From Self-Medicated to Mission

Jesse and Megan’s Wedding, November 2019

On December 22nd of this year my brother Jesse is moving to Cambodia to love and minister to the people there, alongside his wife Megan. Amazing in its own right, yeah? But if you knew my brother three years ago, you would realize that this is nothing short of miraculous, and proof that our God is living and active in the lives of unbelievers even when we stand in the corner laughing at the impossibility of His promises to us.

Life Apart

Three years ago, I had a non-existent relationship with my brother. I knew through talking with family, and a slowly growing relationship with his long-time girlfriend Megan that he was heavily self-medicating from our mutual childhood trauma with marijuana, alcohol, and “anything else he could get his hands on.” He worked as a local bartender, and will tell you himself that he was hopelessly trapped in a cycle of escaping from the pain of abandonment and re-living the codependency he’d been taught in childhood.

Megan had always loved Jesus, but she loved Jesse more, and had submitted to a very dysfunctional relationship with him for almost 10 years. They lived together, and though they did their best to love each other, there was continual pain and brokenness between them – apart from Jesus that’s the best any of us can do.

Planting Seeds of Prayer

Megan and I started spending more time together, praying for Jesse and for a shift in their relationship. Within a couple of months, a dear friend of ours had a dream that felt like it was for Jesse from the Holy Spirit. It instructed “three” of us to get on our faces in prayer for Jesse, with a promise that there would be an “arrest” made. We had very little idea what this could mean, and even worried that it meant the worst (Jesse had expressed some suicidal ideation when Megan had threatened to leave him in the past). But we felt fairly confident that the Lord’s hand was on this. We invited my dad to be the third party of our prayer group, and for 9 months we met bi-weekly to bring Jesse before the Lord – sometimes hopeful and expectant, other times weary and fearful – but obedient to what we felt like was the Lord’s instruction.

Over the course of that time the Lord was working in my heart, growing a love for my brother that I didn’t know I had, a love that felt like HIS love for Jesse, not my own. Megan began to feel peace about doing what had felt impossible - splitting up with Jesse, and one night she very bravely asked him to leave. My sweet brother, found himself on our doorstep with all of his things, abandoned and terrified as he had been as a child, without God and without hope. We had a spare room in our basement. I gave him space to get set up, and we all went to bed, but that night I heard him crying and aching in the basement, and asked the Lord how I could love him. We had NO relationship prior to this. The months of prayer had knitted my heart for Jesse to the Father’s heart for him so I felt confidence and peace as I went downstairs with a cup of water. I just sort of held him and loved him while, as he likes to put it – “he howled like a wolfman in my basement.” He was violently detoxing from alcohol and had been for several days as a last-ditch effort to salvage relationship with Megan. He had also been having episodes of anxiety where he would suddenly lose his vision, and one of these began to happen as I sat with him. I found myself putting my hand over his eyes and praying with authority that the Lord would open his eyes, and show Jesse His deep love for Him. And Jesus did it! The detox and loss of vision ended abruptly. We were both amazed at how obvious the presence of God was in that moment.

Growing in Love

Over the course of the next couple of days and weeks Jesus continually revealed himself to my brother through our church family at Church without Borders, through reading the scripture alone in his bedroom, through worship, and walks in the woods. He quit his job at the bar, and completed his GED. He had been radically loved by Jesus, and changed by that love in what felt like an instant, but the healing kept coming. Within a couple of months, CWB was planning our yearly trip to a community in Phnom Pehn, Cambodia that we’ve built a beautiful relationship with. Jesse decided to go. It was in this season of his life that he began to see how God could use all of his brokenness, his experiences with poverty, feelings of being an orphan, and “couch surfing” to love the least of these. Jesus could make beauty from the ashes of his life. He went out to Montana to participate in a DTS with YWAM complete with an outreach in Thailand, followed by a three month stay in Cambodia.

Meanwhile, Megan was home healing and seeking Jesus, rediscovering her First Love. She felt led separately to travel with CWB’s youth to Thailand on a two-week mission trip, and heard a commissioning from the Lord while there to spend her life in full time missionary work.

God’s Miraculous Restoration

When Jesse returned home from YWAM, they began slowly discussing what God had been doing in their lives. Their friendship was restored and soon after their love for one another, which for the first time ever was undergirded by their individual love for the Lord. They were married last November, and soon after began making plans to spend their lives following Jesus by loving the people of Southeast Asia. This December they will be traveling together to Battambang, Cambodia where they will complete a Discipleship Training School, and then start their life among the Cambodian people as Church Without Borders’ very first homegrown international missionaries. Their dreams are big. They long to see people pulled up from poverty through education (Jesse recently completed his TESOL certification), to bless street kids with a safe place to learn and play, and to serve the large community of sex-trafficking survivors in the region.

There is a light in my brother’s eyes and a change in his countenance that I honestly never imagined I would see. God has truly been so merciful and kind in restoring him to who he was created to be, and though there is still so much healing to do, it is a joy to know him and support him as he lays down his life for the God who died once and for all for the whole hurting, broken world. As a community we have learned to never give up fighting in prayer for this world that Jesus loves, and to expect the unexpected. He is always working on behalf of those who have yet to love Him back, and He is always “able to far more than we could ever ask for or imagine.”