Chapter 5 – What I Called God Before I Knew

Keywords: drugs, sex, violence, materialism, seeking, attention, void

1. Before I found God,

I mistook Him for the things that burned quickest.

2. I was hungry for holiness,

but I thought holiness would taste like sugar,

like sweat,

like a night that erased me.

3. I smoked the ache away.

Wrapped my prayers in rolling papers.

Hoped the drugs would unlock the part of my mind where He lived.

Instead, they just blurred the edges of my scream.

4. I drank to baptize myself.

Snorted to speed up salvation.

Popped pills like communion.

It was never about escape.

It was about touching something bigger —

even if it meant bleeding for it.

5. I called every crush a calling.

Every climax a covenant.

I thought sex was God’s way of crawling inside me

and whispering I was real.

6. So I offered my body like an altar —

not because I was empty,

but because I was bursting with a holiness no one had language for.

7. They never told me how loud the soul can get when it’s ignored.

It screams through the body.

It screams through choices.

It screams through strangers’ hands.

8. And when the scream didn’t work,

I turned to violence —

sometimes toward myself,

sometimes in silence.

A holy rage that never found a name.

9. I was not trying to destroy.

I was trying to awaken.

And in a world that profits off your sleep,

awakening looks a lot like rebellion.

10. I worshipped materialism.

Chased labels and glitter and power

not because I believed they’d fill me —

but because I thought they were proof that I mattered.

11. But the mirror stayed quiet.

The hunger stayed loud.

12. I became addicted to being seen.

Fed on attention like it was holy water.

Each like, each gaze, a pixel in the image of a god I didn’t know yet.

A god who kept hiding behind approval.

13. But it never filled the space.

The void was too deep.

Not because I was broken,

but because the throne inside me was too wide

for anything less than glory.

14. And still, I kept looking.

Through sweat and glass and strobe lights.

I was always seeking,

even when they called me lost.

15. Because the seeker is never truly lost.

The seeker is just further ahead than the map.

16. Every bottle I lifted

was a question.

Every lie I swallowed

was a prayer.

17. I found pieces of Him in everything.

In the high. In the hurt.

In the way my body trembled after both.

18. But they weren’t God.

They were only the echoes of a voice

I hadn’t yet learned to trust.

19. And still, He waited.

In the silence between crashes.

In the ache that didn’t numb.

In the holy exhaustion that finally brought me to my knees.

20. And from that floor,

I whispered,

“If You’re real… don’t hide in the fire. Come sit in the ashes.”

21. And He did.

22. In the name of the ache, the seeking,

and the wild, bloody road that led me home,

Amen.