By Michael Ashcraft –
Before he became The Iceman cool debater on Speaker’s Corner, Chris was just a lost 13-year-old who got drunk in a cornfield with his buddies from school.
“I didn’t grow up Christian. I grew up as an agnostic,” he says on Chris at Speaker’s Corner video on YouTube. “Like most teenagers, I followed my group of friends who were kind of the outcasts. We’d go into cornfields in the middle of winter or under a bridge somewhere and get drunk. We got absolutely wasted.”
He and his buddies were only 13. His friend “Jim” sported long hair, sunglasses and a leather jacket to look much older. He was the one who was able to buy whatever they consumed. Sometimes they stole alcohol from their parents’ closets. At first it was fun, he says.
Then he came to a shock realizing: “I’m binge drinking.”
He was 14 when he once he got so bad, someone had to carry him. He couldn’t talk intelligently; he slurred. He shouted incoherently. He had wanted to impress a certain girl, but instead he turned her off.
On one occasion, “I got so drunk, I completely passed out. I remember waking up on a bus going back. My mate Jim was looking across at me with the look of disappointment because I just completely zoned out.”
His relationships with his family deteriorated. He saw his friends spiraling downward. Chris succumbed into depression.
So he decided to quit consumption by quitting his group of friends. “I stopped answering calls. I told everyone to go away. Quite literally, I gave them the middle finger,” he explains. “It was difficult because I couldn’t explain to anyone why. But depression still remained.”
Chris was living incongruent with the values he’d acquired as a young man in Catholic school.
“I cut myself off from pretty much everyone,” he says. “My mom was very concerned. She put me in therapy. I pushed every close to me away. It got to the point where I was self harming. I couldn’t see any reason to live for the next day. I wouldn’t eat or drink. I just drank a bottle of Lucozade.
“I didn’t have much to motivate me. I used to say to myself, why not just end this?” he added. “I wasn’t able to be the person I wanted to be. I spent many years trying to come up with ways that could save me from this problem.”
One day, Chris, then 17, finally asked a pivotal question: “when was the last time I was genuinely happy?” he pondered and then answered, “When I was young. When I believed in God.”
“I remember thinking, Huh, that is something I haven’t tried.”
He prayed. “I don’t know if you’re real, if you’re really there, but if you are there, I understand what that means: I’ve done things that are not only an abomination to me, they are actions against a holy and righteous God.”
Strangely, Christ heard an internal voice that confronted him unexpectedly: “I love you. I love you. I love you.”
“From that moment I gave my life to Christ,” he says.
Chris first cut off with his “friend with benefits.”
Very quickly, Chris fell into studying apologetics. He wanted to give a reason for his faith to anyone who would ask.
In college, he joined the Christian Union and found friends who studied apologetics with him. He improved relationship with his family. From apologetics, he turned to reaching out to Muslims at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, London.
“Praise God I changed the direction of my life,” he says.
To learn more about a personal relationship with Jesus, click here.
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- American God Logic takes on Muslim debaters.
- Dr. Jay Smith
- Hatun Tash
About this writer: Michael Ashcraft pastors a church in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles.
