Ride Like the Wind
August 4, 2023
“The people here at City Mission cared about me when I couldn’t even care about myself,” Greg said of his experience at the Mission. “They showed me love and understanding when I couldn’t even love and understand myself.” Greg grew up in Turtle Creek, the youngest of five kids. “I was a spoiled little brat,” he said. He always had nice clothes and cool stuff. He got away with everything. He was the baby of the family. But he also experienced more than his share of trauma when he was young. “My story is full of the deaths of loved ones,” he explained. Greg’s childhood idol, Roger, rode motorcycles. “Roger would pick me up and put me on his bike and ride me up the hill,” Greg explained. “Whenever I heard the engine of that bike, no matter where I was or what I was doing, I dropped everything and came running.” When Greg was just six years old, Roger wrecked his bike and was killed. It was devastating for Greg to lose his boyhood idol at such a young age, but it didn’t diminish his lifelong love of motorcycles. When Greg was 12, his dad died on Christmas. “That’s when my addiction really took off,” he said. “I hated God. I was angry all the time. I worried about everything. I started having nightmares. I would sleepwalk and wake up shouting, ‘Jesus doesn’t love me. He never loved me.’” Drugs and alcohol momentarily took his anger and his worry away, so he started chasing after them so he could stay in that feeling of numbness as often as possible. But he never learned to deal with his problems or his pain, so everything just continued to get worse. He did receive some social security benefits after his father’s death. His mom had a job and didn’t need the money for the household, so he spent it all on cool sneakers, nice clothes, and alcohol. He bought himself a dirtbike and learned to ride. In high school, he was a star athlete, but he dropped out of school so he could party. He was getting into fistfights all the time. “I was never really fighting anyone else. I was just fighting what was inside of me,” he explained. “I was fighting my own demons.” When he was 19, he got his first DUI, but the charges were dropped. When he was 21, he went away to state prison for four years. He ended up spending most of the 1990’s in prison. While he was in prison, his Mom passed away. He never really got to say goodbye. He tried to turn his life around, and he got clean for a while in his 20’s and was even engaged to be married to a good, stable young woman who was studying to work in the medical field. On July 4th, she died suddenly of a brain aneurysm, and his life spiraled again. When he was 29, he had his first operation. Arthritis was wreaking havoc on the whole left side of body, and between ages 29 and 47, he would have 13 total operations, including an ACL replacement in his left knee, a reconstruction of his left ankle, reconstructive surgery on his jaw, shoulder reconstruction, and five total hernia surgeries. After one of his hernia surgeries, his body had a bad reaction to the surgical mesh used in the operation, and he was in constant pain for the next eight years. “I went to the emergency room 52 times in eight years,” he explained. During that time, he started doing heavier drugs to help deal with the constant pain he was enduring. “I was angry all the time,” he said. “Angry at myself. I would lash out, get into fights. For me, frustration and depression always turned into anger, because I didn’t know how to handle it.” When the surgical mesh was finally removed and the previous surgery corrected, he started feeling better physically, and he started to put together some clean time. He got a good job in a manufacturing plant in Lancaster County. “I was running my own department,” he said. “I’d be a superviser there now if I had stayed.” But he relapsed. He moved back to Pittsburgh and stayed clean for a while. Only to relapse again. And he had his first experiences with fentanyl. “It got really weird,” he explained. “I was yelling out the windows and talking to dead people. I broke everything in my house. I broke the tv. I had obituaries of strangers just spread out all over the house. I was losing my mind.” In a short period of time, Greg overdosed 24 times. “Eight of those times were really serious,” he said. “I woke up in the hospital. But sometimes, I’d come to on the floor, soaked in sweat. Every three times I would do drugs, I would OD. I was slowly dying. I had no desire to live anymore, but I was too scared to blow my own head off.” Greg believed that suicide was a mortal sin and that he wouldn’t see his loved ones in the afterlife if he killed himself. So he just kept killing the pain with drugs. “They gave me energy and took away all my pain,” he explained. “I didn’t feel nothing. No physical pain. No mental anguish. Addiction is a disease of feelings. I just didn’t want to feel anything anymore.” His body deteriorated to 150 pounds. He was simply withering away, waiting to die, until one day, his biker friends all came over to his house for an intervention. Each one of them poured out their hearts and let him know how much he meant to them. He went to rehab that night. While in rehab, he met City Mission Chaplain and Housing Coordinator, Doug Bush. And Greg knew that if he was really going to change, he needed to get right with God. After rehab, he came to City Mission to get his life back on track. “After eight months at the Mission, I accomplished so much,” he said. “I’m not at all the angry person I was not that long ago. I got my social security benefits. My resentments are pretty much all gone. Even my resentments against myself. Now, when I start to worry or when I feel the anger starting up, I just pray to God. I pray for strength. I pray prayers of gratitude. I pray for the anger to get pulled away from me. And it always does. And mostly, I pray for others.” “City Mission has given me a place to sit still,” he added. “They taught me patience. They taught me how to trust people again. They gave me something to believe in and taught me that there is something bigger than myself. They taught me how to pray and how to deal with my anxieties.” “You know, if anybody else would have done the things to me that I did to myself, I would’ve beat them up. Instead, I just beat myself up. And I just always thought that I deserved all the pain in my life and all the problems. But the Mission taught me that I’m not a bad person. They taught me how to be able to deal with myself.” “You can’t worry about yesterday,” Greg added. “Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery, so you gotta live in the present. When you look in your rearview mirror, you only see a small picture, a limited view. Doing that kept me in my addiction for a long time.” Recently, Greg moved out of the Mission. He moved in with his stepson, while he looks for a place of his own. Today, he is looking forward to his future. “Today, I have no desire to put that junk in me ever again. I have no desire to die. I want to live. I want to have happiness.” And even with all his pain and physical ailments, he still wants to ride his motorcycle. “I’m going to ride my motorcycle for as long as I can. That’s my passion. To me, it’s freedom. It’s the best therapy I’ve ever had. When I get on a bike, all my pains are gone. I can ride for miles.” Greg has been given a second chance. Every day, more people just like Greg, come through our doors in need of healing and restoration. Please consider donating to City Mission HERE to help them turn their lives around.
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