There are moments in life that make very little sense while you are living them.
A conversation.
A decision.
Someone turning up at the door.
At the time, you have no idea where any of it is going.
Then years pass, you look backwards, and suddenly there is a line connecting things you could never have joined together at the time.
I have been thinking about that quite a lot over the last seven weeks.
On 1 July 2026, I started a new role as Head of Outreach with The Haven.
That sentence probably sounds fairly ordinary.
It feels considerably less ordinary when I remember walking through the doors of The Haven on 22 May 1997.
I was twenty-seven years old.
And getting a job there twenty-nine years later wasn’t exactly part of the plan.
To be fair, I didn’t have much of a plan.
A few days before arriving, most of my thinking was focused on finding another £5.
Completing the tenner
The story is told more fully in Window Seat, but the short version is that a neighbour, Jeannie, (also my lifelong friend Fitzy’s mum) brought a Teen Challenge business card to our house.
She asked me to give it to my mum.
That left me with a dilemma.
I already had £5 and was trying to get another £5 from Mum for heroin.
If I handed her this card, there was a fair chance I could kiss goodbye to the other fiver.
So I stood there holding what turned out to be one of the most significant pieces of card ever to come into my possession, asking myself a deeply spiritual question:
Could I get away with not giving her it?
Eventually I handed it over.
Mum called the number.
A man called Ken Persaud answered and, within an hour, a complete stranger was sitting in our living room talking about getting me into Teen Challenge.
I listened.
Sort of.
My addiction was still doing the calculations.
Later that day, after Mum had continued refusing to give me the remaining £5, she asked if I wanted her to phone the man who had visited.
Now there was an idea.
Surely I could explain to this pastor how desperate I was and he would tell Mum just to give me the money.
So I phoned Ken.
I gave him the full story.
Couldn’t cope.
Needed help.
Wasn’t strong enough.
Meanwhile, the thought running through my head was basically:
Just tell her to give me the fiver.
Ken listened.
Then he asked:
“Stuart, can I pray with you?”
That wasn’t in my plan.
I let him pray anyway.
Strangely, I don’t remember a single word of that prayer. I remember almost everything surrounding it, but none of the words themselves.
What I do remember is what happened afterwards.
Something shifted.
I walked back into the living room and apologised to my family. My dad had heard plenty of apologies over fourteen years of addiction and wasn’t particularly impressed.
Mum looked at me differently.
“Look at him. He’s different.”
I didn’t particularly feel different.
Yet something had begun.
A different name
Three days later, Ken drove me to The Haven in Kilmacolm.
It was my dad’s birthday.
Nobody remembered.
That probably says something about the state we were all in.
As we approached The Haven, I actually recognised the building. A couple of weeks earlier, while doing security work nearby, somebody had pointed it out and told me that was where they taught people to live proper Christian lives.
I’d laughed.
Now I was walking through the door.
Within minutes, the centre manager, Fin Moffat, said something that has stayed with me ever since.
“Stuart, we’re not calling you a junkie or a smackhead. That’s not who you are. But you’re not a Christian yet either. So, we’re calling you a student. You’re here to study the Bible – twenty-four hours a day – seven days a week – whether you like it or not.”
Student.
I didn’t know then just how prophetic that word would become.
I certainly wasn’t much of a Bible student at that point.
Within another couple of days I would be sitting in a Christian residential programme in South Wales with a Bible on my knee, quietly asking the guy beside me what I was supposed to do with it.
He told me to shut up before we both got a white ticket.
Welcome to Bible college.
Yet Fin had done something important.
He had changed the language.
Fourteen years of addiction had accumulated plenty of names.
Junkie.
Addict.
Smackhead.
Failure.
Lost cause.
Then somebody met me at the door and gave me another word.
Student.
Someone capable of learning.
Someone whose story was still moving.
Someone whose past could describe where he had been without being allowed to dictate where he was going.
That was the last time anyone in Teen Challenge called me a junkie.
Twenty-nine years is a long time
I wish I could now write something neat like, “and everything went smoothly from there.”
It didn’t.
Life rarely works like that.
There have been wonderful years and difficult ones. Opportunities I could never have imagined and seasons when I had very little idea what God was doing.
Jesus showed Himself to me in Teen Challenge in a powerful way that gave me real hope for the future.
Teen Challenge became ministry.
Eventually there was marriage to Tracy and family, with our three wonderful daughters, Alisha, Zoe and Naomi.
Church planting.
Going back into education.
Journalism.
Writing.
Community work.
Partnership development with Street Connect.
Research.
And now The Haven.
When I wrote the foreword to Window Seat, I described the book as a story still in progress because I was still a work in progress.
I also wrote:
“The past can’t be rewritten – but it can be redeemed.”
Seven weeks into this new role, that sentence feels different.
Because apparently redemption sometimes has a sense of humour.
You can spend years writing about the place where your life changed and then find yourself with an office there.
Coming back
The Haven I have returned to is not frozen in 1997.
Neither am I.
Back then, Strathclyde Teen Challenge’s outreach was probably most visible through its bus ministry.
I knew that bus.
It parked outside the health centre and needle exchange in Easterhouse every Tuesday evening.
I used to walk past it and sneer at the people giving out tea, talking about Jesus and believing that somebody like me could actually become free.
Then Roy Lees came to my house from that same outreach.
Suddenly one of the people from the bus was sitting in my living room talking about somebody I actually knew who had gone through Teen Challenge.
For the first time, possibility started becoming personal.
Today’s outreach looks different.
Community hubs.
Schools.
Church partnerships.
Family support.
Aftercare connections.
Working alongside services and organisations across communities.
Different methods.
The same uncomfortable question sits underneath all of them:
Can we see possibility in someone before they can see it themselves?
I know what it is to need somebody else to do that.
Seven weeks in
I’ve now been Head of Outreach for almost seven weeks.
Long enough to discover where things are kept.
Mostly.
Long enough to realise that every meeting seems to create another meeting.
Definitely.
And long enough for the significance of being here to settle a little.
There have been strategy conversations, funding discussions, visits to community hubs, meetings with churches and services, discussions about pathways, volunteering, families, schools and what outreach should become.
Those things matter.
Yet the redemption arc isn’t found in my job description.
I sometimes think about the man who entered this place in May 1997.
He wasn’t thinking twenty-nine years ahead.
He struggled to think twenty-nine hours ahead.
And I think about the people who dealt with him.
Jeannie handed over a card.
Ken answered a telephone.
Roy knocked on a door.
Fin gave somebody a different name.
None of them needed to know what happened in 2026.
They just needed to do what was in front of them in 1997.
There is something in that which challenges me now.
Because outreach can easily become programmes, strategies, outcomes and numbers.
All necessary.
Behind every number, though, is somebody standing somewhere in their own story.
They may be holding their equivalent of that business card.
They may still be calculating whether change is worth the cost.
They may be mocking the bus.
They may have come through the door without the faintest idea what happens next.
And none of us knows what another twenty-nine years might hold.
Still a student
There is another part of the story I have grown to appreciate.
Fin called me a student.
He was right.
I eventually became one in the conventional sense too. I went back into education, studied at university and somehow ended up doing academic research.
But the older I get, the more I realise that the original description still works.
I’m still a student.
Of people.
Of communities.
Of Scripture.
Of my own mistakes.
And, most importantly, of Jesus.
Perhaps that is part of what Christians mean by sanctification.
It can become a terribly religious-sounding word for something very ordinary.
Learning to live differently.
Then learning again when circumstances change.
Learning how to be a husband.
A dad.
A pastor.
A colleague.
A leader.
Learning when to speak and when to listen.
Discovering that something which worked ten years ago isn’t necessarily what is needed today.
Following Jesus has turned out to involve rather a lot of learning.
Paul’s words to the Philippians make increasing sense to me:
“He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ.”
Philippians 1:6
There is comfort in that sentence.
The work is still happening.
The long arc
One week before I entered Teen Challenge, I had a gun pushed into my back.
Days later, I was trying to complete a tenner for heroin.
Then came a business card.
A stranger in the living room.
A prayer I can’t remember.
A bus ministry I’d previously mocked.
A weekend at The Haven.
A centre manager who called me a student.
And twenty-nine years of life.
There is no straight line joining all of those things.
At least there wasn’t one I could see while I was living them.
Looking backwards, something begins to emerge.
A redemption arc.
Maybe that is one reason I resist writing people off.
I’ve been the person who looked like there wasn’t much story left.
I’ve also lived long enough to discover that a chapter and an ending are very different things.
When Window Seat says the past cannot be rewritten, I mean it.
There are things I would change in an instant if life worked that way.
It doesn’t.
Redemption offers something more interesting than pretending the past never happened.
It can take the very places where life seemed to have fallen apart and allow something useful to grow from them.
Which brings me back to The Haven.
On 22 May 1997, I came through its doors because other people were holding hope that I hadn’t yet learned to hold for myself.
On 1 July 2026, I came through them again.
This time my responsibility includes helping create places where hope can be offered to somebody else.
I don’t know where their story will lead.
Neither did Jeannie.
Neither did Ken.
Neither did Roy.
Neither did Fin.
They simply held the door open long enough for me to walk through it.
Twenty-nine years later, it seems I get to help do the same.
That’s quite a view from the window.
My Story
This reflection sits within the much longer story told in Window Seat: A Life Rewritten — Heroin, Hope, and the God Who Lifted Me.
The story begins long before The Haven and continues long after it, because redemption rarely fits neatly into a single moment.
So if this story connects with you…
You may want to read:
The Gift of Desperation
A reflection on the point where desperation can become an opening to grace and change.
Window Seat (Life Story)
The wider memoir journey — addiction, faith, family, Teen Challenge, recovery and the long work of redemption.
Why We Go Back
On familiar paths, repeated patterns and what it takes to begin walking differently.
More Than the Wound
On refusing to let what happened to us become the whole story of who we are.
All available on the blog.
Books
For more from me, including my published work click below to go tio my Amazon page:
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