February 10. Ben Mueller. Ben holds an MBA and has a stellar record as Chief Financial Officer, Controller, and International Financier. But one of his biggest achievements happened at a weekend event with The Crucible Project.
A men’s Crucible Weekend is like a retreat designed to challenge men to look at what is and is not working in their lives. It’s an opportunity to discover new truths about themselves and to embrace their God-given masculinity. It’s about radical honesty and grace. Not all men are ready to be that honest with themselves. But on this date in 2018, Ben did it. Here’s his story.
Until you discover what drives you, change feels impossible. Let God reveal and heal.
Ben was thirteen when he had his first beer. That night, one beer turned into eight. “This is what I wanna feel like,” he thought. “Instant freedom.”
But Ben was addicted. Soon he was in bondage to drugs too, including crack cocaine.
Ben didn’t understand it, but self-hatred drove him. “I was trying to kill myself with drugs, alcohol, whatever,” he said. “But the other part of me, my soul, was trying to survive. It was this constant internal battle.”
In his late twenties, Ben attended Alcoholics Anonymous, and AA taught him to pray for help. “God’s not going to help me,” Ben thought. “He’s got other stuff to do.”
After an AA meeting, Ben drove to a liquor store, opened the door, and then said, “Okay God, if you are going to help me, this is the time.” He closed the door and drove away. He couldn’t believe it!
Ben was sober for thirty days. But he started using crack again, and he was distraught. He wrote a letter to God. “You either take this now, or I’m going to kill myself.” He drove to a church where an AA group met and slipped the letter into the huge Bible on display at the back.
He never used crack again.
But beneath the victory lurked unrelenting self-hatred. Ben fought it with overachievement. But whenever he had a success—in relationship, fitness, or business—Ben always did something to “screw it up.”
On the outside, Ben had it together. He went to church, had a beautiful family, and earned success. But Ben resisted deep connection. His life was marked by anxiety, depression, and self-sabotage.
When Ben was thirty-four, he had his third back surgery. The doctor put him on OxyContin. Addiction was immediate. After four months, Ben almost died. The doctors changed his prescription to Suboxone, also an opioid. Thus began a ten-year battle with prescription-drug addiction.
Desperate, Ben quit taking the medicine. He crashed. His family watched helplessly as he crawled through their home, sobbing. He had come off too quickly. With his doctor’s help, Ben began to slowly come off the opioids.
A year and a half into the process, Ben attended a Crucible Project weekend. Crucible forced him “to dig in and see what the heck was going on.” Ben realized his self-hatred had started when he was nine. The day Ben’s babysitter’s seventeen-year-old son took Ben to his room and sexually abused him. From then on, Ben had believed he was worthless. Bad. For two years, the teen—and sometimes the guy’s friends—abused Ben.
At Crucible, Ben realized the sexual abuse drove everything. “I had compartmentalized and pretended it was gone … but it was the thread.” Three guys laid hands on Ben and prayed for him.
Sobs shook Ben’s body. His beliefs went from, “You’re bad, and you caused this. No one wants you. No one loves you,” to “You’re a great person. God loves you. Your family loves you.”
His whole life Ben had “danced around the thread” of abuse. “As men, we put blinders on and keep crashing through walls. But sooner or later trauma catches up to you. You either fight out of it or you die.”
After Crucible, Ben chose to trust God more deeply, finish titration, and go through trauma counseling. It was a painful journey, but now Ben is free from addiction, self-hatred, and self-sabotage.
“[God] reveals the deep things of darkness and brings utter darkness into the light” (Job 12:22 NIV).
Could there be a hidden root of destruction in your life? Until you discover what drives you, change feels impossible. Let God reveal and heal.
Based on an interview with Ben Mueller, 2019.
Story read by Nathan Walker