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    I Saw Love
    I Saw Love
    I Saw Love
    Ebook151 pages5 hours

    I Saw Love

    By Tim Holmes

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    About this ebook

    A man alone. A man so broken that if you were to come too close you would be cut by the jagged edges of his shattered soul. This was a man who had lived a life of love, family, and great wealth. But now he stands alone in the darkness. A dark night filled with unease and foreboding. All that he once had in his life, all of the good, the blessings, even the smallest things that once brought him joy, those things are gone. The only possession he now holds in his hand is a gun. A shotgun. It is the answer to his angst. The pain of addiction will end. Everything will end. He lifts the gun to his face. The stillness of the night ignites with the deafening sound of lost hope.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTim Holmes
    Release dateApr 17, 2017
    ISBN9781370455546
    I Saw Love
    Author

    Tim Holmes

    “Although I came to it late in life, writing was always in the blood,” he once told a friend, “and I now lead two lives, those of my fantasy characters, and that of the real me. And often I confuse the two.”Tim Holmes was born in London, brought up in Geneva, Switzerland and educated in England. He eventually embarked on a thirty-five year career in the international wine industry, having learned his craft in Bordeaux and Burgundy as a ‘stagiare’ winemaker during university vacations.After a stint in the Ministries of Agriculturs of those Eastern European nations assimilating their wine regimes with those of the EU Common Agricultural policy in the early 90s, and after a lifetime of travel, tasting and trading wines around the world for a company he founded with two Swiss friends in Zürich, Tim now lives in France and England where he dedicates his time to writing novels and short stories.

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      Book preview

      I Saw Love - Tim Holmes

      FOREWORD

      BY ELIZABETH DAUGHERTY

      People often say that God works in mysterious ways. And everyone involved with this book can attest to that, as God found ways for our lives to intersect over the course of the last 10 years. As you read this book, you should know that many people have been involved with the effort to bring Tim’s story to light. We have all worked together with one common goal, to bring hope to people’s lives and to share God’s never-ending love. Tim’s story is just one example of how God’s love can change a life. Since I have been part of this process, I feel that it is important to also share what God’s love has done for me and to explain how I came to meet Tim.

      My name is Elizabeth Daugherty. I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. I was raised in a loving and supportive Christian family. I did well in school. I believed in God and attended church regularly with my family.

      Growing up, I always felt different. From a very young age, I was filled with fear and insecurity. I began to suffer from migraine headaches at the age of 11 and was put on strong prescription medications for pain. I soon found that when I would take these medications, not only would my physical pain go away, but I also found relief from my emotional pain. It wasn’t long before I started abusing the pain medicine and mixing it with alcohol that I would sneak from my parents’ kitchen cabinet. Over the next couple of years, I started experimenting with other drugs. To make matters worse, I was sexually abused at the age of 13 and again at the age of 14. Once again, I turned to alcohol and drugs to numb my emotional pain. By this time, I was angry at God. My relationship with Him dwindled as I struggled to try to understand why He would allow this to happen to me.

      My anger at God and my inability to deal with life on life’s terms fueled my drinking and drug use for the next eight years. My addiction progressed very quickly. By age 19, I was drinking and using drugs every day. For many years, drugs and alcohol numbed my pain and provided me with a way to escape having to deal with what had happened to me.

      Unfortunately, that escape didn’t last forever. After years of abusing these substances, they finally stopped working. It didn’t matter how much I drank or what drugs I took, I could no longer find any relief. I attempted to quit on my own, but was unsuccessful. I was miserable and wanted to die. I considered suicide, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do that to my family.

      One day while I was meeting someone to purchase drugs, God intervened in an amazing way that changed my life forever. I met this individual at a local restaurant. I was in the process of buying drugs from him when I remembered he once told me he had attended a few 12-step meetings in the past. For some reason, I started asking him about these meetings.

      As only God could have orchestrated, a group of people sitting next to us overheard our conversation and joined in. I found out they all were in recovery and had just left a 12-step meeting. We talked for hours and I agreed to go with them to a meeting the next day. And at the age of 22, I went to my first 12-step meeting. I have been sober ever since. My sobriety date is April 8, 2008.

      Through working the 12 steps with an accountability partner, I have discovered a joy and peace that I had been searching my entire life to find. I now have an amazing, personal relationship with God, and I’m able to use my experience to offer hope to so many other women. Today I realize that, if we allow Him to, God will use the bad things that happen in our lives to help others. And through helping them, we are able to heal.

      While attending these 12-step meetings, I met, fell in love with, and later married a wonderful man named Lance Daugherty. While we were dating, he introduced me to his friend Tim Holmes. They lived together for several years and have always been a big part of each other’s recovery.

      Tim has had a big impact on my own recovery as well. One day, when I was a few years sober, I was having trouble feeling connected to God. I talked to Tim and he told me, Sometimes when we feel disconnected, it is actually when we are the most connected. Through our conversation, I was able to understand that God uses these times to strengthen our relationship with Him. He also uses our suffering to help bring other people closer to Him. The conversation I had with Tim that day helped shape the relationship I have with God.

      Coincidently, I had known Tim’s accountability partner, Tom Braddock, before I became sober. My mother and I would often eat lunch at the restaurant he managed. If I ordered a drink it was not uncommon for Tom to bring it to my table. At the time, I didn’t know he was in recovery. However, he definitely knew I had a drinking problem!

      Tom often jokes that he helped me hit my rock bottom by serving me plenty of alcohol! Apparently, God likes to use people I meet at restaurants to grab my attention.

      It’s amazing how God puts people in our lives at the exact moment we need them. Tom has remained a very dear friend and an important part of my recovery. When Lance and I decided to get married, we wanted someone who was in recovery with strong faith to perform the ceremony. Our first thought was Tom. I mentioned it to him one night and he told me that he recently became ordained. On October 12, 2013, he performed our wedding ceremony.

      Not long after Lance and I were married, we received a phone call from Tim. He told us that he felt like God wanted him to write a book about his experience. He knew God spared him from death in order to help people. Following this conversation, Tim, Tom, and Lance proceeded to move forward to have Tim’s story written and published.

      It’s been three years since God put it on Tim’s heart to publicly share his story. After several failed attempts to find the right person to help him write this book, it was obvious that God needed to open a door. God began to pave the path for me and my mother to become involved in the process.

      Over the years, I have come to believe that everything happens for a reason. God has a plan for our lives. I never could have imagined that meeting Tom all of those years ago would eventually lead to God bringing all of us together to share His message of hope and love.

      "And we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, which has been given to us." ~Romans 5:2-5

      -Elizabeth Daugherty

      AUTHOR’S NOTE

      I have tried to recreate events, locales and conversations from my memories of them. In order to maintain their anonymity, in some instances I have changed the names of individuals and places. I may have changed some identifying characteristics and details such as physical properties, occupations and places of residence.

      CHAPTER 1

      A DESPERATE ESCAPE

      I thought of my mother. I said a prayer. The flash of the 12-gauge shotgun knocked me to the ground. I could hear the faint sound of a whirring helicopter blade. The voices of medical personnel sounded distant, as if they were coming from the end of a very long, dark tunnel. I felt the pain, the burning, torrid pain to my face. And then, as quickly as the flash of the gun, I felt peace. A presence of love enveloped me, my body, my soul, and my mind. The horrific pain faded away like the moon passing behind the clouds in a black night sky. Everything was fading. All that remained was the ever-present, all-encompassing feeling of peace, calm, and love. One final voice emerged. It was the voice of a woman. He’s gone, she said.

      Why? What was the reason for my death? A coroner’s report might read single gunshot to the face. That would be the cause, but what was the reason? No more desire, no more expectations. The fire that once burned so brightly in my life had been reduced to a pile of smoldering ashes. My dreams and my ambitions were now just flickering embers. All that remained was the image of that fatal gunshot wound to my face. Aristotle wrote, To run away from trouble is a form of cowardice, and while it is true that the suicide braves death, he does it not for some noble object but to escape some ill. So, to understand my death you must first understand my life. You must travel the path of my life to discover how I arrived at that dark place where I felt death was my only option to escape the pain.

      CHAPTER 2

      BETH

      The sun shone down from a cloudless sky and danced on the surface of the cool clear water. The air was hot and humid as any resident of Mobile, Alabama, would expect on a summer’s day. The swimming pool of the Highlands Country Club offered a welcome relief for its members. I, on the other hand, was not there to escape the summer heat. I was working. I had taken a summer job as pool manager while attending the University of South Alabama. It was here that my life would start down a path of choices and circumstances that would result in outcomes I was not equipped to handle. After all, I was a naive country boy. I hadn’t dated in high school. Whatever other young men my age knew about life, I knew less.

      College was my first experience at responsibility and relationships outside of my family. I was raised in a small town in central Alabama with a population of less than 500. Main Street consisted of one drug store, several churches, a bank, the court house, and adjoining jail. Oddly, the nicest building in town was the ABC liquor store. We had one red light at the main intersection, but it only blinked to indicate a four-way stop. My family attended church every time the doors were open.

      Growing up, I always knew there had to be more to life than what this small town had to offer. I had this innate sense that I was meant to make a difference in the world. My goal was to attend college and go to medical school. I felt that God wanted me to help people. Until now, my life had been simple and sheltered. But that was all about to change. One day, while working poolside, I met a beautiful young girl named Beth. She was not a fellow employee, but a member of the country club. The youngest of three girls, Beth came from an affluent Jewish family. You didn’t have to know her long to realize she was quite accustomed to getting her

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