Austin’s Grace Story
If there is anything worth remembering from what I am about to share, it is not what I did, but what Jesus did. Left to myself, I would not be standing here today. This is His story, not mine.
I grew up around Christianity, church, Christian education, and a Christian college experience. I knew about Jesus, but I did not truly know Him.
As I got older, I began to place my trust in other things. I looked to money, success, and achievement to give me identity, peace, and security. I believed that if I could just reach enough goals and build enough success, I would finally feel whole.
For a season, it looked like it was working. I built a career, experienced financial success, and achieved many of the things I once thought would satisfy me. But underneath it all, something was missing.
Money became more than a resource, it became my substitute savior. Every goal I reached only created another. Every success only revealed a deeper emptiness. I kept believing the next accomplishment would finally fix what was broken in me, but it never did.
Eventually, everything began to unravel. I found myself buried in debt, struggling with alcohol, isolated, and completely exhausted from trying to hold my life together on my own.
That weight became overwhelming, and I came dangerously close to ending my own life. That week in January 2025, I reached the end of myself. And that is where God’s mercy met me.
In that broken place, I found myself drawn back to Jesus in a way I could no longer ignore. Through a simple moment of curiosity, watching The Chosen, something began to stir in my heart. What I had known about all my life started to become something I needed to know personally. Over the weeks that followed, I began reading Scripture again and honestly examining the claims of Christ. And slowly, everything began to come into focus.
Jesus was not just a figure in my upbringing, He is the Son of God, the Savior of the world. The debt I could never repay, He paid in full.
The life I could never fix, He came to restore. The forgiveness I could never earn, He freely gave.
Looking back, I can see that while I was running from Jesus, He was faithfully pursuing me. And what felt like everything falling apart was actually God’s loving hand removing false foundations that could never sustain me.
In His mercy, He loved me too much to let me keep trusting what could not save me.
Today, I am part of what God is doing through Recovery Church, a community centered on hope, healing, and the transforming grace of Jesus Christ. My testimony is not that I got my life together, but that Jesus met me in my brokenness and began to make me new.
The greatest miracle is not my recovery, it is my salvation.
Jesus said in Luke 9:24, “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.”
For years, I tried to save my life through success, money, and self-effort. In the end, I discovered I could not save myself. So I surrendered my life to the One who could…
