‘I was ready to end my life but God showed me the light’

I was brought up in a Christian household, but we weren’t devout. We’d go to church maybe once or twice a month. I was in The Boys’ Brigade when I was younger, but moved away from it as I got older.

I had my first alcoholic drink when I was 14. I come from Scotland, and here, your life is essentially planned out for you. Everyone thinks: I can’t wait to be 18 and go to the pub. Can’t wait to go on a boys’ holiday. You start drinking for fun. You go out and drink as much as you can. The culture reinforces it. 

Lamenting losses

I lost two people very close to me – one of them was my cousin’s daughter. She passed away with a brain aneurysm at just five years old. Then, my friend David was crushed on a construction site. 

I didn’t know how to cope. We aren’t taught coping techniques when we’re young. Society teaches us – through soaps on TV, and what we see around us – that if you’ve got a problem, you drink. Put it off. Go on a bender and forget about it.

I began work as a health and safety manager at construction sites to prevent accidents like the one that took my friend. I remember my dad saying to me when I was younger: “The minute it starts affecting your work, stop.” But by the time drink was affecting my work, I couldn’t stop.

In 2017, my marriage was suffering because I was blaming everybody else for the pain in my life. I would take jobs in Ireland to get away. But I was never good at being in my own head, so I would just drink. Then the rumours started going around that I was drinking at work. Ultimately, it cost me my job and my marriage.

The voices in my head were telling me: Everybody would be better off if I wasn’t here. The world would be a better place without me.

And that’s when I thought: That’s a great idea. I was at peace with my decision to take my own life. That was the plan – have one final hurrah, go out in a blaze of glory, and then just do it. I thought I’d be happy. That, finally, I’d be at peace.

Sunrise and a stranger

I was at a party that had overran, as parties do. Late in the morning, I decided to walk home. It had been raining for weeks. But as I was walking, the sun came out, shining down on a queue of men going into the local off licence. One guy looked just like me, only ten or 15 years older. And I thought: That’s my life if I don’t make a change.

That was going to be the weekend where I ended it. But for some reason, I had an epiphany. I saw the light. And I stopped drinking. That was six and a half years ago.

I started going back to church, because I knew I couldn’t have come through that without the grace of God. I didn’t realise it at the time, but when I saw that man outside the off licence, God was showing me: This is your life, unless you turn around. I believe the Lord works in mysterious ways. That moment – the sunlight after weeks of rain, that man, that queue – it was all part of how he reached me.

My baptism was a fresh start. It reaffirmed my love for Jesus

I didn’t just wake up one day and feel fixed. I definitely had to work at it. I had to ask a lot of questions about myself, about God, about why I was still here. I had to find out what my purpose was. But before I could do anything else, I had to start loving myself again. And that was hard. There was a lot of self-hatred. I just wasn’t at peace.

I was still in a bad way for a while. But thankfully, that’s subsided. I still have good days and bad days, but the difference now is that I know I’m not alone. There’s always someone beside me. That gives me great comfort.

It was through doing the Alpha course that things really started to change. I had a friend who I’d worked with for a few years. He was always very focused, especially in his faith. And having him there meant I had someone I could ask questions of; someone I could bounce things off. That helped me massively.

I’d been baptised as a child, but last year I chose to be baptised again as an adult. That was a big moment. It felt like drawing a line under the past. A fresh start. It reaffirmed my love for Jesus. And I like to think he’s using me, as a spokesperson for the people who didn’t make it. The ones who lost their lives to suicide. The ones who drank themselves to death. That’s what I feel my purpose is.

I think that’s what I’m here to do: to talk to people. To make them laugh. To make them smile. To spread a bit of joy. That means everything to me. 

Craig Paton was speaking to AJ Gomez