If It’s Broke, Keep Breaking It
Stephen McWhirter
4 min read ⭑
When I was seventeen, someone introduced me to a drug called crystal meth. Since the age of eleven, my story had been a drug-induced downward spiral, but this was a new low.
Crystal meth is an upper. You can snort it, shoot it up with a needle or smoke it. I chose to smoke it. I placed a rock of meth on a piece of aluminum foil and burned it with a lighter underneath the foil. When the smoke rose up, I inhaled it with a small straight glass pipe between my teeth. Not a pretty picture, I know.
The effect? Instant euphoria and excitement.
The first time I used it, I knew I was in love and would need to have it every day for the rest of my life. Starting the next morning, I woke up every day immediately focused on where and how I was going to get more.
Alexandros Giannakakis; Unsplash
When you come down from meth, you’re buried by an unbearable wave of depression and emotional instability. Probably the most destructive aspect is how it makes you believe you can never be truly whole without it. That’s likely true with most addictions, but something about meth imprisoned me more than other drugs.
On meth, I became even more conversational than I am naturally, which means I talked so much I could open a portal to another dimension. I thought it made me more creative. I wrote so many songs on meth that were utter trash, but I believed they were masterpieces. (They were pieces alright. Ha!)
During this time, I somehow got a pretty decent job working for a media duplication company doing graphic design and DVD and VHS duplication (which I know dates me). Throughout the workday, I frequently sneaked off to the bathroom to smoke meth. When I came back, there must have been an obvious change in my personality. It wouldn’t have taken much sleuthing to figure out I was on something. But I was under the impression it made me the fastest and best employee on the planet. Ultimately, I was fired. I was confused and devastated. Why would they fire me? Yeah, meth doesn’t make you the smartest person in the world.
Growing up, I saw movies with addicts desperate for their next score. I always wondered how pathetic someone must be to let themselves end up like that. I never in a million years imagined I would become that person in real life.
One time, after being awake for four days straight on crystal meth, I sat in my car watching the sun come up and realized I would die at a young age from this addiction. The really scary part is that I was okay with it. The idea of quitting the life I had chosen was out of the question. For me, there was no fork in the road, only a grave to fall into. It may seem inconceivable to prefer death over sobriety, but that was my reality.
Looking back on my years of crystal-meth addiction, it feels like an out-of-body experience. How could I have made such monumentally destructive choices?
It seemed I always ended up in the darkest situations. I will never forget sitting in the living room of a typical suburban family’s home when I was about eighteen. Someone had told us there was a party at this house, so we went. This was not some graffitied, rundown crack house. At first glance, it looked like the home of a doctor and his family. A bunch of teens were drinking in the garage. We sneaked into the house, where the parents were enjoying the party. I watched as the parents verbally and physically fought with their teenage daughter over their next hit of meth. It was next-level evil. I could actually feel darkness wrapping itself around me. It was choking any hope of life out of me.
“I’m telling you my story, but remember, pain and addiction aren’t where it ends. Your story isn’t over either.”
I even knew someone who had been cooking meth and blew up their trailer with their infant child inside. They both died. It was heartbreaking.
Did that deter me? No.
Have you heard someone say, “I can stop anytime I want. I just don’t want to”? Well, I didn’t want to change, but I also felt like I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. I had fallen so far. I was too broken. I couldn’t remember what it felt like to be happy without taking something to give me that feeling.
I had created an entire life around my trauma, my hurt, my anger and addiction.
Like many, I was using addiction to numb the pain of childhood wounds and trauma. Nobody sets out in life thinking, You know what? I’m going to become a raging alcoholic and crystal-meth addict. No. I believed a lie about who God was, so I rebelled against him, which left me broken and empty.
While it was difficult and sad, it brings such clarity to every destructive decision I made. Every destructive decision human beings make. We are just a bunch of broken people, making broken choices and breaking everything around us.
Choosing to live a life that runs from the goodness of God only ends with us hurting ourselves, or worse. The result is a broken person living a shattered life. But we were not made to live that way. We were meant to be not broken but whole in Christ.
The pain of living outside God’s purpose is the byproduct of a sinful, fallen world. We all have an inherent black-hole void inside that we know must be filled. But without Jesus, there’s just no filling that emptiness. We try to fill it with everything but him. When we do, the hole only grows, so we get more desperate and try to shove even more stuff into it.
From the very beginning, God has been showing us: Jesus is the only light that fills the dark void.
If you are going through a time of pain or addiction, or if you have a loved one who is, hold on! I’m telling you my story, but remember, pain and addiction aren’t where it ends.
Your story isn’t over either. That may sound cheesy, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s true.
Stephen McWhirter is a Dove Award–winning and Grammy-nominated worship recording artist, songwriter, speaker and now author whose story and music testify to the redemptive power of Jesus to radically restore even the most broken of lives. His breakout worship anthem, Come Jesus Come, has become a global prayer of longing and revival, reaching millions of listeners across streaming platforms and worship gatherings worldwide. You can read Stephen’s whole story in his book, Radically Restored: How Knowing Jesus Heals Our Brokenness.
Taken from “Radically Restored” by Stephen McWhirter. Copyright © 2026. Used by permission of Zondervan Books.
