One morning in the summer of 1988, I was sleeping on some grass and woke to the sound of children walking past a fence near the alley where I’d slept the night before. Years of bad choices and heavy drug use had caught up with me and the few weeks I’d spent living on the streets and at a homeless shelter were enough to awaken me to the despair of my situation. Worldly living had produced such a darkness within me, there were times I had considered suicide as a solution to end the misery that was my pathetic life. From the time I started using illegal drugs until that morning on the grass, I had not been living as a righteous man, but rather as the wicked, which “are like chaff which the wind drives away” (Psa 1:4). My life at that time epitomized worldliness, as I had rejected God's authority over my life, and that came with harmful consequences.