Becoming Sam West

Sam Wyatt finishes his final exam at university and looks forward to beginning the sowing-wild-oats phase of his life before settling into a successful career. Instead a fast and furious fall into addiction occurs, and Sam winds up on skid row of Vancouver, British Columbia, squatting in a foul back alley desperately trying to inhale the last dregs from his crack pipe, and not for the first time, nor the fiftieth.

I so desperately needed the sleep, and there was a period of time, when the insanity of the addiction had subsided, when the sleep was coming and things felt, well, cozy. I could forget where I was, forget how I was living, forget the things I had done. For a moment life would feel normal again. Sometimes when I woke up, in that nanosecond before reality set in, it would feel like I was at home and looking forward to a new day. And in that nanosecond, it was the only true joy of this life that had gotten so badly away from me.

But then I would wake up and it would all start up again.

After a narrow escape from certain death, he finds himself at the base of the mysterious and singular mountain to which his eyes had always been drawn. Exhausted, malnourished, terrified, Sam climbs, leaping from perch to perch and getting drenched and bitterly cold in a rain forest downpour. When he stumbles onto an unusual shelter, he also finds a different kind of salvation: A Bible in the lap of a dead man.

The book was open to a chapter titled Ephesians 4. I read the first line: As a prisoner of the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. I felt something a little like being short of breath. As if I just read something of tremendous importance.

From deep inside him, healing begins.