Anthony Canania

       I was raised in a Southern Baptist Church and School just south of St. Louis in Festus, MO. I remained in that environment all the way through 8th grade. I was saved in 1st grade, attended church 3 times a week, witnessed after school every Wednesday before church, and, literally, lived a model Christian life. However, I had problems in that environment from day one. I am not, and never have been, a person who hides behind doors. I was chastised, punished, and labeled as a black sheep in that school from day one. I wasn't like the other kids who played a charade in front of the teachers, Mom & Dad, and whoever it may concern. I was myself at all times regardless of who was present. It wasn't that I was any worse than any other student; it was that I didn't pretend to be perfect. I was told repeatedly I am going to hell, I'm not a Christian, and even on one occasion had a teacher, while in 7th grade, call the parents of a girl I was dating and informed them that I was a bad influence on their daughter and that continued association with me should be frowned upon. Shortly after this incident I was asked to leave the school after completing my 8th grade year.

            Why is this important to my testimony? Because it was from that point on I lost my faith in religion completely. Time after time of going to deacon homes and finding beer in the refrigerator and cigarettes on the table, finally enough was enough. I truly believed all Christians were hypocrites. I still loved and believed in God, but I told myself I would never walk thru the doors of another church.

             I walked a typical road through high school. I slowly fell further and further away, but high school was only where my problems began. It wasn't until my junior/senior year until I first started to drink and do drugs. During High school both my drinking or drug problem was very minor. I maybe only got drunk five or six times, and as far as drugs, weed was the only drug I involved myself with. The largest impact of High School was how far God and I were from each other, or how far God was from my mind.

             Coming out of High School the Army was first in line. I had just met what was to be my first wife, and the Army was on its way. My first wife was a drug addict, a non-Christian, and a very unfaithful woman; this is where the majority of problems began. Within the first year of my marriage, by the age of 19-20, I went from a bad to just gone. I literally began to idolize my life after the movie "Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas"; I had the brief case and everything. I was doing every drug known to man - from heroin on down. I only tried heroin twice, I couldn't get past the come down, but anhydrous crank, coke, opium, acid, and weed was part of my weekly schedule (I mean that literally). I did crank daily (usually a line in the morning, two at lunch, maybe a hit or two after work), and every night to bring me to sleep at least two joints did me just fine. I recipe drugs like it was going out of style. This went on for close to 3 years. It wasn't until after I took one week of leave in 2002 that I finally quit. We recipe a variety of different drugs over a four day period, and finally went broke and our binge came to an end. But I still remember it like it was yesterday. It was two days later, the morning, that I came walking thru the kitchen and a feeling hit me like you wouldn't believe, I lost my balance, my breath, and my whole body felt unreal-like plastic. My wife kept asking me "what's wrong", and it took me a few minutes to realize -- then it hit me -- I'm sober. It had been so long since my body didn't have some drug flowing in it that it couldn't function normally without it. Yep, that was it, that day I became sober for good. I quit cold turkey that day, and haven’t touched it since. 

            But my trouble didn't stop there. Over the next two years I became a bingeing alcoholic, landing in the hospital three times until finally quitting that habit as well. So then I figured I’d just pick up smoking, and off I went to two packs a day in no time.  During all this time, however, one thing did remain the same in my life. I believed there was a God, I believed Jesus Christ was the son of God, I believed he was sent to die on the cross to save the world from its sins, and believed the only way to heaven was thru him. Even as a drug addict, alcoholic, and a smoker I believed it very strongly.

Now I am at the point in my life where I quit drugs, stopped drinking, and all I do is smoke cigarettes, but that's legal, so I'm on my way to becoming a Christian right?.........  Well, not exactly. (This is the point I would like to make clear a common misconception among most of the non-secular world. They think of drug addicts, alcoholics, smokers, etc…. as the people who are lost and without hope. They are always afraid of approaching them, but it’s not those actions that are keeping them from salvation. Works, good or bad, does not equal salvation. When I was at the point in my life where on the outside I looked the farthest away, I was actually closer to my faith. It wasn’t until I got it together on the outside that I truly fell apart on the inside.) This is the point in my life where I walked away from God.

Almost immediately my common hangouts became bars, strip clubs, strip clubs, bars, and that’s about all the Army has to offer for recreational activities, but I was always a designated driver so I thought nothing of it. Well, it wasn’t long and I became an idolater to my idolatress wife, my marriage began to look more like WWIII, and my new best friend was a full-blown Pagan. Somewhere during this time I developed a whole new religious philosophy and I became a neo-polytheist (a neo-polytheist is someone who believes in one God, but has their own view of what they believe is the real universal religion). My belief in religion was as follows:

1) I believed in God.

2) I believed in Jesus Christ as the son of God.

3) I believed in the Crucifixion and the resurrection.

4) I believed salvation was thru Jesus Christ.

5) I believed that because all religions since the beginning of time shared basic similarities that there must be a connection between them all & the truth is not just in one but in the selected pieces from them all.

At this point I began in-depth studies into every major religion I could. I studied the Occult, Paganism, Wicca, the Necronomicon, the Craft, the Bible, Norse mythology, Egyptology, and any other practice I thought held secrets that still apply today. (As a side note: during this time frame my wife had left me, I was just sent off to, and returned from, Iraq in 2003, and I was deeply in involved as the second lead vocalist and song writer in a religiously political, Black metal band.) At this point in life I am really, really lost, but God was not done with me yet.

            After returning from war, and sometime after the loss of my marriage, I met the woman who I now call wife today. We were both lost when we found each other, and we met under extremely sinful conditions. But we had a good life, we were great with each other, my band was doing great, I was just out of the Army, in college, and life was great. However, this is how I came to salvation. After a year of living a fantastic life my religious research had led me to a substantial belief change. After all my research all I had was a giant wall of questions and things that I could not answer, holes, I had giant gaping holes in my theory. So I did what the devil convinces every lost person to do, I said if there are holes – it must be the Bible. I said that’s it! The Bible is not accurate! I still believed all of the above, but I did not believe the Bible was the infallible word of God. I thought men made mistakes in the translation, and that must be where the holes were coming from; it explained all the variations from the other religions. It didn’t take long until I thought maybe God wasn’t perfect. Is the God of the Bible, God, or just a image of the actual god? Was there even such a thing as a “good” god?  Then it came. God’s long suffering and patience with me was at its thinnest point. For the first time in my life I felt the wrath of God first hand. He crushed me, and I mean crushed me. He took everything I had. I was quickly out of school, quickly out of a job, and before long I was in my front yard selling everything I had trying to make rent. He took everything! For over three months I never had more than 86 cents in my bank account. I was forced to run home to mom, who is good Christian woman and is a woman who I learned never stopped praying for me. She was kind enough to fed me, clothed me, and housed my wife and me for three months. During this time I went from a proud well-established individual to a homeless nothing! It wasn’t long until I didn’t have to swallow my pride, there was none, and I was in church.

            It was during this time that I gave in and I heard the words that I’d needed to hear for a long time. In a very short time, a month or so, those years of research made me laugh. All that research I did, all those questions, in just one month they were answered and put together. God opened my eyes. I didn’t have to search, and study, and hunt -- he opened my eyes and showed me everything. Between this wealth of newly found knowledge and my very new healthy fear of the Lord, my life has been forever changed. I gave my life to God, and so did my wife, who was my girlfriend at that time, and we both started a new life. Later we married as fulfillment of God’s promise, and to stand holy in his sight to receive his blessing. (We both were previously divorced and both swore to never remarry for fear of another divorce, but we learned quickly that living your life in the Lord is the key to a happy marriage. We live in hopes to be right in the eyes of God, and in doing that we are always right in the eyes of each other, because God always has a better way.)

            Now we both live our lives for the Lord. Neither one of us is perfect by any means, but we desire to share with others our story, and to try leading others like us to the Lord. The greatest thing that ever happened in our lives is when the Lord showed us that the purpose of our lives was to serve him and to do his will. The path he led me on in life serves as such a learning experience and a tool for understanding how God’s plan always comes together in the end.  God saved me by breaking me, and for that I am thankful.