For fifteen years, addiction cost Sebastian nearly everything: family relationships, stability and even his sense of personal identity. Today, he's sober, employed, reconciled with the people he loves, and mentoring a member of the same program that saved his life. This is his story.

In high school, Sebastian chose partying over responsibility. That choice became a series of choices, continuing for the better part of 15 years.

Sebastian walked through the doors of Springs Rescue Mission for the first time around the age of 19. He got back on his feet for a while, but the cycle of addiction pulled him back in. By the time he returned years later, he had run out of road.

"It got to the point to where I burned all my bridges, every single one of them," he said.

Couch-surfing stints, evictions and drunken pursuits piled up until every relationship in his life had become a casualty of his addictions. But something else was happening underneath it all.

"God met me when I was at the end of myself," Sebastian said.

“He put me face to face with the truth — where my actions had led me, what I had done, the people I had hurt. And in those moments, he showed me what love really is.”

He came back to SRM, enrolling in the vocational training program in March 2024, but God kept tugging on his heart toward the addiction recovery program across campus. He resisted at first, but the pull didn’t let up. When he arrived for a routine intake assessment, a case manager handed him an application instead of an assessment form. It felt like confirmation. He asked Sebastian one question: “Are you a man of your word?”

“I had never been a man of my word,” Sebastian admits. “I was a liar through my teeth, through and through.” But something in him answered honestly anyway: “Today I am.” That was July 2024. It’s been true ever since.

Sebastian is sober now, and for the first time in years, his family relationships are being rebuilt instead of torn down. He credits it to learning to trust God: “I’ve tried countless times on my own. I’d always fall right back into the same pit. It’s only with the help of God that I’m out of that pit and moving forward.”

Sebastian and his dad are closer than they’ve been since Sebastian was fifteen— they practice archery together and they’re planning a hunting trip. His mom no longer calls every day to check that he’s alive; “she just knows I’m good, ”he says. His relationships with his grandmother, aunt, and uncle have been mending too, a process he calls one of the clearest answers to prayer he’s experienced.

“The Lord taught me to forgive and not only to say I forgive, but to live in that forgiveness,” he said.”

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The recovery process has produced the fruits of reconciliation in Sebastian’s life, both with God and his family. In fact, that same transformation has rippled outward into other areas of his life.

He landed a job as a lot technician at Perkins Motors, a longtime SRM partner, and has now held it for over a year — the longest he’s held any job since he was a teenager. Recently, he sat in on the interview for a SRM program participant who now reports directly to him. “I’m watching him where I was a year ago,” he says, “just rooting for him… to meet him the same way God met me.”

A man once estranged from his own family is now the steady presence someone else looks to. It is a pure picture of redemption.

In May, Sebastian moved out of SRM’s transitional housing and into a house — his first time fully on his own since everything fell apart.

“For the first time in my life, I’m not afraid,” said Sebastian. “I’ve been afraid my whole life, and I’m not afraid.”‍

Above every other relationship he’s rebuilding, Sebastian points his relationship with God as the constant that broke the cycle he couldn’t break alone, making every other relationship possible.

His anchor verse is Proverbs 3:5-6: “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.”

Sebastian is a living representation of that Scripture.

Springs Rescue Mission exists so neighbors like Sebastian can find pathways out of homelessness and into health and healing. Because of your generosity, people are breaking addictions, reuniting with their families, and finding relationship with the God who never let them go.

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