A Voice Called Him Out of the Wilderness

“One night I was asleep, it was early in the morning, and I heard some noise in the living room and yeah, I got up out of bed, and there’s someone in my living room. And so, I go after him. And I move him out of the way pretty easily, and what I didn’t see was two other people and they stood up and one of them had a gun and I remember looking at the gun being pointed at me and the last noise that I remember hearing was the gunshot go off,” said Drew Anderson.

He was on a crash course with destruction long before he was shot in the face during a random home invasion. He was adopted from Korea by military parents when he was a child. They moved frequently, leaving Drew longing for a sense of identity.

“You know, I was given up at birth. And so I just really struggled, you know, to identify with where I belonged and who I was, and so I just literally became a kid who existed until it was time to exist somewhere else,” said Drew.  

When he was 14 his parents retired in San Antonio. Desperate for friendships, Drew quickly got in with a rough crowd. “I wanted to belong to something. And so, I started to look for that and it ended up being the people who wanted to take advantage of my vulnerability and-and my emotional, you know, situation where I was literally just desperately searching for somebody to accept me. You know, I went from being a pretty innocent, silent kid to being very vocal, very aggressive, very outspoken, smoking weed, drinking, small criminal stuff like theft and breaking into people’s homes. And it just – it moved very, very quickly because I was finally getting acceptance, affirmation, and I felt as if I belong to something,” remembers Drew.

When he left home at 17 he felt empowered to explore his new identity. Cocaine use became a daily obsession. He recalls, “I became lawless, drugs all day, high on cocaine. Now I’m going to rob people. Now I’m going to sell at a higher ratio. I’m going to sell more; I’m going to make more money. And so the flood gates of bad activity and criminal activity just opened all the way up.”

Cocaine fueled him and gave Drew a feeling of invincibility. "People respect me more when I’m on this stuff. People take me more seriously when I’m on this stuff. And so it felt as if it – next to a heartbeat that it was the second most necessary thing in my life to be on. I was definitely addicted, but addiction wasn’t even how I felt it. It was just, 'I need this because it makes me who I am,'” said Drew.

Then, in 2012 Drew confronted the men who broke into his home. The bullet to his face lacerated his brain instead of travelling right through it. He woke days later in the hospital broken and helpless. “When I woke up I couldn’t hear out of my right ear. I couldn’t open my mouth and speak, the first question I had that I wrote on my little board was, 'What happened?' You know, and they’re like, 'You got shot with a .45 caliber handgun from nearly pointblank range and you should not be alive.'”

Drew continues, “I had a nurse that was assigned to my room one of the very first days I was there, she sat in the chair next to me and started to read the Bible and started to pray, and I wish I could have told her to leave or, you know, to get out because that’s definitely what I wanted her to do, but I couldn’t because my mouth was wired shut.” 

His nurse continued to visit Drew and read the Bible faithfully for the next 90 days.

“She just stayed consistent,” says Drew. “Came in and told me, 'I’ve looked at your chart, I know what you’ve been through, I know that you’ve got this going on. You shouldn’t be alive, but you're alive and God has plans for you. You know, God wants to do something in your life.' And you know, over time as it passed and her consistence grew, I just submitted to it. And by the time I left the hospital, you know, she asked me a question. And she was like, 'Promise me that you’re going to go find a church.' She had earned my trust, and she had earned my respect in her consistency and so I told her I would.”

The very next day Drew stepped into a church. In a moment he found what he had longed for his entire life.

“I walk into this church and I’m – got watery eyes and I don’t really understand why but then the pastor at the time has an impromptu altar call right in the middle of worship, offering people the chance to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior. I just – I just wept, man. I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I felt this – just this weight come off of me and I was just crying, unexplainably crying, full peace had come over me,” said Drew.

Drew was set free from cocaine and his identity was redefined as he immersed himself in the Bible and his new church community. “When I started to read His word I felt different. When I started to pray, I felt the peace that I had always looked for. I started to read my identity in a book and found my identity in the Lord,” recalls Drew.

Drew says he is thankful his life was spared and for a second chance to find meaning and purpose in the time he’s been given.

“I lost so much time, I lost, you know, a lot of people. I lost time even with my parents. And man, God has restored it all. You know, I have a beautiful wife, beautiful family, ministry. Tons of spiritual kids now because I’m a youth pastor and I’m so grateful that Jesus stepped in, and that Jesus made Himself known to me when I would have never sought Him out."