Miracle Story #16 (Part 5 of 5)

“My ex still lived across the street from the Dunsworth house. And her family was over there all the time. I always was scared to walk out that front door because of what I had done to her.

I started to understand what I did to her.

And it was in my ninth step that the other miracle happened.

I went to Dillon’s because I was making some home-made enchiladas. I needed ingredients, and olive oil was one of the ingredients I needed.

Olive oil comes in all kinds of shapes, sizes and bottles, right? Well there’s one that looks exactly like a Goldschlager bottle. Now normally my mind would pass all the bad times and fire off right to the good times of me with that liquor.

But it didn’t do that this time.

It didn’t do any of it this time. It just was a bottle of olive oil.

And I recognized it.

So in that moment I realized that the desire to drink and use had been lifted from me.

And…

(paused for emotion)

And it was the biggest miracle that had happened in my life.

I broke down in tears right in the middle of Dillons. And I realized that I no longer had the desire use.

And I knew that that couldn’t be possible without God being in my life.

I knew He had taken it.

I don’t know exactly when He took it from me, but that’s when I recognized it.

And so I was on fire.

I was on fire.

I had sent out one of my amends.

I wasn’t going to go knock on the door to my ex, because she was in a new relationship with a police officer. And I was just worried that…

Because it says ‘Be willing to make amends wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.’ And I feared that there would be a confrontation that would cause more harm than good, if I knocked on that door.

So I sent her an email.

And days went by, and I didn’t hear anything back.

I put all of my stuff out there and what I had done wrong. The cheating, the not really having my heart in it but feeling obligated, all of that stuff.

And I didn’t expect to get anything back, but she sent me an email back a few days later.

And she said, “I forgive you.”

And something in that moment made me realize the hurt that I’d been causing all the women in my life, my entire life. I realized that even up to the point of telling women, “Hey, this is all this is gonna be,” I was fooling myself.

And right then an emotional mudslide came onto me.

When I first got into Dunsworth, this time around, there was a girl that was brand new to the Hazel House, which is not very far from the Dunsworth House. We were going to go do a presentation about Oxford House to a treatment center and I met her there. There was an attraction. And so I told her all that same stuff. And we were together.

And when I left her house, she started texting me and I wasn’t responding or I was busy or I didn’t want to. And I finally texted her back and told her that she knew what it was going to be and that I didn’t understand.

Well she had relapsed.

And what I told myself after she relapsed was, ‘Well I did my part. I told her the truth so that’s on her. She made the choice to relapse.’

But when I got that letter back from my ex, and I saw all that stuff, I became aware of the harm that I was causing people.

And I realized that I may not have made that choice, but I played a part in it.

Because regardless of what she told me, with sexual intercourse there has to be an emotion. Whether I had it or not, doesn’t matter.

There has to be an emotional connection in there.

Because it’s one of the most intimate things that God put on this planet between two people.

And it wasn’t until I realized that….

Luckily I was strong enough at that point, and had built the foundation in my recovery, that that pain didn’t push me back out to using.

But I had some work to do.

And I did it.

That specific set of prayers came up and I started praying for ideals.

My plan when I got into the Oxford House, was to stay there for a year, work my steps, and then move with my family back to Colorado.

I wanted to be back in Colorado.

And I remember my sponsor telling me somewhere in that timeframe, “Matt your plan sounds great, but God’s got better plans for you. Just wait and you’ll figure them out. You’ll see them as they unfold for you.”

Kind of like what you said.

After I got through all of my steps…I got a phone call from the guy who kept putting me on the interview board.

Four years in recovery, a big part of the Oxford House. He was on the World Council for crying out loud.

He had moved out on his own and he called and said, “Matt, I’m going to open up an Oxford House in Hutchinson, Kansas.”

He knew that’s where I was from.

And I hated this town. I hated this town. I had all of this bad stuff in this town.

But after I’d worked my steps I realized that this was a town that never did anything to me. I hated my experiences in this town but ninety percent of my experiences, I played a part in.

So this light came on in my head, like the sun came up over the city in my head.

And when he said that, I knew that God wanted me to be a part of that.

And I said, “Let’s do it.”

So we moved over here, opened up the first Oxford House.

And we weren’t wanted.

The neighborhood didn’t want us. The city didn’t understand us enough to want us….yet.

We had to fight lawyers, all this stuff.

But I understood how bad it was needed. Because there was nothing like that here for me.

That’s why I had gone to Wichita.

But my friend relapsed about four months into it.

I found out he was using before we ever even moved over here. He was a peer mentor at Crossover Recovery Center down on Waco. He was a prominent member of the recovery community. And he had been using secretly before that, unbeknownst to anybody. And he was trying to escape his use by moving to Hutch.

He thought that running from his problem to Hutchinson to open up an Oxford House was the solution.

And God works in mysterious ways.

Whoever sold him that dope sack...the very last dope sack that he used...indirectly helped make him realize he needed to go to Hutch. So that dealer is partially responsible for Oxford Houses opening in Hutchinson, Kansas.

The first Oxford House opened in Hutchinson, Kansas in October of 2014.

And we now have six houses.

To me, that’s how God works.

That dope dealer will never know that. He will never know that he played a role in getting this recovery movement started in Hutchinson.

Do you understand the chain of events there?

So he kept it under wraps for a while but he couldn’t stop. And one day I called him out on it because he was acting funny about taking a UA after having gone out of town.

He was like, “Well I can’t pee right now.”

And I said, “You know the deal. Just hang out until you can.”

He finally came back to my room and he was like, “Matt, I can’t do it anymore. I’ve been using.”

And it broke my friggin’ heart.

He had become my best friend. He was one of my greatest mentors in Oxford House. He taught me everything I knew.

But that was another changing moment in my life.

He had told everyone he was working steps the whole time. He had gotten four years of recovery, off of his ego. It was all about pats on the back, plaques on the wall, watch me shine kind of deal.

As long as he had that coming in on a steady basis, it kept him fueled. Which a lot of great things came out of…

But it wasn’t about that.

I knew that. But I was following his lead.

I was like, ‘What can we do to get another plaque on the wall? Best house of the year? Shoot for this. Newspaper articles.’

All that all stopped right then and there.

It became…’What can we do to open up more beds so people don’t die?’

So THAT became my drive.

I’m on the World Council now for Oxford House. I’m the State Association Chair for Oxford Houses in Kansas. We effectively have eight houses now in this area.

Two and a half years ago, we didn’t have any.

I’ve just pushed this movement as hard as I can.

I go into prisons. I mentor guys in the prisons. I mentor guys on the streets.

Every little thing in my life has happened the way it has happened to put me in a position to be able to do what I’ve been doing here in Hutchinson, Kansas.

And now it has become a “We” thing.

Because when he relapsed, it was just me.

And I had all of these guys that didn’t know anything about recovery, anything about Oxford House.

They were hearing it from one source about how it’s supposed to work, and were bucking it the whole time.

It was a nightmare.

There were a lot of times that I didn’t think it was going to work, because there is so much work that goes into opening up an Oxford House. And there’s so much that goes into making sure that it stabilizes after the rough period of being brand new.

And we’ve had to do it with these houses.

I have a girlfriend now who was one of the first women to be in the Oxford House here. And she was part of the ideals that I prayed for. And she’s been a very big part of this movement.

So now, all of the people in this town that are in Oxford Houses now, know what it is.

They know how it runs, how it works. We’ve got seven sponsee’s that we are teaching this program to of Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous.

It was “I” at first...and it’s slowly transformed to “We.”

And this October, it will be three years since we started in Hutch.

We actually have eight houses total. Six here in Hutchinson and two in Great Bend, Kansas.

Promise House is a nine-man house.

Niam House is a sixteen-man house.

Tomahawk House is a nine-woman house.

Phillips West is a ten-man house.

Jimmers House is a twelve-man house.

Hastings North is a fourteen-woman house. It’s for women and children.

Hope Central in Great Bend is a seven-man house.

And Serenity Way in Great Bend is an eight-woman house.

So around eighty-five beds for people in recovery.

And I think God brought me back from death to do this…to open up Oxford Houses for others.

You know, the disease of addiction is similar to the disease AIDS.

HIV was so shunned and so misunderstood when it first came out. There wasn’t any money going into the research and there were people dying by the millions, who had that disease.

Because they united and came out of the closet, so to speak, people realized that it’s not a gay disease. And it’s not an “if I touch you I’ll get it” disease…any of that stuff.

There became an understanding, and the public was educated on it. It made way for all this funding so now you’re not going to die if you get HIV. And if you do, you can still live a full life.

Addiction is no different.

We are shunned.

When we opened up the first house, Promise, two doors down was an assistant district attorney.

And we didn’t know this.

But we went and knocked on her door, because before we move into a house in a neighborhood, we go and we let all the neighbors know. We get dressed up nice and we go educate them as best we can, on the spot, about Oxford House…about what we are there to do and what we’re going to be doing.

But they get caught up on ‘recovery house’ and they see a bunch of people with needles in their arms and brown bag specials walking around, automatically.

Because that is the stigma that we have created.

And I understand that I’m a part of creating that stigma, especially in this town.

Because for the majority of my life, I was creating problems in this town.

I was taking taxpayer dollars every time they locked me up. I was stealing from people. I was robbing cars. I was driving them, stolen. I was just being a havoc and a menace to society.

So I get that I’m a part of that stigma.

And we’re trying to break that.

.

Oxford House is saving lives.

You have an 87% success rate to have long-term recovery if you stay in an Oxford House for eighteen months or more.

No other entity on the planet can boast those numbers.

Most treatment facilities boast a 3-5% success rate.

DePaul University has done five separate studies since 1975. And that’s what their conclusions are.

It works.

And God is alive in those houses!

These thirty day centers that just teach a few…..that’s not it.

You’ve got to have a community involved. Because this disease is a community disease.

It’s a community problem.

Where they’re successful with it in other countries, is where they’ve decriminalized the use of drugs, meaning that you’re not going to go to prison for seventeen years because you have methamphetamines in your pocket.

They’ve used the money they’ve saved on all that to create community treatment centers where people working there want to work there. They believe in it. And they want to help the people that come in, and they show them love.

Just like in an Oxford House.

And that’s what was missing in my life, that connection.

When I was growing up my mom used to be like, “Why are you hanging around all those bad kids that you’re hanging around?”

“Mom, how come I’m not the bad kid? Their parents probably think the same thing of me. These are my friends.”

Because I found a connection with those kids that I didn’t have at home.

I told you my mom was off doing her thing after my dad died. We pretty much had babysitters here and there and stuff.

So we ran the streets and we found the love that we were missing in the home, in each other. Whether it was bad love or whatever.

You get that love connection in these types of community centers, where the community is genuinely caring about the people. Not just the community, but the people in the community.

Everybody’s life is worth the exact same amount as the next person’s.

I don’t care if you live south of the tracks or north of the tracks.

So that’s where I feel like God has put me.

And I’m excited to see what He has next for me.

There’s a big movement going on right now with us being a grass-roots organization, completely financially self-supporting.

And we’re taking another step in it.

We’re almost at 100 houses in Kansas.

And nation-wide there are over 10,000 houses.

Becoming part of something that’s bigger than you is how you understand that a power greater than you exists…and then understanding that it only exists because there’s a power greater than it, keeping it up.

So making that connection through the step work is what has put the power in my life.

The paradox is that I thought that if I let go of everything that I was holding onto my whole life…that I was going to lose power over me. Or that I was going to go out of control.

But you let go of power to become empowered.

You let it go and it comes back.

That hospital stay where I actually died and He brought me back to life was probably one of probably a million different times that I was faced with death.

Who knows.

But I know this…I know I did die.

And I know I did come back.

And I always hear about the warm, fuzzy experience that people have had when they’ve died. And they see the light and they come back.

But man, it was a horrifying experience for me.

But I get it.

And I understand that it was necessary.

It was a necessary impact on my life that made me wake up.

Don’t judge a book by its cover.

And make sure that you understand something before you judge it.

Oxford Houses are saving lives. But we have to fight every single neighborhood.

And I don’t know if you remember here recently in Wichita, but we opened up a house in College Hill. And they fought us.

They fought us tooth and nail.

To the point where they almost shut down….

There are twenty-six Oxford Houses in Wichita, and they almost shut down over half of them because they were over the limit of eight, for what a group home qualifies for.

And it was all over the news for a while and the people in the neighborhood were like, “We don’t want them living by us.”

At first it was because of the parking. And then this or that. Because of their kids walking, or this. But what it came down to, by the end…they were just irate.

And the real reason came out.

“We don’t want them next to us.”

What do you mean?

We’re people.

Luckily, we are federally protected. We’re considered with a disability, and the Equal Housing Act of 1985 protects us.

And we can have as many people as we want under the roof.

But we don’t like to use that.

But I get it.

Again, it’s the stigma.

We’ve got to prove ourselves over and over again, in every new neighborhood.

If anybody gets a chance to read this and they’ve heard of Oxford House…maybe there’s somebody that thinks there’s no hope for someone that they know, or themselves...

They can reach out to an Oxford House.

We’re all connected.

I don’t care who you are, or what you believe, or where you live, how you live, how happy or sad you are. We’re all connected and we’re all in this together.

It saved my life.

It has saved countless other lives.

And I’m going to be a part of it until the day I die.

It has become the passion of my life.

And my plan is to continue to open up houses here until God shows me what’s next.

Wherever that takes me.”

Part 5 of 5.

If you or someone you love needs help, hope and healing from the disease of addiction, please visit the following:

http://oxfordvacancies.com

http://oxfordhouse.org

http://oxfordhousekansas.org

© 2017 by One Million Miracles. All Rights Reserved.

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My name is Matt, and I live in Hutchinson, Kansas.

In the midst of addiction, death and recovery, I AM Miracle Story #16.