“I’m thankful to the mission for saving my life,” Brian says. For Brian, those words aren’t an exaggeration.
After decades of struggling with addiction, multiple attempts at recovery, and years spent missing moments with the people he loved most, the Coachella Valley Rescue Mission became the place where he began to rebuild.
“This place, by far, has superseded my expectations,” Brian explains as he tells his story of rebuilding. “It’s one of the best choices that I’ve made in life.”
Today, nearly 70 days into CVRM’s Gateway Program, Brian speaks with gratitude about restored relationships, renewed faith, and a future he once struggled to imagine. But the road that brought him to the Mission was a long one, including other attempts at rehab along the way.
“I was an electrician,” Brian says. “[When I] got promoted to a project manager, I had to start and stop three different crews.” Exhausted by demanding schedules and constant pressure, Brian accepted an offer from a friend that changed the course of his life. “He said, ‘Hey, try this,'” Brian recalls. “And it…ended up being meth.”
“From that moment,” he continues, “I thoroughly loved it and basically got its claws in me and had me hooked.”
Over time, addiction slowly dismantled the life he had built.
“I had a wife, I had a house, I had all the toys, the bikes, boats, the quads,” he describes. “Slowly things started going away. Broken marriage…just everything.”
There were periods of sobriety. Programs. Jail. Prison. Attempts to start over. Through it all, one truth remained impossible to ignore: his children.
“I have four kids,” Brian says. Eventually, the birth of his youngest son became a turning point. “I don’t want him to have to experience everything that I put my other kids through,” he shares. “They’ve had to miss their father [when] I was absent for a lot of that because of incarceration or my addictions—not being the father that I should have been.”
Now, Brian is more confident and determined to be better for his family. “My kids deserve the attention. My family deserves to have me.”
Brian came to CVRM through people who refused to give up on him. His father-in-law, a pastor who had been involved with the Mission for more than twenty years, introduced him to the Gateway Program and encouraged him to consider a different path.
“I wasn’t so willing to come in the beginning,” Brian admitted. “I drug my feet.”
But once he arrived, something shifted. “My relationships couldn’t be better,” he says brightly. “My family life couldn’t be better. It’s amazing what they do here.”
The Gateway Program helped Brian rediscover routines and responsibilities that addiction had pushed aside. “You have to work on you before you can help anybody else,” he says. “Before you can help your family…you have to fix you.”
The Mission has also helped him rediscover himself.
“Since I came to the mission, I have found myself. I found God. I value my self-worth now. I see what I’m worth. I see what I can be, not what I was. There’s no reason why I can’t succeed. There’s no reason why I can’t be a good product of society.”
Today, Brian’s goals are simple but meaningful: to return to the union, marry the woman he loves, and be present for his children in ways he couldn’t before.
“I can’t make up for time that I lost, but I can make up for the time that I’m gonna put into the relationship with my family.” He wants to become the kind of father his children can count on and look up to. “I want to be my kids’ hero.”
When asked why others should support the Coachella Valley Rescue Mission, Brian’s answer comes easily: “It changes people’s lives on the daily. The mission has helped to instill all that life back in me. To change individuals for the rest of their life, to be a productive member of society, to live a happy, normal life.”
For Brian, CVRM is where he stopped seeing himself as a statistic, as he puts it, and started instead believing in the husband, father, and man he still had time to become.
“I can stand ‘em out two feet and be a man again.”