Hello, my name is David Prewitt, I have been blessed to be married to Theresa Prewitt, and we have been happily married for 11 years. We have three boys: Michael, who is sixteen; David Jr., who just turned four; and John Mark, who is three. And this is my testimony.
At the present it has been 8 years ago that I really gave my life to the Lord. Before I accepted Christ I was an alcoholic and former addict. To be honest, I had no idea what it meant to really love someone and I really had no idea what it meant to be loved. Don’t get me wrong I grew up in a great family with very loving parents who devoted their entire life to being Godly parents and doing the best they could to follow God’s will and train me to be a Godly man; I just wasn’t interested. Even though I was raised in a Christian home as the oldest son of a Baptist Minister, and I went forward at the age of four and said the sinner’s prayer; I don’t think I had a full enough understanding because there was really never any fruit from that and when I hit adolescence I went off the deep end. I began hanging around with the wrong crowd and started messing with various forms of drugs and alcohol. The music I was listening to was nothing but depressing and I was depressed. Many would say that just meant that I was a normal adolescent, but I disagree. I purposely chose to live outside of everything I was raised to believe in and I purposely chose to ostracize myself from my family’s affection and protection. I also became involved with gangs and dealing narcotics. This eventually led to me getting deeper into trouble with my family and with God. I joined the Army in 1987 to get out of town and away from everything that I thought was wrong with my life. Unfortunately everything that was wrong with my life was me so my baggage went with me. While I was in the Army I continued to drink, became more depressed and even more angry, and no matter how drunk I got or how many fights I got into or how many different ways I found to prove how tough and self-made I was I could not get rid of the anger and the self-hate that I felt. After eleven years of service I left the army because of medical problems with my knees and ankles.
I met a girl while I was stationed in Ft. Lewis, Washington, before I received Christ as my Savior. We only knew each other for about six months before we were married at a retired preacher’s house. The relationship was doomed from the start; the only thing that we had in common was we both liked to party and fight and we enjoyed each other’s company in bed. If we couldn’t fight anyone else we fought each other. It was a stereotypical biker-style marriage—a life style we both enjoyed. She left me every three or four months and left the marriage for good after being married for a little less than two years.
After I left the Army four years later, I met a young lady (Terri) with whom I fell in love and eventually married after a year of engagement, who is my current and final wife and the mother of my three children. After my first marriage I was scared to death of ruining another life and I point blank told Terri not to fall in love with me but that we should walk into it together at a slow pace to make sure it was right.
While my wife and I were dating and neither of us had met Christ yet, I started to experience something different with Terri: she was the first girl I had ever known as an adult that had a brain; that I really wanted to talk to, and really get to know who she was, what she believed in, and why.
Terri had been pushing her to get me to go to Mass and I consistently refused. I had no use for religion of any kind and I really didn’t want to be a part of the Catholic Church. As much as I hated the church and my Dad for what I thought was shoving the Bible down my throat. I knew that the Catholic Church did not line up with Scripture. By this point in my life I had tried many forms of religion. I had experimented with Buddhism, Wicca and American Indian mysticism as well as some other things, including a spirit guide that came to me in the form of a wolf offering direction for my life and promising to never leave me. Thinking about that now still causes me to shudder. Finally, Terri asked me why I would not go to Catholic Mass with her and her parents. I told her that I did not agree with the Catholic Church and because of that I would not attend Mass. She asked me what I disagreed with; and so I told her that the Catholic Church did not believe we were saved by grace through faith, which is how Scripture says we are saved. She said that, no, they do not; they believe one receives grace through the sacraments. I told her that this was works, which cannot save anyone and she told me to prove it by showing her in the Bible. I had been recalling verses from AWANA, and did not know the references so, the next day I called my dad, to whom I had not spoken in quite some time, and asked him what the reference was. Long story short, I showed her Ephesians 2:8-9 which says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” (ESV) This led to a lot of other questions, which meant that I had to ask my dad a lot more questions and our relationship began to heal. After more questions, Bible study and soul-searching that my wife did on her own, she asked Jesus Christ to come into her life and be her Lord and Savior.
After that, the more she read, and talked to my mom, the more she realized that I was not saved and the more she began to pray for me. After roughly five years of marriage and prayer for me, during which time I could hardly call myself a good father and husband (to this day I thank God that He gave Terri the grace to put up with me during the first part of our marriage when I would not come home until late and when I did come home you had to pour me into bed) finally one night while I spent most of my time isolating myself from my son and my wife listening to music on the computer and drinking my favorite whiskey, around two o’clock in the morning in February, God more or less grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and, while it wasn’t an audible voice, more or less told me that He was done playing around with me. He told me that I knew better and if I wanted to keep playing Russian roulette with my life and my responsibilities as a husband and a father, then He was going to let it happen and be done with me. I have never felt more alone than I did that night. After about 15 minutes of just the absolute worst feeling of black despair I have ever felt, I went upstairs, dumped the rest of the alcohol in the house down the drain, walked into our bedroom and as gently as I could woke Terri up and told her that I was going to hell and I didn’t want to live another second without the peace that she had and without the relationship that she had with Christ and asked her to pray with me, so we knelt at the foot of our bed at 2:30 am, and I asked Christ to forgive me and to be my Savior.
The next morning (afternoon) I kept worrying that it didn’t work if I wasn’t sober, so I asked Him again just to be sure, but I finally had peace for the first time in my life. I never touched a drop of alcohol after that night—I have never even had the urge. This February it will be seven years dry as a bone, and I couldn’t be happier. Just to recap, I am amazed that my Heavenly Father can use an unsaved drunk to, in essence, bring my wife to Him, and use her to begin to restore my relationship with my parents and eventually bring me to a saving knowledge of Him. And for reasons that I still don’t fully comprehend but completely accept, He decided that in His grace and mercy He would grant me the blessing of being called to be a pastor and counselor for His church. His love, wisdom, and mercy amaze me more and more every day.
About a year after my salvation, I accepted the calling that God had for me to be a pastor and be in full-time vocational ministry in July of 2004. He had been pushing me in that direction for some time, but due to my earlier divorce and history, I did not feel worthy of the calling. I finally realized after much prayer and Bible Study that when we come to Christ we die to the world, which means our mistakes and history are dead and buried with Him when he died on the cross for us and are risen again with Him when He rose from the grave. My life became a new life and a new creation, so I placed my faith in Him and made the step to begin my education to become a Pastor and Counselor. At that point, I began to attend Vennard Bible College in University Park, Iowa. I am now finishing up my degree with a double major in Biblical Studies and Clinical Psychology at Liberty University where I plan to attend Seminary and get my M.Div. and MA in Marriage and Family Therapy. My wife and I have dedicated ourselves to God’s calling on our life to strengthen the family unit and create strong Christian families that are dedicated to living their faith daily.
