How Sean Hughes overcame addiction through JESUS CHRIST.

I pray that this testimony of God's amazing grace in my life will be an encouragement to those who are suffering from an addiction or have been praying for a loved one battling an addiction.

From the time I was a toddler, addiction has devastated my family. In the first three and a half years of my life, we lost three close family members. My uncle, who was in bondage to drugs and saw no way out, took his own life at just twenty-two years old. Four months later my father, who battled alcoholism, fell asleep at the wheel and was killed. Eighteen months later, my seventeen year old sister was walking down the street when a drunk driver ran off the road and killed her. I also watched the ongoing destruction that other close family members caused through their addictions. I could not understand how people who had been so affected by other people’s addictions could make the decision to use drugs and alcohol themselves. I remember feeling so irritated when they would say things like, “I wish I could stop.” I would reply, “No you don’t, or you would stop.” To say I lacked compassion and an understanding of bondage would be a serious understatement.

I made a personal commitment that I would never touch drugs, and I threw myself into sports as an alternative. When I was fifteen years old, one of my baseball teammates asked me if I was going to heaven. I assured him that I was, since I thought I was a “good person.” He shared with me that we are saved by grace, through faith, and not by works, so I prayed to receive Christ as my Savior. Unfortunately, my “prayer of faith” was not preceded by a godly sorrow for my sin which would have brought about repentance leading to true salvation. I’m afraid to say that had I died during the next nine years of my life, I believe I would have been one of the many to whom Jesus will say, “I never knew you; depart from me, you who practice lawlessness!” (Matthew 7:23, NKJV)

I kept my commitment not to touch drugs throughout high school and college, and I went on to play baseball at the University of Tampa. Due to a career-ending injury, I transferred to Penn State at the end of my senior year and started working in financial services for a large company. Within one year, I was promoted to vice president, opened a new office for the company in Philadelphia, and married my college sweetheart, Jessica. I thought life just couldn’t get any better, but little did I know it was about to all fall apart. While on our honeymoon, I aggravated an old back injury from my baseball days for which my doctor prescribed an addictive narcotic painkiller (oxycodone-acetaminophen). The next month, I went to a pain management specialist who prescribed me 180 pills per month of another addictive narcotic (hydrocodone-acetaminophen). It was not long before the person who swore he would never take drugs was totally dependent upon narcotics and scared to death to admit it.

I began to have panic attacks, so my doctor decided to add an anti-anxiety medication (alprazolam - another very addictive substance) to the mix. I would go to work so high that I lost the respect of all my associates and clients. What used to be a very successful business was falling apart, and the panic attacks just got worse. The next month my doctor recommended I see a psychiatrist who diagnosed me with an anxiety disorder and prescribed more medication on top of the two addictive substances I was already on. The more medicine I took, the more my life fell apart, but I had become so dependent upon the drugs that I couldn’t imagine living without them. Every month it seemed that I was diagnosed with another mental illness and prescribed more drugs. By the time it was over, I had been admitted to three different psychiatric hospitals, diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Bi-Polar Disorder, Schizo-affective Disorder, and Fibromyalgia, and was taking nineteen different prescriptions every day.

I had lost our business, our apartment, our cars, and all of our money. My pastor at the time advised my wife to divorce me and move on with her life, but by God’s grace she decided instead to move in with a family from our church and pray that God would somehow restore the life we once had. Like my uncle twenty-five years ago, I saw no way out, and I prayed for death every day. One day in May of 2002, my prayer was almost realized, and my family received the phone call they feared would come eventually: “You better come down to the hospital; we don’t think he’s going to make it tonight.” The nineteen different medications that I was on had a negative interaction in my brain and I went into seizures, experienced temporary blindness, and felt a deeper sense of fear than I ever knew existed. After six hours of uncontrollable seizures, I finally fell asleep.

The most terrifying part of this whole experience was that I felt a deep fear that had I really died that night, I would have gone to hell. That really shook me up because for the previous nine years I had not only believed that I was saved, but I was also sharing my faith with others and even had a part time job in college as a youth pastor. The next day, I finally came to true repentance and completely surrendered my life to God in total brokenness. I almost dared Him to take the life I destroyed and turn it into something that could bring Him glory. At the time, I looked at it as rededicating my life to Christ. However, looking back on it, I believe that was the time that I truly became born again. My eyes were opened spiritually in a way they never were before, and I realized just how desperately I needed a Savior. I turned to Jesus to not only save me from the consequences of my sin, but also to save me from the power of sin in my life.