JEH: Good afternoon, Scott.
SCOTT: Hello.
JEH: Can you tell me your full name?
SCOTT: Scott Gardner Eastwood.
JEH: How old are you?
SCOTT: Fifty-three.
JEH: Do you have any siblings?
SCOTT: Three.
JEH: And where are you in the pecking order?
SCOTT: I’m the baby.
JEH: Spoiled?
SCOTT: Yes, in a weird way, but yes.
JEH: All right. Could you tell me about your mom and dad?
SCOTT: Okay, well, mom and dad met when mom was thirteen, dad was nineteen. Mom’s dad was a thoroughbred horse owner, and dad was a trainer.
JEH: Where was this?
SCOTT: This, I think they were in Jersey at the time.
JEH: Okay.
SCOTT: So, dad being a thoroughbred trainer, they actually followed the horses up and down the east coast. And dad worked for my mother’s dad, which is how they met. It was a bit of a scandal because she was thirteen, and she ended up pregnant with my sister Linda.
JEH: At thirteen?
SCOTT: At thirteen. And they were together until they died, and my dad was seventy-two when he died. But, with that said, the three siblings that I have, my sister Linda is twenty years older than me, my brother George is eighteen years older than me, and my brother Jim was nine years older than me. I lived with Jim only until I was seven years old, and I never lived with George or Linda; I was like raised in two separate families.
So, when mom and dad were in the horse business, George and Linda were raised in the thoroughbred horse business, living in a trailer that actually moved. Jim was born in the middle, and then there was me, the mistake (laughs). And we say that with love; I was definitely not meant to happen, but I grew up in a different house.
By that time dad had just gotten out of the horse business by the time I was born, and mom was running a national pageantry system called Talent America, that was very successful in finding stars, people you know from movies and Broadway.
JEH: So, where were you living at that time?
SCOTT: In Lincoln, Rhode Island, I was born and raised in Lincoln. So, when I was raised, when my parents raised my older siblings, they were poor, they were outright poor. When I came around, we were middle class, and yes, I was spoiled. They had more than they could give to my siblings. They were also wiser, smarter, you know, they were older.
My mother recognized in me at a very young age that I had the ability to see through peoples’ intentions. I’m a very good judge of character, in other words. She taught me from a very young age about business. One example was, I was eight years old, and she was booking a national contract with the Marriott Corporation to use their hotels for our pageants.
She would take me to these meetings of executives, Marriott executives, at eight years old, and she would play it off as, “Oh, I’m a working mom, don’t worry about it, he’s just going to play in the back of the room, but I needed to bring him for this meeting.” After the meeting, on the way out, she would then ask me, “So, who’s lying, who’s telling the truth, who’s actually going to do the job,” and this and that, and I would give her exactly what these people would do.
She cultivated that in me as I grew up in this business. So, I grew up in this environment. I grew up with people that were making movies that were just like childhood friends. We weren’t poor, but we lived like we were rich. So, I had this real demented way of looking at things. So, long story short, mom also realized I had a business acumen.
At thirteen years old, I would get picked up like a normal kid from a freshman year in high school. I went to Catholic High School, because they were better at sports. She would then have a bag packed for me, I’d get on a plane, fly to whatever part of the country, tell these hotel executives whatever I had to do to run the preliminary, which is just a smaller pageant in a local area. The show could have been in any of the forty-eight states. I get off the plane, tell them all what to do, run the pageant, take all the cash, put it in the suitcase, fly back, and then go to high school like a regular kid on Monday. I had a ton of responsibilities as a child.
JEH: At thirteen years old, you were doing adult work, telling adults what to do?
SCOTT: Yes.
JEH: Did that give you a swelled head, an ego?
SCOTT: Yes, to a degree, because when I got home, I was made to live like a normal kid, going to high school, doing homework, getting in trouble, playing with my friends in the neighborhood, and on the weekends, I had an insane amount of responsibility that I had to live up to, and the expectation was to never make mistakes. Mom was a driven business woman. She wasn’t bad, she wasn’t good, she was human, but she had a very twisted way of looking at things. Neither of my parents were religious, but I went to Catholic High School.
It was an insane amount of responsibility. When I was working, I had to carry a certain attitude in order for adults to listen to me. But there was one hotel executive at Marriott who knew me well and trusted me completely and he was a big enough deal that when I brought his name up, everybody fell in line. So, here I was, a football player, sports guy, solidly average student, but in the real world I was helping my mother run a very large business that was very successful, and I had a ton of responsibility, and so I had kind of a twisted childhood, but I thought it was amazing, like what other kid could say that they had this childhood.
JEH: I have never heard a story like this in my life, this is a fascinating story. So, tell me about your teenage and early adult years if you will.
SCOTT: Okay. I can’t say I had faith in Jesus, but I knew who God was because of Catholic High School. My parents did not promote me to go to church, but I did go and make sacraments, but it was more like a business transaction than a faith transaction. So, I knew who God was, but I had no relationship with God until I did. So, I went through high school, I played three sports, I worked for mom, I had a job in the neighborhood. I was always busy; I’ve been like that my whole life.
As a young adult, I went to college in Indiana just to get away from everything. I only had to come home and be who that person was.
JEH: Where did you go to college?
SCOTT: Indiana Institute of Technology, a very basic business program. I did my four years and then I left. I had a great time while I was there because I didn’t have to be that person that I was in Rhode Island.
JEH: Did you graduate?
SCOTT: I graduated. My plan was after graduation to go and become a stockbroker in New York City. My girlfriend, at the time, gave me a present, and my son was on his way, and I made the shift from becoming a stockbroker and trying to raise a kid in Manhattan, to restaurants and got married and went to suburbia life in restaurant management. The pageants at that point have basically dwindled off, mom couldn’t carry the business. So, I ran restaurants out of college instead of becoming a stockbroker.
And that was my first wife with my son, my son was born in ‘94. So, young adult, I’m in restaurants and I rose very quickly in restaurants. I was running one restaurant, to within five years, running a hundred restaurants myself for a Papa John’s Corporation.
JEH: One can easily see that your mother had prepared you well for management.
SCOTT: Very. Part of that was, she taught me, yes, business, but she also taught me like a class in how to manipulate people. She was also loving, caring and spoiling. Also, a very manipulative weird way of thinking. Dad was a very calm. Dad was an alcoholic, but I never knew he was an alcoholic because he stopped drinking when I was two. I only knew sober dad, I didn’t know alcoholic dad.
So, I came from genetically a line of alcoholics, but nonetheless, alcohol did not play a big role in my life at that point. I was progressing in restaurants. Unfortunately, about four years into that, I got a divorce from Mary, who was Scott’s mother. It was my fault; I just didn’t like her anymore. I know that sounds horrible. There were of course more reasons than just that, but it needed it to end, so I ended it.
And then, went on to meet my second wife while I was still working in restaurants, she’d actually worked for me. And we got together and ended up having two girls with her in 1998 and in 1999, Briana and Shauna. We were together for about three years.
JEH: Were you married?
SCOTT: Yes, but briefly because she then decided she didn’t want to be a wife and a mother anymore, and took off. That was in 2001. At the time, I was running a hundred restaurants. I have these two little girls. They were two and three. I was the worker, the caregiver and, the provider, I didn’t even know how to brush hair, especially for girls, and I became a single dad like within two days’ time.
I went after it. I did what I had to do. I took custody of the girls. She disappeared for three years, before she came back, I got divorced by myself in Connecticut at that time. I did take a demotion kind of, I switched companies, and I went to running one restaurant, because I was a single dad now and I just couldn’t put in the hours that I had to put in. So, I ended up switching franchises, no big deal. Either way, it was still massively successful running the one restaurant. I was a single dad for four years.
JEH: Were you able to see your son at this time?
SCOTT: Yes, oh yeah, luckily my parents would help me enough so that I could go. He lived in New Hampshire, I lived in Massachusetts at that point. And I would drive up to see his football games, and he would come down and spend time with me and the girls. I always took to being a parent very seriously, always provided, always did what I had to do.
So, when Briana and Shauna were six and seven, I met my third wife Lori, who had custody of her two girls. We met at a dance recital, and we were an immediate hit, We moved all four girls in together, Lori is of course who comes to church with me.
JEH: Okay, you’re present wife?
SCOTT: Which is complicated, but yes. So, we got together, and then my son moved in, and then we adopted my nephew, and we raised six kids together. We did great at it.
JEH: What year was this now?
SCOTT: 2005, when we got together. Yeah, I think it was 2005, we moved in together in 2006. So, in our twenty year span we raised six kids, my adopted nephew, my son moved in, and we were machines, all the kids played sports, there was dance schools, and there was all the stuff. It didn’t matter what I did, I was always successful at work. So, when I turned thirty-nine, my weight had gotten up to 360 pounds, and I got the gastric by-pass surgery because I was on a path to death. I lost 160 lbs. 2 years later drinking reentered my life, but it was like, go out, have fun, come home, no big deal.
JEH: Was it stress eating?
SCOTT: Mostly. I ate because I love food, I ate because I worked in restaurants, I ate because I was sad. My mom taught me growing up that there’s two solutions to everything, you can drink your way out of it, or you can eat your way out of it, but those were my healthy solutions in dealing with anything. So, the first of those two bad habits that almost killed me was food, and I was on a path to death. My doctor looked me dead in the face and said, “Scott, you’re thirty-nine years old, you do whatever you want, and you’ll be dead in ten years if you keep eating like this.” I had all the bad habits, fast food, candy, I was a hot mess, 360 pounds.
JEH: And drinking beer doesn’t help.
SCOTT: Yeah, but that was really inconsequential. I’d go and have a few and it was no big deal. If I had a scotch, it was no big deal. So, I get the gastric by-pass. At that time, you know, we’re in the house, the kids, you know, were becoming older, it was fourteen years ago, 2010. I get the surgery, and they said, “You really shouldn’t drink after the surgery.” So, I listened, I lost 160 pounds in six months, I did not drink for two years, I just didn’t drink.
About two years into it, you know, now the kids are getting older, and we’re all still successful in all we do. I was at an event, and I said, you know what, I’ve always had like one or two, it’s no big deal, they don’t know what they’re talking about, and I had a drink at an event. And it was no big deal for a couple of years, if I was at an event I’d have one or two drinks, and it did work differently. Alcohol, because of the surgery, did make me feel differently than it did before the surgery.
JEH: How so?
SCOTT: It was easier, you take one sip, and it would literally go right to your head after surgery. I was aware of that, and I was like, okay, I will just have to drink less if I’m going to drink, but no big deal for the first couple of years.
JEH: So, social drinking at that point?
SCOTT: Yes, not problematic drinking, yet. Of course, the kids are getting older so some of them are moving out, going to college, this and that, my responsibilities became less, and my drinking became more. I started to drink every night, and have two fingers, to use an old fashion slang term, which is about two to three ounces of scotch with a cigar, and that was my cool down time. And then like a year into that, all of a sudden, I’m drinking four fingers, and before I realized it, I was drinking every night and drinking a lot. And still functioning, still doing my job, but I didn’t recognize that I couldn’t stop drinking.
I was like, this is great, I’m comfortable, it’s working, I’m calmer, you know, I’m basically self-medicating at this point with booze, and not aware of it. I knew that there was alcoholism in my family, but I didn’t know the rules of alcoholism. And before I knew it, I figured it out, I was having a problem with drinking. At this point I had become a financial planner, not an advisor, a financial planner.
One day I was driving, in the morning. On my way to meet with clients, when I started to reschedule the day so that I could start drinking earlier. The bell went off in my head, and I went, whoa, I have a problem. This was like a moment in time that I can remember, I can remember sitting in the car, and I said, I’ve got to fix this.
Now, everything in my life I’ve fixed myself. I used my willpower. I had no relationship with God. I fully thought that everything I had done and everything I had gotten away with was because of my will. That was then. So, that day I said, oh my God, I’ve got a problem. I said, okay, I’m just going to stop drinking on my own. For two years, on my own, I would drink, get mad at myself, not drink for a day or two, then drink again, and I could just never get away from the compulsion of drinking. it got to a point where Lori was now recognizing this as a problem. Although we were very communicative. She was starting to get upset about it.
So, I went to a doctor and the doctor gave me this pill called Antabuse, which if you drink on Antabuse, it makes you violently ill. I said, that’s it, that’s what I need, I’ll take the pill, and I won’t drink. After taking the pill for about a month and not drinking. I decided that, well, you know what, I’ll stop taking the pill for two days. Then I can drink like I wanted to, because “I got this now” I stopped long enough that I don’t need take the pill.
JEH: You were still in control.
SCOTT: Exactly. So, I started to drink. The effects of Antabuse linger for weeks in your system. I did not understand at the time that one of the side effects is death while drinking on it. So, I go to the back yard after two days of not taking the pill, I buy my favorite bottle of scotch, I buy my favorite cigar, and I’m sitting in the backyard. It’s a nice summer day, my dog’s next to me, I light up the cigar, and I start drinking. I start to warm up; I felt my breathing become labored. This is how stubborn I was. I thought I could drink through the side effects, and I start pouring it down. Now, I just want to get drunk, and I’m like, what is going on, I’m feeling awful, but yet I’m trying to drink and smoke at the same time, but yet I feel my lungs are getting restricted. And I guess at some point I went face down, butt up, off the chair, passed out. My dog starts freaking out, my neighbor looks over the fence, sees me like this, calls the ambulance. The ambulance shows up two minutes after I went into respiratory arrest.
The EMT’s, when they revived me on the way to Roger Williams Hospital, said, “Why are you trying to kill yourself?” Now, one, I was still inebriated, but still also recovering from being dead for a minute, I had stopped breathing, respiratory arrest. They’re asking me why I was trying to kill myself, and I’m like, I’m not trying to kill myself, what are you talking about? They’re like, “Well, you were drinking on Antabuse, you knew one of the side effects was death.” I’m like, no, I just wanted to get drunk, I didn’t know what they were talking about. I get to the hospital, and of course because now you’re drinking on Antabuse, a normal person then assumes that they’re an alcoholic, I still think I can control this.
Somebody at the hospital that volunteers in the AA program came down to talk to me. I was on suicide watch, because everybody thought I was committing suicide, as much as I tried to talk them out of it, they would not listen. I’m like, no, I didn’t want to be dead, I wanted to be drunk, why won’t any of you get this.
So, he comes and talks to me, he goes, “Look,” and he made sense to me, it was weird, because I don’t listen to people. This guy made sense to me. He’s like, “Look, if you’re drinking on Antabuse and you can’t stop your drinking. I have this wonderful program. It’s called Seabrook, it’s down in South Jersey, you go there for a while, they help you stop drinking, wonderful food, great classes, good people just like you trying to quit booze.”
Here I am now in a hospital, after an ambulance and almost dying, I said, well, I guess I need to take this more seriously, stubborn, willful. That started my six-year career of going in and out of thirty-day programs. I would go, I would be great for three or four months. A meeting a day. At the end of the first one, I’d come out of Seabrook, I’d do ninety for ninety, which is a thing AA people will understand.
I’d do ninety for ninety. When I’d finished that, I’d complete it, now I got this, I’m no longer an alcoholic. I look at my wife, you can confirm it with Lori, I looked her in the face that day and said, hey look, I’m back, I’m a normal drinker again. Let’s go to the ‘Track” (Otherwise known as Twin River) and have some fun. She’s crying, and I’m like, no, no, no, you don’t understand. I can go back because we used to drink together and have fun together. She was like, “Okay, if you think so, let’s go try,” because if we just drink on Fridays everything’s okay. We went out, and it worked, for the next three months we were going out on Fridays and have fun, and I would not drink the rest of the week.
JEH: Is it fair to say that you didn’t think that you had a problem?
SCOTT: I knew I had a problem, but I thought I could fix it. I thought there was an end to being an alcoholic, like you could fix cancer, you could fix a cold or a flu. I thought alcoholism is something I could fix and go back to being a normal drinker. I wanted to be a normal drinker. I did not want to be one of these people that never drinks for the rest of their life.
It took six years of going in and out and experimenting and trying. Trust me, in between I was doing meetings, and I would get a sponsor. I would try to do the steps, but I wouldn’t really do the steps in AA. I would end up relapsing and drinking like a fish again, and every year it got worse. It started to affect my work, it started to affect my relationship with my children, it started to affect everything in my life, but at this point I couldn’t stop.
JEH: Were you aware that it was affecting —
SCOTT: Yes, it didn’t matter, I drank anyway. I was a full-blown alcoholic at this point but still was not getting the point. If you asked me a question out of the pages of the Alcoholic Anonymous, I’d have given you a perfect answer. I went to all the classes, I went to all the programs, I could explain to you how exactly alcoholism worked physically, mentally, I couldn’t do it spiritually. I could give you the exact textbook answer that came out of the doctors’ manuals, of what happens to alcoholics.
I knew alcoholism, and if you ask any of my therapists at that time, they would tell you I was the most intelligent, well-read alcoholic they knew, but I couldn’t stop drinking. This is where the redemption really comes in. Two years ago, this Monday, December 30th of this year I will have not drank for two years. Two years ago today I was in one of the worst relapses of my life. I drank for seventy-two straight hours, I don’t even want to tell you the amount of alcohol that went into me, a normal person would be dead.
On the day before, on the 29th of December two years ago, I finally came out of it enough to call Lori. We had separated at this point, and said, I am just sober enough right now, I’m not going to stop drinking, but I need you to get me to a rehab. I was so distraught after she came to get me because I just couldn’t figure out how to stay sober. She gets to the house, she’s going to rescue me again, and even though she had no obligation to at that point to help me. By the time she got there I was so distraught I no longer wanted to be on the planet.
When we went outside I kind of tricked her, she thought we were going outside to get in the car to go to rehab. I live on a very busy street, and there was a Mack truck coming and I stepped into the street for the Mack truck to kill me. I wanted be gone, there was no hope left in my body. Lori recognized what I had done, she horse collared me, pulled me out of the street. Luckily, I was so drunk that I couldn’t fight anything. I don’t even know how I was walking. She pulled me out of the street and saved my life and got me to rehab.
That morning I wake up, and I realize what I had done. I realized that drinking had taken me to a level that I no longer wanted to be alive. Never mind work, never mind take care of grandkids that I now had. None of it mattered, all I wanted to do was drink and die, I wanted it to be over. My life, of all that success, all that wonderfulness that I had done, and everything I had done in my life no longer mattered because I couldn’t stop drinking and I couldn’t stop it, and I wanted to die. I had tried for six years at this point to stop drinking and failed and failed and failed but kept trying new things.
So, I’m in this rehab. The next day, if you can’t tell already, I’m an extremely talkative person, I talk in my sleep, I talk to myself, and I talk to people as often as I possibly can, because I actually love people. For two days in that rehab, unless I was spoken to, I did not talk, I was done with life. I did have a revelation while I was in there, I said the only thing I haven’t tried is this relationship with God.
Now, I did have a bonus because I knew who God was, I knew it was Jesus. I just didn’t know who he was. Because of Catholic High School I thought I knew who he was. You know, you spend an hour a day in religion class. So, at least I knew who God was, but I had no relationship. I had no idea of who he was, and I said, well, it’s the only thing I haven’t tried to stop drinking.
I knew a guy, I got a guy. Six months earlier I had called him during a very traumatic point in my life. I was sober at that moment, and I called him because he was in the program, and I met him through the program. I asked him a very deep question about, how can God allow this to happen to such a small child. He gave me an amazing answer, and I knew I had my God guy now.
JEH: What did he say?
SCOTT: Well, he just really explained it to me in a way that made sense, that, “God didn’t let this happen, the devil makes these things happen, to take people out, and who are we to know God’s plan.” For some reason at that point it made sense to me, but I still had no desire for this relationship with God. Of course I relapsed again, and that’s what led to this rehab, where now I’m not talking to anybody.
After those two days, on New Years Day, I realized, okay the only thing you haven’t tried is a relationship with this guy Jesus. I knew it then, and I said, I know a guy who can teach me this. The next day, because you had to ask for permission to use the phone. I asked them for my phone so that I could call this guy. I called him, and you all know him as Bob Coderre.
I called him, and I said, Bob, I’m in rehab, I can’t stop drinking, the only thing I haven’t tried is God. When I get out of here, will you help me with this God problem? He said yes, and when I got out not long after that, he picked me up in his truck, he asked me some very poignant questions. I was massively confused; I didn’t know how to answer them.
At this point, I was willing to listen to anything, because at this point, I knew I wanted to live, but I knew I couldn’t stop drinking. So, this is a horrible paradox in my brain. Bob, he was very particular in his questions, like I could tell that he had done this before, he had a long, long, long, long history of sobriety himself, and we had a great conversation.
We kept talking. If these facts aren’t right, it was all kind of a blur at the time. Now I’m in a sober house, I have no job, my whole family is basically not talking to me. I have ruined everything in my life, at least that’s what I thought at this point.
JEH: You burned a lot of bridges?
SCOTT: You know, I didn’t actually burn them to the ground, but they were crispy. Bob picked me up , he handed me a book called, “More than a Carpenter, “ because he knew I was a very science guy, I was intelligent. This, “More than a Carpenter,” book explained to me how Jesus was real, and how could it be any other way that he was the Son of God. This book explained it to me, and it was enough of a spark to me. I’m in, I’ll listen. I started to work with Bob every week, a couple of times a week, where we really started getting into, not religion, we got into faith. Building a relationship with Jesus directly, and I did what I had to do, and I listened.
The other part of that was Bob was my spiritual guide to Jesus; he was my God sponsor. I had another sponsor for AA steps, and he was a very successful, a guy who had been sober for a long time, with a very good way of doing the twelve steps. So, I was such a drunk, I needed two sponsors, so hard-headed, so willful, so over the top.
At this point in my life, for the first time in my life, I knew I had people in my life I could trust, and whatever they told me to do, I did. I didn’t work for a long time; I took nine months off. I just got sober. I worked with the two of them, and if they told me to go paint the line on 95, I painted the line. That’s how low I had gotten to, the point where I didn’t trust myself.
A month or two into this I got to move back to my apartment, out of the sober house. This is the single greatest gift I ever received in my life, when I finally started to get, as we call it, a mustard seed of faith, God came down, put the Holy Spirit inside of me, and rewarding me by relieving my compulsion to drink. I say that specifically like that because that’s a miracle.
I no longer drove by a liquor store and yearned for the booze. God took the compulsion to drink away from me, because of my faith in him, and I’ve continued for the last two years. Every day I build my relationship and knowledge of God. It’s what made it possible for me to stay sober until this day, but that is not the only gift. The relieving of the compulsion led me to more faith, led me to more of a relationship. I’ve gotten back the things that I’ve lost, or at least the things I wanted back, I have now received a life that I never could have not imagined that I had before.
All those years I was trying to get sober and couldn’t, I kept trying to go back and be the person I thought I wanted to be. Once I gave that up, and put my faith in God, he’s rewarded me with a life that I could have never even imagined for myself. Do I go through troubles like every other human, absolutely. They are no longer the end of the world, they no longer effect my relationship with God, there is no point now that, I have the solution, and I have the access to it at will. Do I get angry at people on the road, you better believe it. Now instead of chasing them down and yelling at them, because I’m never really a physical guy. Now I look up and go, God, what am I doing, I know you don’t like me like this. So, here, you take it, I’m going to go back to being peaceful. Guess what, it works.
I write to Jesus now in my journaling, because I’ve always been a journaler [sic] throughout this whole process. Now, I write to Jesus, my questions, my problems, the things I don’t understand, the things I need just not do anything about, I write to him. I also talk to him on a daily basis, all the time. When something good happens, I thank him for it, when something bad happens I ask him for the understanding of how I could fix it, or if I’m even meant to fix it.
JEH: Let me ask you, how did you meet Bob prior to that time to know to call him?
SCOTT: So, like I said, Bob has been sober for many years, and there was a meeting that I would go to when I was going in and out that Bob was a part of. It was at a rehab facility that I knew the owner quite well, and that’s how I got to know Bob, kind of, I knew him from the meeting.
The pinnacle point of me and Bob’s relationship which led me to make the call when the tragedy happened in my life, because I didn’t understand how God could let that happen. It was one of the other times that I got sober, I was in a sober house and Bob showed up one night to help out with the guys. Bob was talking about the spiritual matters of staying sober, to all of us. I told him, yeah, I know who God is, I know it’s Jesus. Now, this is before I’ve had all this, right, it’s me in a sober house, still thinking I can do it on my own. When I said, yeah, I know it’s Jesus, and Bob looks at me and says, “Well, do you want to get to know him better?” And these were my actual words, no, me and God are good, I went through five years of Catholic High School, I know who he is, I know that me and him are good. Bob looked at me and said, “Okay, when you’re ready.” And I said, well, I’m good. That was an actual legitimate thought in my world.
It was about two months later when the tragedy had happened, and because of that phone call is why I called Bob. That’s where the seed was planted, it was way back in that sober house when I told him, no, I know who God is, and I’m good, I don’t need your information.
JEH: How did you make your way to Harvest, did you know about Harvest Community?
SCOTT: Well, it’s Bob’s church, and once my faith started to grow, he made the suggestion to me, “I need you to find a church.” Now, he didn’t directly invite me to Harvest, and I’m still me, so I was being a bit hard-headed, because in my head, I said, well, then why don’t you invite me to your church, but I didn’t tell him that.
I waited, and he kept bringing it up. It could have been two months, “Have you found a church yet?” No, and he would just drop it, it was like this unspoken animosity, but he wasn’t catching on of why I wasn’t choosing one, because I desperately wanted him to ask me to come to his church. And finally, he wore me down, and he asked me again, and I looked him, and I was like, Bob, why won’t you just invite me to your church. He said, “Well, because I wanted to give you options.” And I was like, and I wanted to be invited. And he said, “Fine, will you come?” I said, I’ll be there Sunday.
JEH: When was this, how long ago was this?
SCOTT: April or May when I first started to go. They almost had me go to the baptism that summer, and things happened, and I didn’t end up doing it. I had signed up for it, but didn’t go, I was in a funny spot, because the two years have been up and down, it’s been wonderful, and it’s been trying, and it’s like living a whole new life, and I wasn’t feeling it for the baptism.
So, I started going to Harvest. I’m in literature every morning, I’m a super morning person, and the first thing I do is make coffee and get the dog fed and get him out to pee, and then the bible opens. At the time, I had no clue of what I was reading, and I started to email Pastor Gene, what does this mean? This was like every morning, and I was blown away that he would answer them that day at some point, with a full explanation.
To the point where he then made a suggestion to me, “Scott, there’s a book out there called the Bible Knowledge Commentary, I suggest you get it.” He saw that I needed to know. I knew there was more to it than I was reading, and I am definitely not the guy who will wait to gain knowledge. I will go after it, if I want to know it, I’m going to find a way to know it. Pastor Gene was very kind, between him and Pastor Bacon and Bob, I was peppering these guys with stuff coming out of the bible, verses, and things I didn’t understand, and things I wanted to know. Pastor Gene even said to me, “These are poignant questions, you’re getting it.” So, he suggested the Bible Knowledge Commentary, of course I had it pretty quickly. He sent me a coupon or something so that I could buy it cheaper. I was like, I don’t care, I need it. Rather than pester these guys, I know how busy they are.
Bob made a suggestion to me, “Well, why don’t you ask Pastor Gene if he has time, you go and have a conversation with him for an hour or so.” So, me being the salesman that I am, of course I ask, what’s the worst you can get, no. So, I called Pastor Gene, and I said, hey it’s Scott, I would love to spend an hour with you if I could, whenever you have time. I gave him all the outs, and he was like, “You know what, lets figure it out, yes, we’ll meet.”
Then we met, and he has been so gracious. Now, of course there’s a lot of in betweens [sic] because of his schedule and my schedule and life, but that man has basically given me an hour of his life about every other week since we met the first time. It’s great because he’s gotten to know my life through faith. How to explain to me and grow through trials and tribulations. Wow isn’t God amazing that he gave me this trial so I could learn from it and come out of it better, and it’s just been this path.
Then there was this Pain to Purpose that I did with Pastor Steve, with my group of ladies that were amazing. Through these years, through Pastor Gene, and Bob, and the class like Pain to Purpose with Pastor Steve. How all things that come at me now in life, what lesson is God trying to teach me here.
How I turned all of that into a working relationship, and even in understanding that I’m not meant to know, which I can’t tell you is nothing I thought in my life ever about anything ever. I always thought if I wanted to know then I could know it, and now I have a daily expression in my life, through all of this training, and all of this knowledge, and all of this acceptance, and all of the taking of suggestions, and all the going after this knowledge, there’s one thing I know now, that “Who am I to know God’s plan”. I can’t tell you how much more peace that brings into my life.
I literally grew up thinking, and I was taught that you can control anything, and anybody. You just have to find the right words and do the right things. Today my thought process on control, and this is one of the big things that God taught me, so that I could live a better life, is the one thing I know, the only thing that I know I get to control in my life is the choice in my own behavior, and that is literally it. I don’t get control over my thoughts; I don’t get control over the things that happen around me; I don’t get control over the people that I thought I was controlling. I get control over nothing in my life, but the choice in my behavior, but because I was taught that by God, I do my very best to only behave the way I’ve learned that God wants me to behave. I know God had a plan for me, and who am I to know that plan. I gave up wishing that I had anything from my past. That’s where my growth has taken me, is everything that happened, I can say this full of truth in my heart, I am so grateful I was an alcoholic.
If I had never had that kind of trouble in my life, I would have never given myself to God, to get to the peace and the knowledge, and the love that I now have, if I hadn’t had gone through the worst trial of my life. If I hadn’t had wanted to step in front of that Mack truck, I would never be where I am today, and I can’t imagine what God’s will is for me going forward, but I know that I’m ready to receive it when he’s ready to give it to me.
JEH: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
SCOTT: The payoff has been, after two short years of gaining faith, is the life I couldn’t had even expected for myself. I’m a master planner, I’m great at planning things out, and organizing things. I tell you; I’m dumbfounded by giving up the control, and having the faith, and not being afraid to ask, my life is tenfold better than it ever has been in my life. There is no quantitative number I can put on any part of my life, other than the amount of peace that I now have in my heart.
I am as human as you get, I’ll have the thought I shouldn’t have, but now I have the chance to act the way I want to act, and I correct the thought, even though I had it, and I don’t get mad at myself for having it. The crazy part, all my life I always thought I had to fix those people, I had to set them straight, I no longer think like that. If I was mad at them, and I had the opportunity now to meet them. Now I go for, there’s good in this person. Where I used to use it for the power of no good, now I try to use it for the power of good. It’s just better, everything’s better.
JEH: And we’ll end on that because everything is better. God bless you and thank you for participating in the Redemption Stories.
SCOTT: You’re welcome and thank you for asking me to come.