Chapter 1
Hard to Believe This Was My Life
Sometimes, when I look back on my life, it is hard to believe that all of it happened to the same person.
Today, my life is completely different. I have a strong family, two grown children who walk beside me and support me, and a wife with whom I have endured some incredibly difficult seasons. Together, we have survived pain, loss, uncertainty, and countless hardships, yet somehow we managed to hold on to the things that mattered most: love, faith, and the determination never to give up on one another.
We live in Warsaw now. We build businesses, we build a future, and we live a life filled with meaning, structure, and hope.
And yet, whenever my mind drifts back to the past, I still struggle to connect the person I was then with the man I have become today. The contrast feels almost impossible to comprehend.
Sometimes I ask myself how a teenager can fall so deeply into alcohol addiction. Looking back now, after so many years, it almost feels unreal as though I am remembering someone else’s life, some distant and tragic story that could not possibly belong to me.
But it did.
It was one of the darkest chapters of my life, a season that slowly and almost imperceptibly pulled me deeper and deeper into destruction.
My first encounter with alcohol happened while I was still in school. At the time, it all seemed harmless enough the first cigarette, the first drink, the kind of moments that often appear during adolescence, especially in those years when fitting in feels more important than anything else.
A new boy from Georgia joined our class, and his family made homemade wine. He began bringing it to school, and we would gather in the school garden, drinking, laughing, joking, never stopping to think about consequences or where that road might eventually lead.
At that age, none of it felt dangerous.
It felt normal.
It felt like everyone around us was living the same way.
But looking back now, I can clearly see that those seemingly innocent moments marked the beginning of a slow and almost invisible collapse.
Outwardly, my life still appeared promising. I played sports, especially football, and I was genuinely good at it. I had energy, potential, and what seemed like a real future ahead of me. But internally, something had already begun to change. Alcohol was quietly becoming part of my life, slowly sinking deeper into my habits, my thinking, and eventually my identity.
As time passed, new groups of friends entered my life, people for whom drinking was completely normal. I began skipping school more often, sometimes disappearing for days at a time. My grades dropped, my priorities shifted, and little by little I began losing control over both myself and my future.
By the ninth grade, things had become far more serious. Wine was no longer enough. Vodka became common. Sometimes we even drank during classes, sitting in the back rows while pretending to pay attention. At the time, it felt rebellious, even “cool” but in reality, it was the beginning of a nightmare that was only gathering momentum.
Eventually, my life became deeply intertwined with a world of addiction. I spent time in apartments filled with alcohol, drugs, and people who had long ago lost control of their lives. Violence, fights, criminal activity, and chaos became normal surroundings for me.
Even though I was only sixteen to eighteen years old, I was already spending time with people much older than me, men who were considered street “authorities.” But behind that image was a deep inner emptiness and destruction I could no longer escape.
Many of the people I once called friends never survived that lifestyle.
One man I knew, addicted to drugs, disappeared after leaving for Russia. Another friend, Andrei, was sentenced to many years in prison. He had once been an ordinary young man with dreams and potential, but alcohol and drugs completely destroyed his future.
There were countless stories like that.
Some ended up in prison.
Some died from overdoses.
Others simply disappeared into lives that no longer resembled life at all.
I stood at funerals of people I had laughed with only months earlier.
One story, however, left a particularly deep wound in my heart: the story of Yulia, a girl I went to school with. She was like a sister to me. We grew up together, shared memories, and spent years side by side.
But her life ended tragically.
Her mother became addicted to alcohol, their family slowly fell apart, and eventually they began drinking together. Their apartment was sold piece by piece to support the addiction, and their entire world collapsed into ruin.
Yulia died very young.
That loss stayed with me for years.
I witnessed too much pain. Too many broken families. Too many destroyed lives.
I saw people lose everything: health, freedom, dignity, relationships, even life itself.
And despite seeing all of it with my own eyes, I continued walking down the same road.
Soon, I began having serious problems with the police. I was detained multiple times for drunken behavior, fighting, and various minor crimes. Some situations became far more dangerous than others.
At one point, criminal charges were even brought against me.
I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time while heavily intoxicated. I was arrested, placed in detention, and investigators attempted to pin a crime on me that I had not committed.
My mother saved me.
She was a strong woman, respected, intelligent, and determined and more than once she pulled me out of situations that could have destroyed my life completely. Through her efforts, my innocence was eventually proven.
But the fear I experienced during that time left a permanent mark inside me.
For the first time, I became truly afraid of where my life was heading.
At another point, I ended up in a psychiatric hospital.
What I saw there shook me deeply, people whose minds had been shattered, people disconnected from reality, people whose lives had been consumed by addiction and despair. In many cases, alcohol was at the center of it all.
It was another warning.
But even that did not stop me.
My life continued spiraling downward. Around me, the same stories repeated themselves over and over again: broken destinies, destroyed homes, apartments lost to addiction, lives collapsing piece by piece until the chaos itself began to feel normal.
I saw my mother’s pain. I saw my sister’s tears and fear. But I still could not stop.
At one point, I convinced myself that joining the army would change me, that discipline and hardship might somehow pull me out of the darkness.
But even there, I continued drinking.
By then, there was already a young woman in my life, the woman who would later become my wife. Somewhere deep inside, I hoped that family and love would save me.
But addiction does not disappear simply because someone loves you.
I continued destroying not only my own life, but hers as well. I disappeared from home for days, drank constantly, and lost control over myself again and again.
My mother tried everything she could think of to help me psychotherapy, hypnosis, specialists, treatments. I went through countless attempts at recovery.
Nothing worked.
Alcohol still held me captive.
People around me predicted only two possible endings for my life: prison or death.
Eventually, I reached a point where something inside me finally broke completely.
I no longer had the strength to fight. I no longer had the energy to pretend that I still controlled my life.
Until that moment, I had spent years running running from pain, from problems, from emptiness, and ultimately from myself. I drowned everything in alcohol, noise, parties, and constant distraction.
But one day, there was nowhere left to run.
I found myself completely alone.
Not physically there were still people around me. But inside, there was only emptiness.
And in that emptiness came a brutal realization:
I could no longer save myself.
I saw clearly where my life was heading. I had already watched my friends lose everything to addiction, prison, overdose, destruction, death and I realized that I was walking toward the exact same ending.
Slowly.
But inevitably.
And for the first time in my life, I became truly afraid.
It was in that state exhausted, broken, stripped of every mask and illusion that I first heard about God.
Not as religion.
Not as tradition.
Not as something distant or abstract.
But as Someone who saw me exactly as I was in that moment: lost, addicted, shattered, and still not beyond hope.
The believers I met told me that God could change my life, that no person is hopeless in His eyes, and that my story was not over yet.
But I carried so much disappointment inside me that believing again felt almost impossible. I had already tried to change many times before. I had promised myself countless new beginnings, only to fall back into the same darkness again and again.
As far as I could see, only two roads remained ahead of me: prison or death.
And then, somewhere deep inside, a simple and brutally honest thought appeared:
I have nothing left to lose.
I did not suddenly become strong in that moment.
I did not feel confidence.
I did not feel peace.
I simply understood that I could no longer continue living the way I had been living.
So I fell to my knees.
And it was probably the most sincere moment of my entire life.
There were no beautiful words.
No religious formulas.
No performance.
Only a cry rising from the depths of my soul:
“God… if You are real, please set me free. Please give me a new life.”
I did not know whether anyone was listening.
I did not know whether anything would happen at all.
But in that moment, something inside me shifted.
Quietly.
Almost imperceptibly.
Like a small light appearing for the first time in complete darkness.
And although I did not fully understand it then, that moment was not merely an emotional experience.
It was the beginning of a life I had never even dared to dream about.
Chapter 2
When Light Begins to Appear Within
After I spoke those simple words — words that carried no religious formulas or polished phrases, only sincerity and desperation, something inside me began to change in a way I still cannot fully explain, even today.
It was not an emotional rush.
It was not temporary relief or an attempt to convince myself that everything would somehow be different.
It went far deeper than that.
It felt as though a weight I had carried for years silently, constantly, almost invisibly had suddenly been lifted from within me. In its place came a strange sense of lightness, something unfamiliar and almost impossible to describe. Along with it came freedom, the kind of freedom I had never experienced before.
But this was not external freedom.
Nothing around me had changed overnight. My circumstances were still the same. My past was still there. My problems had not magically disappeared.
This freedom was internal.
Quiet, yet incredibly powerful as though, for the first time in years, there was finally space inside me to breathe.
And together with that feeling, something happened that had once seemed completely impossible.
The things that had held me captive for years began losing their power over me.
The desire to drink disappeared.
Not gradually.
Not through endless struggle.
Not through discipline or force of will.
It simply lost its hold on me.
The same thing happened with the people and environments that had once felt inseparable from my life. The conversations, the atmosphere, the entire lifestyle of that world suddenly felt distant and foreign, as though I no longer belonged there at all.
I no longer wanted to return to it, because something inside me had changed too deeply.
In its place came an awareness of God’s presence.
Even now, I struggle to fully describe it, but it felt so real that I became afraid of losing it. It was as though, for the first time in my life, I had touched something truly alive, something real enough to give meaning to existence itself.
And deep within me, a new desire was born: to hold onto that reality with all my strength.
It was during that season that I first walked into a small Protestant church.
There was nothing outwardly impressive about it. No grand architecture. No performance. No religious spectacle. There were only about forty people there, yet something about them immediately struck me.
Their sincerity.
Their warmth.
The way they treated one another.
I had never seen anything like it before.
They sang worship songs and prayed together, and although I barely understood what was happening around me at the time, one thing became absolutely clear inside me:
I was in the right place.
After the worship, the pastor stood up and began speaking about the love of God, about a God who sees people completely, knows every detail of their lives, and still does not reject them.
As I listened, I realized that even the parts I did not fully understand somehow still reached deep within me.
At that moment, I did not need to analyze everything intellectually.
It was enough simply to feel.
And what I felt was this:
There is life here.
Over time, I began speaking more with the pastor. He never pressured me or forced anything on me. He simply talked with me, explained Scripture, shared his own experiences, and slowly something new began growing inside me:
faith.
Not abstract religion.
Not empty tradition.
But a living conviction that God truly loved me with all my past, all my failures, and all the darkness I carried inside myself.
That understanding did not come all at once. It formed gradually, like pieces of a puzzle slowly falling into place.
I began reading the Bible. I read Christian books, reflected deeply, asked questions, and little by little something inside me became clearer:
My life was not an accident.
I had not been created to destroy myself.
I had not been born for addiction, emptiness, and meaningless existence.
I had not been born to end my life in suffering the way so many people around me already had.
And slowly, another realization began taking root within me the understanding that God had a purpose for my life. That there was a calling, a future, and a path far greater than anything I had ever imagined before.
These changes soon began affecting every area of my life.
I started looking differently at people, at my family, at my wife. Things that once seemed unimportant suddenly became deeply valuable. The things I used to destroy were now the very things I wanted to protect.
The desire to live differently did not feel forced. It became the natural continuation of what was already happening inside me.
I wanted to understand why God had preserved my life. Why He had given me another chance. What He wanted me to do with it.
At first, the people closest to me struggled to believe the changes were real.
To them, everything seemed too sudden, almost suspicious. Some thought I had joined a cult. Others assumed I had been manipulated or deceived. Many simply believed it would not last.
But time passed, and I did not return to my old life.
I did not drink again.
I did not return to the same circles.
I stopped searching for excuses.
And slowly it became obvious to everyone around me:
the changes were real.
Eventually, I began feeling a strong desire to return to the people I once lived among, but now with a different heart and a completely different understanding of life.
I visited old friends and people from my past, those with whom I had once shared addiction, chaos, and destruction, and I told them about God. I told them there was a way out. That their lives could change just as mine had changed.
Some listened.
Some came to church with me.
And in some of their lives, change began to happen as well.
But others did not want to hear any of it. They continued walking the same road they had always known.
And through all of this, I began understanding a simple but profound truth:
God calls people and offers them a new life, but each person must decide whether to accept it or turn away.
That was the beginning of my new journey.
Inside me, a deep desire was growing a desire to tell others that God is not theory, tradition, or religious language.
He is reality.
A reality powerful enough to completely transform a human life.
I had become living proof of that transformation myself.
A man who had once stood somewhere between prison and death had been given the chance to begin again.
And it was during that season that another desire began awakening inside me the desire to build something meaningful with my life, to discover what I was truly capable of becoming.
I started thinking about business. About ministry. About the future. About the path opening before me.
At that point, I still could not see the full picture.
But one thing had already become absolutely certain:
my life would never be the same again.
Chapter 3
A Life Filled With Meaning
From that moment forward, my life changed so profoundly that my former existence began to feel distant, almost disconnected from the person I had become. Everything around me gained new meaning and new depth, and life itself no longer felt like a meaningless sequence of days passing one after another. It became alive, valuable, and deeply significant.
A new energy awakened within me an energy I had never known before. For the first time in my life, I genuinely wanted to live.
Not merely survive.
Not simply endure one day after another.
I wanted to live fully and consciously, with an awareness of each moment and the value hidden within ordinary life.
I began noticing things that had once escaped me completely: the quietness of the morning, the rhythm of breathing, the presence of loved ones, the beauty hidden in simple moments I had previously rushed past without ever truly seeing.
For the first time, I deeply understood that every single day is a gift, and that the time given to a human being on this earth is fragile and limited.
The biblical words about “numbering our days” were no longer just verses written on a page. They became a living reality within me. I suddenly realized how quickly life can disappear, and how miraculous it already is simply to wake up, to breathe, to see, to feel, and to continue existing.
That realization changed everything.
I began valuing my family in a completely different way. I cherished the people standing beside me, treasured the quiet moments of ordinary life, and learned to appreciate the simple miracle of opening my eyes each morning and realizing that I had been given another day.
The first natural response of my heart was gratitude.
Not formal religion.
Not empty habit.
But sincere and profound gratitude toward God for changing me and giving me a new life.
And together with gratitude came another desire, the desire to share what I had experienced with others.
I wanted people to understand that God was not merely an idea, a tradition, or religious language. He was real. He was capable of lifting a person out of the darkest places imaginable and transforming a human life completely.
Over time, that desire began expressing itself through action.
I started gathering small groups of people in my home for Bible discussions. Together, we reflected on Scripture, talked about God, about life, about change, and about the possibility of beginning again. Different people came — friends, acquaintances, friends of friends and many listened carefully because what I shared was not theory.
It was lived experience.
Gradually, this ministry began to grow.
We organized evangelistic meetings, went out into the streets to speak with people directly, and shared what we ourselves had lived through. Little by little, my life became increasingly filled with meaning, more deeply rooted in faith, and more clearly centered around the understanding that my life had a purpose.
After some time, I was invited to attend a large conference in Ukraine where Sunday Adelaja was preaching, a man many people were talking about during that period.
His story itself seemed extraordinary.
A young man from Nigeria who had arrived in the Soviet Union to study had eventually built a church in Kyiv that gathered tens of thousands of people. What was happening there felt almost unbelievable. People testified about transformed lives, broken addictions, restored families, and deep emotional and physical healing.
At the same time, there was something deeply compelling about it all.
When I arrived at the conference, the scale of what I witnessed exceeded anything I had imagined.
The enormous hall was filled with people from many different nations. Thousands of voices rose together in worship, united by faith and expectation, and the atmosphere carried a sense of power and purpose unlike anything I had ever experienced before.
But the most important thing was not happening around me.
It was happening within me.
At one point during the gathering, I felt the presence of God so strongly that I could barely remain standing. It was not merely emotion or excitement. It felt like a deep encounter that strengthened my faith and confirmed something essential inside me:
the path I had stepped onto was not an accident.
Later, I had the opportunity to meet Pastor Sunday personally and participate in his seminars, retreats, and leadership gatherings. His words, his perspective on life, and especially his ability to see potential in people, even when they could not see it in themselves had a profound impact on me.
He helped me begin seeing myself differently. He helped me understand that my life carried purpose, and that purpose could be pursued intentionally, step by step.
Eventually, this journey led my family and me to Ukraine, where we moved for a season to serve as missionaries.
We did not have financial security or any strong material foundation beneath us, but we had faith and at that stage of our lives, faith felt stronger than circumstances.
We worked with young people, organized theater groups, visited schools and orphanages, and held meetings where we spoke openly about addiction, alcohol, drugs, broken lives, and the possibility of transformation.
I shared my testimony and spoke honestly about everything I had gone through myself, and I could see how deeply it resonated with people.
One of the most meaningful parts of that season was our street performances.
In city centers, in small towns, and in many unexpected places, we performed short theatrical presentations with young people from the ministry. The stories were simple and easy to understand, yet they touched themes almost everyone could recognize: addiction, choice, sacrifice, redemption, and hope.
We spoke about Christ not only through words, but through living images and scenes that often reached people more deeply than ordinary conversation ever could.
It was a remarkable season of life.
Our children were still very young at the time. My son was barely one year old, and my daughter was around seven. Yet despite the uncertainty, despite not knowing what tomorrow would bring, we traveled together as a family with a simple but deep faith that God Himself was leading us.
Financially, we lived very modestly.
We bought small batches of cosmetics, and my wife would go from office to office offering them to people. That was how we survived.
And strangely enough, it was enough.
Again and again, we saw God provide for us through even the simplest things guiding us, sustaining us, and opening doors exactly when we needed them.
It was our first true missionary journey: difficult, uncertain, and yet deeply blessed.
And it was during that season that I began understanding more clearly than ever before:
the life I had been given was not given to me without purpose.
Chapter 4
Calling, Growth, and the First Lessons of the Journey
At that time, I still could not fully comprehend how extraordinary the course of my life had become.
Not long before, I had simply been an ordinary young man from Belarus, a man without clear direction, without understanding the meaning of life, someone whose future was slowly collapsing under the weight of addiction and self-destruction. And suddenly, everything had changed so dramatically that I found myself speaking to others about God, not as a distant religious concept, but as a living reality capable of restoring, healing, freeing, and lifting a person out of the deepest darkness.
In many ways, I myself had become evidence of what I was preaching.
Yet together with this transformation came a new kind of uncertainty. I knew my life had changed, but I still did not fully understand what the next step should be. How does a person build a life that is not merely different, but truly meaningful? How could I respond to everything God had done for me?
It was during this season that my connection with Sunday Adelaja began influencing me profoundly. Through his ministry, his teaching, and his personal example, I started looking at life through entirely new eyes.
He did not speak only about faith itself. He taught people how to recognize purpose, how to understand their calling, and perhaps most importantly, how to move toward that calling intentionally and consistently.
For the first time in my life, I truly understood that a human being is not an accident, not a faceless fragment lost in the crowd, but a person whose life carries value in the eyes of God.
Slowly, I began realizing that every life carries direction, meaning, and purpose waiting to be discovered by those willing to search for it.
At the same time, my understanding of God deepened. I began seeing that salvation was not merely rescue from destruction, but an invitation into an entirely new kind of life, a life filled with meaning and eternal perspective. The sacrifice of Jesus Christ no longer felt like an abstract theological concept. It became deeply personal to me, a living expression of God’s love revealed not only through words, but through action.
The influence of Pastor Sunday affected me not only spiritually, but practically as well.
I attended seminars, retreats, leadership meetings, and listened carefully to his teaching about purpose, discipline, effectiveness, and the importance of not wasting the life God has given you. He spoke about setting goals, developing character, and continuing to move forward without losing either faith or inner stability.
His books and teachings became a compass for me, especially during seasons when life grew difficult.
At first, I mistakenly believed that living with God meant life would automatically become easier, that obstacles would somehow disappear effortlessly. But over time, I began discovering that the real journey of faith is far deeper and far more demanding than that.
Another side of life slowly revealed itself to me, one I had never truly considered before.
I learned that moving forward requires more than belief alone. It demands character, patience, endurance, and the ability to walk through pain without allowing it to destroy you.
There were disappointments.
Moments of misunderstanding.
Betrayals.
Situations that forced me to learn forgiveness even when my heart resisted it.
And there were seasons when continuing forward required strength I did not feel I possessed.
It was during those years that I remembered a phrase I had once heard:
“Crisis is a blessing.”
The first time I heard those words, I struggled to accept them. Everything inside me resisted the idea. Crisis felt like something to escape from as quickly as possible, a place of pressure, pain, confusion, and helplessness.
But over time, after walking through difficult seasons and emerging from them changed, I slowly began understanding something important.
Crisis does not only reveal weakness.
It also forms strength.
It is often in crisis that character is forged.
It is in crisis that inner endurance develops.
And it is in crisis that people begin seeing themselves and life with greater clarity.
During my time in Ukraine, I also visited rehabilitation centers for people struggling with alcohol and drug addiction. What I witnessed there affected me deeply.
I met men and women who had spent ten, fifteen, even twenty years trapped in addiction people many had already completely given up on. And yet I watched some of those same individuals experience radical transformation.
I saw former addicts become ministers, pastors, and mentors helping others find freedom.
I saw families restored.
I saw children reconciled with parents they had once hated or abandoned.
I saw people rediscover purpose where only emptiness had existed before.
These were not theories or motivational speeches.
They were living testimonies.
And every one of those stories strengthened my conviction that God truly is capable of changing human destiny.
But alongside that conviction came another, deeper understanding.
Life with God is not made only of bright moments and quick victories. It is also a path marked by trials, losses, failures, and seasons when a person must begin again from nothing.
Faith is tested not merely through words, but through the condition of the heart. Not through emotions alone, but through the choices a person continues making after the emotions disappear.
And as I would later discover, I myself would have to walk through those kinds of seasons.
There would be losses.
Mistakes.
Painful lessons.
Crises I could not yet imagine.
But all of it would become part of the journey.
A journey that shapes a person.
A journey I will continue telling in the chapters ahead.
Chapter 5
A Life Preserved
Scripture says, “The old has passed away; behold, all things have become new.” And the farther I moved from my former life, the more clearly I began to see it not as scattered memories or disconnected episodes, but as one complete journey, a journey in which, despite everything, I had somehow been carried through and preserved.
When I look back today, I no longer see isolated moments. I see vivid scenes sometimes painful, sometimes overwhelming filled with details that once seemed random and insignificant, but over time formed one undeniable realization:
my life had stood on the edge many times, and somehow it continued.
And this began long before I ever started thinking about God.
I was around three years old when I became seriously ill with meningitis, a disease that often ends either in death or in lifelong consequences. At that age, a child understands neither danger nor the value of life itself.
Everything I know about that period comes from my mother.
She told me about the unbearable fever, about the moments when I barely responded to anything around me, about the fear and helplessness parents feel when they realize their child’s life hangs by a thread so thin it could disappear at any moment. There were hospitals, doctors, sleepless nights, waiting, uncertainty and no one could guarantee how it would end.
It was more than a medical crisis.
My life could have ended before it had truly begun.
But it did not.
I survived.
At the time, people called it luck. A fortunate outcome. One of those things that “simply worked out.” But now, looking back years later, I can no longer see it as coincidence.
There was something more there.
Something invisible then, but unmistakably clear now.
It was preservation.
Later, there was another moment, this time during childhood, when life again stood dangerously close to another ending.
Like many boys, I climbed trees without fear, never thinking about consequences, carrying the childish belief that nothing bad could really happen. One day, I climbed especially high, and suddenly I slipped.
The fall was violent.
I struck my head hard, and for a brief moment everything seemed to stop. Yet once again, life continued. At the time, it did not seem extraordinary, but today I understand how thin that line truly was.
As the years passed and my life sank deeper into alcohol and destruction, those dangerous moments became more frequent, though by then I had almost stopped noticing them.
One memory still stands before me with disturbing clarity.
It happened in Grodno, near the old castle overlooking the Neman River, where the land drops sharply into a steep and dangerous slope. We were sitting there, as we often did, drinking, talking loudly, laughing, completely detached from reality and without any awareness of how dangerous that place actually was.
At some point, I stood up and walked toward the edge.
The ground beneath my feet was uneven, covered with slippery grass and loose dirt, but in my condition none of it mattered anymore. My mind was blurred, my body heavy and unstable.
I took one step and instantly lost my balance.
Everything afterward happened both incredibly fast and strangely slow at the same time.
I fell.
Then I began tumbling violently down the slope through bushes, rocks, exposed roots, and hard earth. My body rolled uncontrollably, slamming against stones and branches, catching for a moment before sliding farther again. At some point, I no longer knew where up or down was. There was only movement impact after impact after impact.
The slope was brutal, rocky, unforgiving and any one of those collisions could have ended my life.
Eventually, I reached the bottom.
And then, suddenly, there was silence.
I lay there motionless for a moment, trying to understand what had happened. Slowly, painfully, I managed to stand. My clothes were torn apart, my skin ripped open, blood covered my hands and face, my entire body ached, and every breath felt unstable.
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