“My dad was a professional,” Alvin says. “He was a musician, so very seldom he was home.” With his father on the road all the time, Alvin’s mother left the family for another relationship, leaving him to be raised by his grandmother. Alvin recalls being abused as a child. “My grandmother … would chastise you with a belt, stick, chair, whatever she could get her hands on,” he says. In addition to the abuse, she and the other adults in Alvin’s life, including both parents, aunts, and uncles, struggled with alcohol, leading him to start drinking at an early age. Alvin’s high school years were marked by being high or drunk, behavior that continued into adulthood.
Alvin was able to forge a career in computers in spite of his substance abuse, but things started spiraling down for him once he was introduced to crack cocaine. He began to lose his material possessions, including homes and cars, and eventually found himself “stealing and lying and scamming people,” he says. “To have that type of behavior was new. I’m like, whoa, what are you doing? I mean, walking in stores and taking stuff just wasn’t the norm for me, because I always worked.”
As time went on, Alvin’s addiction worsened. Looking for a fresh start, he moved to another city and landed a good job with a utility company, doing computer work again. Soon, however, he’d found where to get drugs. “I just found it on my own,” he says. “See, when the enemy gets a hold of you, you have a sense, because he guides you.” Alvin says his combination of job skills and survival skills was what enabled him to keep him going for several years before he finally ended up homeless and on the streets.
While homeless, Alvin spent his nights sleeping by a trash can in an abandoned, rat-infested garage. Alvin says his lack of self-care was his lowest point. “I didn’t care about anything,” he says. “Didn’t care about myself. Didn’t care about anybody. I didn’t have the willingness or the drive to get up … It’s a bad place to be.”
Eventually, Alvin found help at a local rescue mission. “The real delivery for me was Jesus Christ,” he says. “When I was willing to turn my will over to Him and confess, things started changing for me.” Alvin graduated from the mission’s program and became a staff member. “I wound up taking some courses and became an ordained pastor and serving the homeless population,” he says. He even started a local church.
Sadly, Alvin, in his own words, took his “eyes off the prize.” He quickly relapsed. He started drinking and using crack cocaine. In less than two weeks, he says, “I went through all of my credit cards, went through all of my savings … lost the car. Lost the keys to the apartment.” Alvin says he was locked in a motel room and began to have suicidal thoughts. “That, to me, is a rock bottom.”
Alvin knew he needed help. He found it at Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission. “They open(ed) their arms and embraced me, gave me another opportunity,” he says. “Spoke the truth to me.”
Alvin says he is appreciative of the staff at the Mission. The staff treated him gently, allowing him to turn back to God the right way, by humbling himself. “Approach the throne in the right way,” he says. “Yeah, I love that.”
Alvin’s time at the Mission has inspired him. “Now I’m the Support Services Administrator at the Mission,” he says, “because my love is the homeless. So, I want to go down there and help out down there as much as I can and be a light. Maybe someone will see something in me that will help them change their life.”
Alvin’s life today is full of hope. “I am in a real good spot,” he says. “It was a rough going there for a minute, but I’m so excited what the Lord has for me … God has given me a testimony … I want to share the stories with someone else, and maybe, they won’t go through what I went through.”
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