can understand his errors?” 

Before Christ, I was a fatherless, rebellious, arrogant, know-it-all. I interpreted my mother’s love and my father’s absence as a license to live by my own rules. I was not born into a Christian home. My first memory is of me throwing a book at my father after he hurled expletives at my mother. My weapon of choice, a book, foreshadowed my first idol and source of my future arrogance: knowledge. My parents divorced. Years later, my grandmother gave me a book on Frederick Douglass and told me that, as a black man, if I wanted to be successful in this life, I needed to be twice as smart, jump twice as high, and run twice as fast, than the greatest white man.

In 1995, after a year living in Hampton, VA with my father, my sister and I returned to Texas with my mother and her new husband. She had been born-again and we began attending church regularly. I got baptized because, after my sister had responded to the altar call, my mother told me that if Jesus came back today, I’d be the only one in the house going to hell. So, I said the words and, in my mind, abracadabra, I was saved. 

My mother and stepfather let me come and go as I pleased. My grades were always excellent and I was never in trouble. I remember every whupping I ever got, no more than four, and one of those my stepfather admitted years later was undeserved. Mothers were constantly asking my mother if their sons could come over and spend the night. I was president of our church youth ministry all four years of high school, and every year after school was out, I’d read thirty books a summer. The Bible was always my book of choice. 

I read a lot, and I learned from books that world renowned men and women beat against the current of society. I became a contrarian. If you loved it, I hated it; if you hated it, I loved it. But knowledge puffeth up, and puffed up I became. By the time I turned 18, my reputation revolved entirely upon my intellect. I blended the Truth of God’s Word with the vicarious wisdom of the fictional characters I’d known through literature with the pragmatic understanding I’d gained from the classroom which, when added to my ability to quote passages from memory in relevant contexts, built me a reputation for being untouchable in regards to communicating the truth. For at least a dozen years, I was never intimidated and never silent. I esteemed everyone according to the knowledge they could or couldn’t wield. I learned that exposing people to knowledge they were not ready to receive was dangerous, even murderous, business. My best friend once told me, “Bryan you’re so smart, people think you’re crazy.” I felt powerful. Slowly, silently, imperceptibly, I was becoming a law unto myself. 

My senior year of college, I suffered my first heartbreak from a young woman and started a campaign of pornography addiction and fornication that wouldn’t end until after I was married. Fornication led to drunkenness to drown the guilt. Drunkenness led to smoking cigarettes, then marijuana, then prescription meds, to maintain the euphoria. I gained 40 pounds. I justified myself. “I’m ahead of the curve,” I’d tell myself, “So what if I dumb myself with weed and liquor? I’ll bring myself down to their level.” And wouldn’t you know it, people liked me more when I was drugged. Or so it seemed. For the first time in my life, I was popular, sought after, desired, when before, I was someone people kept at an arm’s length; I was someone they were intimidated by; I was someone they feared getting too close to. So, I doubled down on the drugs and built a new reputation slumming as an addicted, foul-mouthed, born-again preacher.

My arrogance activated a fresh idol: codependency. I made it my mission to fix what was wrong with people, these people that were always breaking my heart with their choices. “Your people perish, Lord, for lack of knowledge,” was the mantra of my messiah-complex. I became a pseudo-counselor, trying to help people fix their apathetic and undisciplined lives with a profane mixture of self-help and Biblical theology. 

In graduate school, I read more than I’d ever read in my life. For eight years, I was reading a book every two days, while the Bible gathered dust on my desk. I grew greatly in knowledge and reputation until the volume of volumes I hadn’t yet read overtook me. I took to drinking to drown the despair that I’d never know everything; I’d never become unassailable through knowledge. In some way, I’d always be exposed to the criticisms of others. I was smoking a pack and a half of cigarettes a day. My apartment was filled with empty brandy bottles, like trophies. I railed in drunken, public tirades about how wicked and corrupt the world system was and how ignorant people were to believe the lies they heard and watched on television. “Bryan, can you please stop talking about killing all white people,” my boss told me, while I was holding drunken court with a passel of undergrads at the fancy dinner table, opposite her and the white guest speaker. I became a Black Nationalist. I became a feminist. I became an atheist. I defended homosexuality. I paid for an abortion. I studied spirit science and astral projection. I read the Bhagavad Gita and chanted to hindu deities. I dabbled in the occult. All the while, I considered myself a Christian, believed that Jesus is the Son of God, and taught the Bible in whichever church or non-profit organization I was affiliated with at the time.

After I was married, I lived a conspicuous double life. Ecclesiastes 12:12-13 became my surrender, but my addictions did not let go as I’d wished. Despairing of my direction and the time wasted with the verbose, circular logic of academia, pleasure became my mistress. Desperately, I was looking for freedom, and peace, and manhood. All I found were illness, angst and contempt. From 2009 until the end of the Covid lockdown, my daily life revolved around an unholy trinity of lust: drugs to lift my mood, food to stuff my cravings, and sexual immorality and adultery to release my desire, so that I could collapse into the torpor and oblivion of thoughtless, dreamless sleep. At the height of my hedonism, I’d go through the same cycle two and three times in a single day. Over that period, I’d been threatened and kicked out of churches for showing up intoxicated, earned a masters degree and went ABD for the doctorate, and spent over $1,000/month on drugs and alcohol. I had no friends, only plugs and leeches. My wife would hardly look at me, just at my hands when I came in drunk from the cornerstore. I was drowning in guilt and shame. “How can a man possibly live soberly in a world like this,” I’d rail at God, while stapling the most macabre and unjust newspaper headlines I could find to the wall behind my workstation. But I did what I wanted because God loves me and His grace is sufficient, even for this, and I had said the sinner’s prayer, and I was baptized, and I believed in Jesus. and salvation cannot be rescinded, “for nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus”, according to His Word, so I was saved, in my mind, no matter what I did.

So badly, I wanted to quit and be sober. I quit drugs every day for ten years. Hundreds of times, I poured out all of my alcohol, only to find myself, before I was conscious of it, stumbling out into traffic at 11:45pm to make it to the corner store before they quit selling beer and wine. Hundreds of times I’d broken all of my Black and Milds in half and crumbled the weed into the trash bin, only to find myself bent over the edge, fishing out butts and nugs from the bottom, sopped in garbage juice. It wasn’t until 2017, when I found myself driving 90 mph on an eerily empty freeway into Houston, while opposite me a wall of deadlocked traffic was trying to get out before the hurricane hit, so that I could sleep with a woman who wasn’t my wife, and at three in the morning, trying to get back out of Houston, nearly lost the car and my life, trying to drive through the waters of the flood as they covered the headlights of my car and rose onto the hood, that I realized, pleading with God for my life, that I was utterly out of control. I’d never stopped calling myself a Christian, because I’d always considered myself God’s own drug addict. But the reality was that I was living at the fever pitch of abusive arrogance, codependency and lust, a living model of Romans 1:18-32, a fool, wise in my own conceit. 

At one point, I don’t recall when, I begged Jesus to come and save me. I knew of Him and I knew of God’s witness of Him through His Word, but I’d never surrendered my life to Him, put faith in Him. I’d never even acknowledged the reality and rebellion of my wicked and sinful heart. But, by this point, unemployed, alcoholic, adulterer with a fractured marriage and two young children, all of my best-laid plans had produced nothing and amounted to much less than nothing. 

“Cleanse thou me from secret faults.”

By the first night of re:generation, I was desperate. I’d have done anything asked of me to be free, not just from drugs but from my own conception of myself. I’d been through AA, both voluntary and court-ordered for a DWI in 2011, so to hear of a recovery program with God’s Word at the center, I was all in. 

I can’t explain what happened next. The Bible calls it a mystery. New life. Vision. A spiritual transfusion. Salvation. All I know is that by surrendering to Jesus, my eyes opened to the truth. Of my life, this world, sin, the church, marriage, knowledge, everything. He took my desire, that bottomless craving, for drugs, alcohol, pornography, strange women, and gave me an aversion for them. 

This process of recovery in Christ has revealed to me the levels of dysfunction in me beyond what my hands, feet, and mouth are addicted to. Recovery in Christ showed me that my appetite for pleasure was merely a symptom of the deceitfulness and wickedness of my own heart. I realized that I wasn’t God’s own drug addict, but just a drug addict. I’d known what salvation was, who Jesus is, the technology of faith, and some scripture, but it wasn’t until I embarked upon a disciplined, patient, and daily study of God’s work of redemption through Jesus Christ that I saw clearly how desperately I need a savior. I began to understand plainly, methodically, personally, what I had before only understood emotionally and academically. This time, when I read through the pages of steps one through three, instead of my arrogance balking at being dragged through concepts that I considered myself already an expert in, my heart softened, not to the wisdom and power of God’s methods and communication, but to the excellency and glory of His grace. 

This is year three for me in re:gen; I know that every step is vitally important to our recovery in Christ. Steps one through three laid a solid foundation for me in sober and deliberate truth that compelled me to make a sound, unemotional decision. Steps four and five – inventory and confession, dragged me through the dark hallway of my past so that I could account for and confess to the damage I had both received and caused. But the step that resonates the most with me now is the step that we’re currently on: Step 6 – Repent. This step is where I’d gone wrong from the first time I was baptized at 10 years old. The Bible says in James 2:19, “You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe and shudder.” This verse showed me that it wasn’t enough to know what was true; the devil knows what is true. But armed with that knowledge, he still chooses what is false, what is death. That was me. All knowledge, no wisdom. All truth, no conviction. All persuasion, no decision. I’d never known, never understood, that to choose Christ was to choose against myself. I thought salvation was like life insurance for your soul. But when I realized, indicted by the historical ledger of my own choices, how wretched a sinner I actually am, and how I had, for years, been leading men and women, friends and enemies, and my own family down the broad path by living a double life, blaspheming the gospel and Christ’s name by my countenance and lifestyle, when I realized that the conviction was coming from my grieving of Him, I finally, truly, sincerely, repented. 

Since I first engaged with re:generation, steps four through nine have become like daily bread for my soul. Keeping a running inventory of when I offend or am offended compels me to either confess and make amends, or confess and forgive. I understand how to keep my heart with all diligence. Today, I’m leaning completely into Step 6 –  Repent and my repentance plan like never before. Proverbs 1:7 says that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.” For the majority of my life, I thought I knew, but my knowing was not according to the fear of God and so was not knowing at all. I built myself up as an idol in the arrogance of my own way, only to have my own hands cast me from the pinnacle of my self-made temple and dash me to pieces upon the rocks below. Jesus, then, picked me up and is putting me back together, in His image this time. 

Since Jesus, I’ve never been more sure of my direction, more hopeful for my life, more pleased to defer my will, desires and plans for whatever His are for me. It is simply a pleasure to be found in Him. His yoke is easy; His burden, light. He is a friend, a loving master, an elder brother, a savior, my king, my advisor, my teacher, in short, everything to me. Without Him, I am nothing, and I’m pleased to admit it. 

Following Jesus is no longer a hobby of convenience or a bauble that adds an idealistic depth to my conversations when I dialogue with strangers. It’s not just “how I was raised” or how I decide my voting preferences. Daily, delighting to abide in Jesus Christ is my entire life. If He was not my focus, I consider it a wasted day. To support me now, I have more than books as guides and fathers and friends. I have real men who I’ve grown and built with through this process. David Thomas, Stan Canonge, Kevin Carmack, Bill Howard, Tui Matila, James Johnson, Darryl Henderson, and our current group of re:Gen men sitting here today. I can be honest, vulnerable, pissed, and even irrational with these men and they will patiently listen and seek to understand what my heart is trying to say, instead of judging my words. They hold me accountable by asking me difficult questions and reciprocate through allowing me to ask them difficult questions. The Holy Spirit works through these men in my life to make me more like Jesus, our elder brother. 

Jesus has restored Jenny and I’s marriage. Personally, our relationship today is what I am most proud of in my life. She has shown me the grace and love of God from the beginning, when I was too focused on myself to recognize it. I perceive how Jesus interceded for me through her, and how the Holy Spirit empowered her to stay when she had a Biblical right to leave. And because of God’s grace through her, we now have four beautiful and otherworldly children whom we love together, dearly. I don’t even remember what life was like before them, and I don’t want to. I’m more blessed than I ever deserve to be, and I owe it all to Jesus. The last few verses of Ecclesiastes say this: “ . . . my son, be warned: the writing of many books is endless, and excessive devotion to books is wearying to the body. The conclusion, when all has been heard is: fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person.” So I leave you with this: Stop seeking, you are already found and complete in Jesus. 

My name is Bryan. I have a new life in Christ. I am in recovery from arrogance, adultery, and control.

Thank you for letting me share.