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Cole knew he needed help, and at first he was just looking for a rehab. Right around then, Rise Discipleship came through Amarillo, where he was, and put a flyer in the hand of a family friend, who told his parents. Cole was in a detox home at the time, and when he got out, he came to Rise, expecting a program to get him sober. "I think God kind of bamboozled me. I was looking for a rehab, and I found so much more than that." What he found was a lot of Jesus, and something he

Kevin is a graduate of the Rise Discipleship home. He had a good upbringing, he says, and simply chose to go the other way. He had always been a light drinker, but a rough divorce five years ago changed that, and over the past three years the drinking became something else entirely. "I was drinking at least two to three fifths of whiskey a day." It spiraled from there, into pills, into harming himself, into a belief that sat under everything else. "I figured I wasn't any good

Kevin is a graduate of the Rise Discipleship men's home. He describes the life he came from in one word: chaos, driven by his addiction and, more than anything, by his own way of thinking. "I thought I had it all figured out. And I didn't have anything figured out." It was job after job after job, career plans that never panned out the way he pictured them, because his drinking, his drug use, and his selfishness always got in the way. For a long time, he lied to himself about

Victor Grimes is a graduate of the Rise Discipleship men's home. He describes the life he came from as a turmoil of negativity, alcoholism, and drug use, and underneath it, a conviction that he was abandoning God's plan for him. Here's the thing about Victor: he never lost his faith. He believed in God the whole time, and he says God never left his side. The problem was that he was living with one foot on each side of the line. "Straddling the fence, I wasn't accomplishing mu

Víctor Manuel Rodríguez es graduado del hogar de discipulado Rise. Antes de llegar, su vida no tenía rumbo. "Mi vida era un caos. Era un drogadicto que no tenía límites. A la droga, a todo lo malo que te puedas imaginar." Por dentro peleaba consigo mismo, entre lo bueno y lo malo, y lo malo siempre ganaba. Había llegado a creer que ese era su destino. "Creía que siempre iba a estar abajo, que ya no iba a ser el mismo que fui alguna vez, que iba a caer en el mismo abismo, en l

Before Dillion came to the Rise Discipleship home, he didn't really have anywhere to go. He had been living with a friend for about a year, and then it was time to leave. He was on drugs. He moved into his mother and her boyfriend's place for a while, in conditions no one should have to live in. "No water, no electricity, no power, nothing like that. My life was pretty much in shambles." He was lost, with no idea what to do. His lowest moment was simply that, having nowhere t

Ransom Rawls is from Big Spring, Texas. He came to the Rise Discipleship home carrying two things: a severe addiction to methamphetamine, and no real sense of where he stood in life. He had come to believe that being a drug user in his local community was simply who he was. That was the whole story he had of himself. A Different Story The home changed that story. What Ransom learned there was simple and life-altering. "I learned that God is real, and that I have a place in li

Juan Martinez is a pastor. He's also a father of two graduates of the Rise Discipleship home, and, years before any of that, he was addicted himself for a long time. So when his own children fell into addiction, he understood the terror from the inside out, including something his mother had tried to tell him for years. "When I used to get incarcerated, my mom would say, it's so good that you got incarcerated. I'd say, why are you happy I went to jail? And she'd say, because

Bruce Perkins is from Chicago, Illinois, and he just completed the one-year Rise Discipleship program. But his story of rejection and hurt started before he ever had a say in it. "I was born a crack baby, a product of that in my mother's womb. I was born high. My heart actually stopped." He came into the world already fighting, and the hurt followed him. For most of his life, Bruce simply did whatever he wanted to do. An Extended Hand Then, in Pennsylvania, Bruce met a couple

Tyler Luera is a graduate of the Rise Discipleship men's home in Abilene, Texas. But before he walked through the door, he was a man with no idea where he was headed. "Before coming to the home, I was lost, I was confused, and I was addicted and afflicted." He was searching for himself, for his identity, in the very things that were killing him. It took him down a path of destruction. He had no sense of direction, no clear idea of where he was going. He was just trying to do

Jacob Crawford is from Austin, Texas, and a proud graduate of the Rise Discipleship home. But for most of his life, he was alone. Both of his parents passed away, and as an only child, he was thrown into the world by himself, carrying abandonment wounds he had no idea how to hold. So he did what a lot of people do with pain that deep. He numbed it with drugs. The Cycle Even after he got saved, Jacob couldn't break free. For four years he lived in a loop of relapse and sobriet

Andrew Bray came to the Rise Discipleship men's home from Las Vegas, Nevada, after years of what he calls a very turbulent lifestyle: a revolving door of incarceration and a lifelong battle with addiction. It started young. As a kid he was always getting into fights, setting things on fire, shoplifting from stores. Then he would go home and be a good son. Two lives, running side by side, from the time he was a little boy. "When I got older, the double life was just my standar

Felix Dominguez grew up in Chihuahua, Mexico. He was 16 the first time he used drugs. It started with marijuana, then cocaine, which held him for seven years. Then, in 2018, he lost one of his closest friends, Frank Reese. The last month they spent together, Frank was using methamphetamine, and Felix started using it with him. When Frank passed, Felix fell into the worst stage of his life. Meth became the drug that ran him from that day forward. The Realest Conversation Event

Deborah is a graduate of the Rise Discipleship women's home. Before she got there, she was, in her own words, a hot mess. She was trying to juggle being a mom, getting high, and holding down a job, and it wasn't working. Underneath it were past hurts she couldn't seem to let go of, so she numbed them with meth. For a while she convinced herself she had it handled. "I thought I was doing life. I was taking care of my kids, I was working. But at the end of the day, I was in my

Brennan Meyer was trying to do the right things. Youth group. The right friends. But underneath it, something was already drifting. He was listening to what he shouldn't, watching what he shouldn't, and going deeper and deeper into hiding, trying to fix himself on his own. It all came to a head the first day of his senior year of high school. He found someone with marijuana, got high, and thought it was the greatest thing that had ever happened to him. For the first time, the

Joshua Graham had the jobs he wanted. The cars. The things he thought would make him feel like enough. "I had everything," he says, "but I had nothing at the same time." The problem was never the stuff. It was what he believed about himself. "It was my self-hate. That's what drove me to my drug abuse, to try and fix it. I believed I was never going to be good enough, and that I could never change." So he chased the next thing that would quiet it. When drugs weren't the answer

Finding Purpose: How A Discipleship Home Changed My Life

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Kyle Kimmel is a graduate of the Rise Discipleship men's home. He's quick to say his life started good, a great family, real support, raised right. There's no one to blame for how he ended up at Rise but his own choices. But there was a wound underneath it all. "When I was 13, my only sibling, my brother, died in a car wreck. That was the first love of my life I ever lost." That loss sent him looking for comfort in all the wrong places, and it started a 23-year addiction to d

Discipleship Home vs. Rehab: Why Rise Offers More Than Recovery If you’ve ever watched someone you love struggling, you know how heavy it...