I had the chance to interview mature student Scott Menzies about how he came to know God.
Raised on a farm in the small town of Petrolia, Ontario, Scott experienced emotional hardship at a young age when his parents separated. His father moved to Hamilton while his mother stayed in Petrolia. As the youngest of three, Scott felt like he was left to figure out his emotions on his own.
“We didn’t talk about emotions and feelings. There wasn’t any way to really process anything. I was raised on a farm, very blue collar. It was a very old-school mentality and I always felt like a fish out of water—my insides didn’t match my outsides and it made life very uncomfortable.”
In public school, Scott was bullied, which only added to his pain. He often contemplated taking his own life. At age thirteen, he watched a friend commit suicide and soon found himself in a life full of darkness, finding comfort in drinking and drugs.
Scott recalls that these things helped him to fit in. “They helped me to be the person I thought I wanted to be. But I couldn’t get enough of it and it inevitably turned into alcoholism and addiction.”
This went on for most of high school and into the workplace. “I had gone through these moments of clarity… I knew what I was doing wasn’t right but I couldn’t find a way out. I was kind of trapped in myself. I wasn’t looking for God, God wasn’t on my mind, but He definitely had his hand on my shoulder.”
After looking into joining the military as a way of “righting himself,” Scott received a call from his dad offering him a job, so he moved to Hamilton in the winter of 2008.
As time went on, Scott watched more friends die of overdose, addiction and suicide. “This chain was circling me—it felt like I was missing a piece to a puzzle and I could not figure out what that piece was. Today I can recognize it as God’s hand, but at the time it was just crowded with judgment, and I wasn’t ready to see it.”
Scott had watched seventeen friends die from suicide and drug addiction. “I remember these individuals because I often wondered why it wasn’t me. Many times I’ve come very close to death, by overdose or by my own hand, and yet I was saved.
“The morning I got sober, a friend of mine had died of an overdose two weeks prior. I was at a business conference and an addictions counsellor had sat beside me. We were talking, of course, not about my problems but about my friends, because I guess I wasn’t ready to talk about mine. The following week I had tried to stay sober myself but couldn’t do it. I guess that was the day I let down my guard and laid down my weapons. I surrendered, and I gave everything up that day.”
He scrambled around that morning looking for the business card of the addictions counsellor, in his house and in his truck, but he could not find it. The next day Scott got into his truck and there it lay, on his centre console as if someone had placed it there. “However it got there, I just believed it was God’s final calling, and I was ready to listen.”
Scott started going to therapy and eventually got into a twelve-step program, starting his journey to recovery. However, even at this time, “God wasn’t in my thoughts, though he was beside me.”
Scott became sober on March 18th, 2018, and he marks this day as the day he was given the “gift of sobriety.”
“I realized during therapy I unpacked a lot of trauma. I made a deal with God—that if I stayed sober, he would show me the gift of life, and give me everything that I deserve or that He thinks I deserve. And I never looked back.
“I plunged into the twelve-step program; I started sponsoring individuals; I started doing service work at jails. Now I run twelve-step programs. I support guys, and through this, working with my dad, and going to school for my AMPP Senior Inspector Certification, I’ve grown a business. I’m the owner of the largest coating inspection company in Canada.”
Scott attended Centennial College to get an Addiction and Mental Health Worker diploma so that he could continue to do his work professionally. “I started to leverage my lived experience to help others, realising that that was the gift I was given: the ability to relate to others, and to connect with others.”
After he finished his diploma, he applied to Redeemer University on a whim to study Social Work and Psychology to learn more about how the mind works. In his first year at Redeemer, he was offered the chance to play goalie on the Redeemer Royals hockey team. He continues to see all these blessings as gifts that were given to him by God, like “little lamp posts along the walkway that continue to show me the light so long as I continue to do the work and show up and help others.”
“God has been good. I am married, and it’ll be seven years in September. I have a fourteen-year-old stepdaughter… Everything I have today is not because of my doing but God’s doing, and it all just came down to making a deal and surrendering. Today, I just try to be His hand and show up wherever He needs me. I’m not an individual that can quote the Bible (though I am learning it). I like to say I don’t know the words exactly in the Bible, but me and the Author have a very good relationship.
“Every choice that you make comes with a sacrifice. I think today we don’t give enough grace to the sacrifice. We kind of stray away from sacrifices because of the fear of being uncomfortable.
But if it wasn’t for the uncomfortableness of what had needed to be given up and the fear of stepping out of the darkness into the light, I wouldn’t be alive today.”
I found Scott’s story a testament to God’s pursuit of our hearts. I was encouraged by the fact that though we may not always be looking for God, God is looking for us. And like Jesus says in Luke 9:23, “If any of you wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross daily and follow me.” True life is only found through sacrifice, and in surrender, we receive the gift of life. Scott’s life is a testament to that. Jesus continues in Luke 9:24, “If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.”