Growing Up
Colin didn’t grow up in a faith based home, it was very progressive, secular minded. His mom went to parochial school, grew up Lutheran, and had some “church hurt” he suspects. Faith wasn’t discouraged, but it certainly wasn’t encouraged. Colin wasn’t ever in church other than weddings and funerals, and even then it was sporadic. He was baptized as a baby, but that was a Lutheran tradition and more for his mother.
He grew up in a family of medical practitioners, his dad’s a pharmacist, his mom’s involved in pharmacy, and his brother is involved in pharmacy, so they owned a drug store for awhile. He learned, subconsciously, at a very young age, that if there was ever anything he felt that he didn’t want to feel anymore, they made a pill for it. His dad’s motto was “Better living through modern chemistry”.
Numbing the Pain
When Colin became a teenager he started hanging around some people and experimenting with stuff, he learned very quickly how to numb pain, how to fill idle time.
Colin has been a musician his whole life, always hanging around other musicians, so drugs were always around and encouraged by his parents to a degree.
Shortly after graduating high school, he met a woman, they started dating, and by the time he was 21, his child was born, not planned. “That was a very awful, tumultuous relationship. I was miserable” Colin told me.
When his daughter was born, he had to cut his hair and get a “real” job, so he went back to what he had grown up in; Pharmacy. Colin got a job at Walgreens, worked his way up to pharmacy technician, and that became his drug dealer. He started stealing narcotics, opiates to deal with the pain, he was drinking a lot, was not very present, and was just an awful person to be around. That went on for many years.
Learning to Pray
Eventually Colin met a woman, Anita, who would later become his wife. She was the first person to introduce him to God. She grew up in a very faith based home. The moment he met her, he was in love. She spoke Jesus to him, but he didn’t want to hear it. Colin wasn’t an atheist at that time and was open to the idea, but too miserable and stoned to really have a relationship with God.
Anita was the first person to teach Colin how to pray, but he didn’t know what he was doing. He was walking his dog around the backyard and knew he was ready to get out of the relationship he was in and move on to what was next, but was scared and didn’t want to leave his kids. Colin prayed the only way he knew how and he heard an audible voice in his chest and his heart, that scared the life out of him.
When he was getting his daughter ready for daycare, he dropped a gallon of milk, made a mess and heard that voice say, “I gave her to you”, which he knew meant his daughter and that he was going to have to do what was right to be a father for her, even though it was going to be hard.
Colin left the mother of his child, and started dating Anita. He had told her a little about the drugs, but had her pretty well convinced that he had stopped, and had tried to stop, but couldn’t. They got engaged very quickly, and married within a year on September 21st, 2013 and two months later, almost to the day, Colin finally got caught stealing drugs at work.
Colin spent the weekend in county jail, got bailed out, lost his job, and his marriage was not completely shattered, but would be eventually.
The First Church
Colin saw an ad in the paper for Goshen First United Methodist, looking for an assistant worship leader. He had no idea what that meant, but it paid and he assumed it would be pretty easy. Really needing the job, Colin went and bought a cheap cross necklace to wear. “He (Steve Campagna) had no reason to hire me, but he did.” Being given a chance, Colin started leading worship part time, and developed his first church family with his wife. They attended the church for a few years, but Colin didn’t really work on himself, didn’t earnestly try to do anything to treat his drug addiction or other childhood trauma, nor did he have a relationship with God during this period.
Living two lives
When using drugs and alcohol stopped working to fill the void Colin felt, he started using people. He began to be unfaithful to his wife because that was the only thing that would make him feel something, “It was bad. It was very bad. It was really like living two lives. I had a wife and then I always had a girlfriend.” Colin shared
In 2018, Colin was having an ongoing affair with a woman, when God finally got through to him and he started to feel overwhelmed with conviction and guilt, which he had been able to turn off for a long time.
Colin wrote his wife a letter, blindsiding her. When she came home from work, he had her sit down on the couch, and confessed everything to her, the lies, the cheating, the drugs, and asked for a divorce. Then he left, grabbed a bag and left her there speechless on the couch, informing her that he would give her as much time as she needed to think about it all.
The next morning, Anita was in the shower after just having her world crushed, and this time she heard God’s audible voice telling her to forgive Colin. She argued with it, asking God why, and He replied, “Because I already have”.
Anita decided that she wasn’t going to file for divorce and they were going to work it out. Colin didn’t want to do all the work, because he knew it would be hard, but he really wanted her to remain his wife, so they spent the next two to three years in individual counseling and marriage counseling. “It was good. It was brutal, but it was really good for us, it really helped”. Colin said.
Caught
At this point, Colin still hadn’t surrendered to the Holy Spirit and because of that, he was still chasing the world, and gratification through women. He started messing around with another woman, only this time he got caught red handed.
Anita took off her ring, and threw a couple of f-bombs at him, which is not a word she uses lightly. She said she was done and she left. Colin was left absolutely broken. He remembers falling over, balling up, but his daughter was still fairly young and there at that moment, and he knew that he couldn’t melt down in front of her, so he crawled out to his garage.
Going in a new direction
He couldn’t do it anymore. Colin tried, rehab, narcotics anonymous, alcoholics anonymous, all the 12 step programs. He hurt so badly and was so riddled with shame. He dropped to his knees and called out to God, and a name flashed across his mind of a pastor from the first church they had gone to. So he gave him a call, and told him he couldn’t do this anymore and asked him to baptize him. Two days later, Colin got baptized and upon emerging from the water, he wept uncontrollably, feeling joy and grace for the first time. “That was the first time I ever felt full. That was the first time that I didn’t feel alone”. Colin told me that the water was cold, but he felt warm and he no longer felt the pain he used to carry all the time. “Everything looked different. Colors looked different. The appearance of the world changed.”
Colin and Anita kept working on their marriage. Having been in a band of some kind or another since the age of 16, Colin walked away from the most successful band he had ever been in, knowing he couldn’t both work on his marriage and be a part of that band. Their marriage continued to get stronger and stronger and they started searching for a home church, as per Anita’s conditions for returning. They tried out one other church before choosing Crossroads. Per Colin’s conditions in choosing a home church, he didn’t want to be a part of the worship team. When choosing Crossroads, Anita really liked the message and Colin thought that the worship team sounded great, so no one would ever ask for him to join it.
Getting Involved
When Covid hit in 2020, Colin and Anita started attending online due to lockdown protocols. Once coming back, the church was starting a series called “All In”. Within a couple weeks of that series, there was a “call to action” service. Colin and Anita looked at each other, rolled their eyes, and begrudgingly decided to get involved.
Colin got involved with the worship team. The first time he did worship at Crossroads, everything changed and made sense. At that moment, he lost his desire to play secular music. “The secular world had just always broken my heart and I was chasing fame, accolades, and attention.” Colin Shared. He felt this “Holy Spirit certainty”, that his path in life was about using his natural gift and abilities that God had given him for singing His music, to His people, in His house.
After a while, Crossroads asked him to get involved in their recovery ministry, which at the time was called, “Celebrate Recovery”. Once getting involved, Colin knew that those were his people. “They’re the rejects, the outcasts, the have nots, the broken hearted, and the disillusioned. They get me and I get them”. His wife had known Jesus her entire life, she’s had seasons where she has loved Him more or less, but Colin can relate to the type of person who has doubted or questioned His existence first hand. It was in recovery ministry that Colin started feeling his calling towards pastoral ministry.
"The Church Rockstar"
Colin still uses worship as his voice. “I’m not a preacher. I’m not a sermon writer. I’ll talk to you all day, but stringing together cohesive thoughts like that is not my thing”. Colin and Anita have both committed to living radically for God.
Colin is currently full time, vocational ministry associate campus pastor and worship pastor at Crossroads Mishawaka Campus. Both Colin and his wife are in school for pastoral ministry. Anita is working towards leaving her secular vocation to be onboarded at Crossroads into Campus Pastor Ministry. Colin and Anita get to do ministry together, as husband and wife.
Colin and Anita have had some real struggles and heartaches with infidelity, infertility, and miscarriage. They have had a hard marriage together, a lot of adversity. It has never been sunshine and rainbows, “but we have found that everything we have gone through, we end up encountering someone going through the same thing, and we’re able to walk through it with them and love on them through the middle of it.” They’re able to approach it with a first person perspective.
There are days when Colin wishes it wouldn't have been so hard, but he is thankful for it now being on the other side of it and he wouldn’t change it. He’s been able to see God transform people, and heal their hearts. Colin is never not blown away by what he gets to be doing for a living. “I get to be the church rockstar. I get to play music with great people. I get to have fun for a living and show Jesus to people through the process.” His daughter now also has a relationship with the Lord, which he never thought would happen. “I pinch myself everyday, because I don’t deserve to be here. I’ve overdosed twice, had a seizure because of narcotics. All the times I drove myself home and was so drunk that I don’t remember it, but I’ve never got into an accident, I’ve never killed anyone. I shouldn’t be here.”
Colin is grateful that all the people he hurt, instead of hating him they prayed for him, they forgave him, and they never gave up hope. Jesus was in all the heartache.
